Published Online: Oct 30, 2015
Page range: 105 - 140
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/csci.77
© 2015 Ian Hargreaves, John Hartley, published by Sciendo
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Ian Hargreaves and John Hartley met in the late 1990s when Hartley was Head of the School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies at Cardiff University.
Hargreaves, fresh from a high profile career in journalism, joined Cardiff to lead the vocational side of the Journalism School. The digital communications revolution was in its infancy.
Hartley left Cardiff in 2000 for Australia, where he established the Creative Industries Faculty at Queensland University of Technology.
In late 2010, the pair re-met, at an event in Birmingham organised by the UK research Councils to develop bids for the See:
It was in this meeting that the idea of the Creative Citizens project emerged. Almost four years later, at the Creative Citizens Conference in September 2014, See:
Hargreaves (left) and Hartley at the Creative Citizens Conference, Royal College of Art, London, September 2014. They are sitting in the ‘News Café’ – a specially constructed set for the Conference (with fake sauce bottles for added spice).
IH: Someone said this morning in one of our workshops: ‘we may be academics, but we are also citizens.’ That encouraged me to think that what John and I are trying to do here might not be so stupid. We would like to explain why we landed on the creative citizen space on the game board at the same time and why the conversation is so rich.
JH: What we are about to do is to try to combine anecdotal narrative storytelling with abstract thinking, conceptualisation and the advance of knowledge. You will be the judges of whether we make it or not.
Growing Up in East Lancashire: Hargreaves (right)
IH: Now who can this be? … Aren’t I sweet? That’s me dressed up as a television set at a holiday camp in North Wales. Standing behind me is by big brother (the sheikh) and my middling brother (the pirate). That’s how I got into media.
Growing up in the orphanage: Royal Wolverhampton Orphan Asylum – ‘The Ophney.’ – Eric Idle, top; Hartley, bottom (1960).
JH: This is my childhood in the 1950s. It was tragedy done as comedy; a genre at which the survivors of British boarding schools are very good. Up at the top there (middle) is Eric Idle – the minstrel of the Monty Pythons, responsible for The Galaxy Song and ‘Always Look on the Bright Side of Life’ – and down at the bottom, that’s me (second from right).
JH: This is the Royal Wolverhampton Orphan Asylum, founded in 1850 after a cholera epidemic; and I spent five years there.
So the question for both us was this: how to get out of the predicament we found ourselves in, in our childhood.
The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter, by the Incredible String Band (March 1968)
IH: When I was a teenager my middling brother (the pirate) came home from Dundee University with this album: See:
The short one said in full:
End.
Grosvenor Square – Mick Jagger and friends (October 1968)
Picture source:
JH: My teenage years need to be passed over in silence, so I move on to when I was a student. My external self was formed by that year of things being broken: 1968. One of the most memorable was the Grosvenor Square Demonstration against the Vietnam War. This event was the subject of a field-forming book by James Halloran, Philip Elliott and Graham Murdock, called
JH: The other image is the first demonstration I went to as a student journalist, taking photographs of hairy people protesting against Maggie Thatcher, the milk snatcher. These pictures were published in the student magazine at Cardiff University, where I was a student. My ‘teenage’ formation – seeing alternative universes – took place in squares.
Trafalgar Square (January 1972). Photomontage by J. Hartley
IH: I was not really with the placards. Being radical to me didn’t mean big marches where I felt bossed about by someone with a loud hailer. I was more interested in anarcho-communitarianism.
JH: I felt the sense of community with the people I walked with. But I was already interested in finding ways of representing public events by means other than traditional journalism or just the act itself.
Kaleidoscope Youth and Community Project, Eric Blakebrough (1985).
IH: I was definitely into dirt, hair, dogs and stuff like that, but not so much as to stop me visiting the university careers office. I managed to get myself a job on a journalism entry course with a regional newspaper company. Then I met the man who wrote the book (above), my father-in-law, Eric Blakebrough. See:
The book (below) is much later (1998) when I was working at the
A step beyond Morris dancing: The Third Sector Revival. Demos 1998. See it at:
IH: The think tank Demos See: Geoff Mulgan, as CEO of Nesta, gave the opening address at the same conference where we gave this presentation. See:
Top left: Cardiff student newspaper (co-founded 1972 and still going). Top right: First solo book (1982). Bottom: Rebecca Magazine (1983).
JH: these pictures are intended to confound the idea that the journalist is ‘over there’ wile the academic is ‘over here’ (and never the twain should meet).
I co-founded See:
I was also involved in a magazine called
Then I published by first solo book in 1982, It’s still in print:
We were interested in social issues; in new ways of representing the world, ourselves, journalism and knowledge.
‘… could be Britain’s greatest PM since Winston Churchill’.
IH: we move on. In 1996, after spells as Director of BBC News and Editor of the
I was a conditional enthusiast for Blair in general and a full-on enthusiast for the communitarian dimension in his politics. In the post-election victory issue shown here, I wrote that Blair could be Britain’s greatest PM since Winston Churchill.
‘… the shine was already flaking’.
IH: A couple of months later, the shine was already flaking.
JH: This sequence, showing various book covers, is about making choices about careers, and allowing within that choice for the fermentation of alternatives. I became a professional academic. I found that I knew how to write books.
I was cursed, damned and doomed by my PhD supervisor (the late Terence Hawkes) See Hawkes’ obituary, by another of his former PhD students John Drakakis:
This clutch of books from the period sees me trying to combine an understanding of journalism – from the point of view of its readers, audiences and citizens at large – with an understanding of popular culture in its most entertaining mode; and to try to understand how those two things intersect.
IH: So, that’s a quick summary of a lot of stuff. Now we are getting quite close to the earthshattering moment when John and I meet.
I was offered a job at the School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies. I was ready for a big life shift, so I accepted. The lovely picture of Penarth Pier, taken on my iPad, notes a place where you and I both lived, though not in the same years.
Penarth Pier – the view from Hargreaves’ iPad.
JH: Yes, although it’s not really about Penarth, it’s about Cardiff and in particular the Cardiff School of Journalism. I was extremely proud to be able to take what was then a section of the School of English into independence as a separate School – 1996, I think this was. The university took some convincing because it worried that applied skills and professional training were not what a Russell Group university should be doing. So we had to demonstrate that we were across the scholarly and academic requirements as well as pulling in enough students, grants and attention to justify the expense.
Cardiff, under the leadership of Sir Brian Smith, was a place on the move. See Sir Brian’s own recollection of his Cardiff years::
However, I knew that I wouldn’t be accepted as an educator by the journalism professionals themselves, so we had to get in someone who knew what they were talking about – and that someone was Ian.
IH: So I arrive in Cardiff at the turn of the Millennium. We get rid of the typewriters – I believe they went to Cardiff Prison – and start to engage with the emerging digital world.
One of my new colleagues was the photographer, Daniel Meadows. See Meadows’ home site:
Daniel Meadows and his ‘Photobus’, 1970s
Daniel Meadows.
Source:
IH: this is an intermission in the sense that John and myself both went far from Cardiff, though neither of us cut our links. Fancifully, I label this the ‘wild geese’ years, after Yeats, but without intending any comparison with Irish Republicans. WB Yeats (1913) ‘September 1913’: see: First published in 2003 by Oxford University Press under the title
David Miliband, 2008. For the banana as politics, see:
JH: The people I admired most were those who took up the pen and wrote with no sense of joining a profession. John Milton, for example. John Milton (1644) Hartley, John (2008) ‘Journalism as a human right : the cultural approach to journalism’. In M. Loffelholz & D. Weaver (eds.)
IH: I also wanted to look at the world from some new angles. So, I took a job in business and then another one working for David Miliband MP when he was Foreign Secretary. I worked for Ofcom, the communications regulator.
QUT Creative Industries Precinct, Brisbane
JH: I went back to Australia and took the path to the dark side, as an academic executive. At QUT we launched the world’s first ‘Creative Industries’ Faculty (2001), and built this handsome new Creative Industries Precinct (2004). I was founding dean of the Creative Industries Faculty at Queensland University of Technology (2000-2005).
But I was still trying to bring the agenda that motivated me into a wider view than was possible simply by producing yet more books.
Photo: Daniel Meadows
The old links hold though: the photograph here of me with my family was taken by Daniel Meadows, on one of his visits to Australia.
IH: I was working in the Foreign Office in 2010, with a plan to return to Cardiff University after the general election that year. That took shape as a new chair in Digital Economy, which from September that year I held on a 0.6 basis, enabling me to mix academic work with other interests. See:
The Hargreaves Report 2011.
IH: One of these turned out to be intellectual property – I was asked by the UK Government to write an independent assessment of the UK legal framework on IP issues in the context of digital disruption to markets for music, books, films and the like. See:
The AHRC Connected Communities Programme – source of Creative Citizen funding
IH: I was also asked by my Head of School to go along to a research council event at Birmingham University, to explore the possibility of research collaborations in the Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Connected Communities programme. See:
When I read the background to this programme, with its interest in community, creativity, technology and citizenship, I felt that I was on a good track. I had no idea, however, that John would be at the same meeting – as an expert advisor.
What exactly were you supposed to be doing there?
Connected Communities – AHRC programme (2010) Source:
JH: What attracted me was the fact that in the context of this Connected Communities programme the AHRC wanted to develop research around the concept of creative industries. As you can see in their slides here, that’s the kind of thing they were looking for; and they asked me to come over to pep up the discussion. My presentation is archived here:
But I was astonished to see you sitting on the other side of the room.
IH: so making a long story short, we started to talk and meet, along with the group of researchers which had closed in upon the idea of creative citizenship at the meeting.
The Creative Economy Manifesto 2013
IH: it took us three or four months to think through our main research question and to establish the partnership between six universities and a dozen or so community or other non-academic partners.
In this period and subsequently, I also got involved in other projects which informed my view of creative citizenship and its potential. These included the Hasan Bakhshi, Ian Hargreaves & Juan Mateos-Garcia (2013) See:
Digital Literacy – Foundation of Creative Citizenship?
JH: Illustrated here is a book of mine, John Hartley (2009) Richard Hoggart (1957)
My book takes that idea forward to the digital environment.
My motivation for being involved in the Creative Citizen project is not only the value of the work itself, which is really carried by the investigators in Britain, but also the way it challenges the state of knowledge. My contribution to the process has been to articulate the view that the study of creativity and citizenship is not simply personal or anecdotal, nor is it simply a narrativisation of either politics or research. Bringing creativity and citizenship together means changing our
This conference is demonstrating the truth of that.
JH: We need to learn how to talk to each other across these boundaries of discipline and practice, to accommodate the clashes of different knowledge systems, different value systems, and so on, and to find new ways to collaborate towards some innovation in ideas and practices.
There is a role for academics; there is a role for formal knowledge systems and there is a role for quite disciplined (Popperian) approaches to the study of these things. The message from me is that we live in a world where complex system really do determine our positions, our agency and our identities in some ways, and yet those complex system are open and productive for everybody in the system, not just for trained elites or professionals.
The lesson is more about how to sample, to understand, to characterise the productivity in creative terms and in civic terms of the whole population and not just of trained elites. That’s what makes this kind of work really challenging and interesting for me.
IH: I add to that the importance of the political – which is why I was so committed to providing a forum for engagement with mainstream political think tanks at this event.
What has emerged above all for me from the event is a powerful set of insights into the importance of partnerships, made in the right way, across all sorts of boundaries.
At a time when technology is disrupting most things – journalism, creative industries and universities among them – we have great opportunities to innovate and to make new formations.
Media, Community and Creative Citizen: the research question.
At this point the session was thrown open to general discussion.