The Cultural Values of Digging

Activities around digging have become massively popular again in recent years, including in the attention they have received from cultural institutions. Many cultural institutions have in recent years recreated wartime (allotment) gardens to highlight a range of different issues and values. Such exhibitions and events, organized during a time of renewed austerity measures, increased concerns around food and the environment, draw obvious parallels to the contemporary moment, offering possibilities to rethink our own values. This project seeks to better understand the myriad of different ways in which issues around digging have reemerged in recent years, to analyse, understand and measure these by looking at how they have been expressed and mobilized by different people and actors. This can be expressed as actual digging and linked to food production, as more symbolic digging, as performance and event, digging up local histories, or as new forms of gift giving. This proposal is for a Research Development Award to examine these multiple (re)emergent forms of digging and to establish evidence for their cultural value. In line with the Cultural Value project, this proposed project significantly adds to the development of rigorous approaches to the researching, articulation and use of case studies as evidence for evaluating dimensions of cultural value, in our case related to a range of different ways value is attached to digging. This project will examine these different forms of digging by studying their perceived cultural value through five distinct aspects: digging as 'nation-building', digging as 'lifestyle choice', digging for 'heritage', digging to enable 'community building' and digging as 'gift'. It does this by focusing on two different social scales: looking and both individual and community groups and secondly by examining the mainstream media and recent relevant policy initiatives. The project asks the following questions:

1. What are the different cultural values associated with digging and how are they articulated through the five identified thematic strands as well as the different social scales and institutional levels?
2. How are different historical reference points used to articulate and explain these values?
3. How is digging linked to ideas of citizenship and relevant to what it means to be British today?
4. What are the different imagined futures and societal trajectories associated with these values?

The project is specifically interested in the rediscovery, reuse, reworking within a contemporary setting of these three historical motives and movements: the 17th Century Diggers, the wartime Dig for Victory campaign and popular 1970s TV show The Good Life. What aspects are selected, and how are these mobilized across the fives different digging themes and within the two social scales and institutions. To answer our research questions, the project develops four distinct, but interconnected case studies, which show the potential for the use and value of such new sources, and associated methodologies, for the identification and evidencing of personal and group experiences, specifically focusing on the use of social media. Our case studies focus on: the UK print media representations of digging, 2000-2012; The Winstanley Festival remembering the Diggers; the recreation of a wartime garden; the Big Dig, a recent initiative that encourages people to 'give' through digging. The project will develop a working paper and two journal articles. The project will host one highly innovative end of project event ensuring dissemination and impact within and beyond academia. Our impact strategy engages the public sector, commercial and private sector, third sector and wider public.

This project brings together a group of leading scholars and practitioners in the area of (social) media (Vis), culture and participation (Miles and Ochu), food cultures (Jackson), allotments (all, especially Vis), and citizenship (all) for an innovative, interdisciplinary research project that investigates the cultural values of digging through examining its recent popularity. Knowledge exchange and impact of the research through public engagement is implied throughout and benefits further from Ochu's experience as a public engagement specialist (at Manchester Beacon). In part our impact will come through the organisation of one project event, a so-called 'really useful workshop', which will be held in Sheffield at the end of the project (February 2014). This format was designed by the current project team, as part of a project on allotments and open data and involves the following: in order to ensure a genuine engagement with academics, relevant stakeholders and the general public, who play a pivotal role in expressing the cultural value of digging. The workshop will thus have both an academic/stakeholder and public element. It will be held in a well-known cultural landmark, the Showcase Cinema complex in Sheffield. In delivering the workshop and ensuring wider outreach we will work closely with the cinema and public engagement team at Sheffield.
We will work closely with the public sector to identify workshop participants. Specifically through established working relationships with local councils in Sheffield and Manchester, the Department for Communities and Local Government and Cabinet Office who have all expressed an interest in our work. Vis is a founding member of Open Data Manchester, which has become a key shaper of debates around open data in the UK. Her open data work specifically focuses on the opening up of local council data pertaining to allotment waiting lists and rent charges. Through this work close relationships and networks with local and central government working in this area have been developed. Moreover this work is regularly shared in the form of public and invited talks, for example at the Open Government Data Camp, has appeared on The Guardian Data Blog, as well as delivered through keynotes at international events like the recent Open Knowledge Festival, attended by many relevant stakeholders. Within Manchester the co-operative (commercial private sector) have expressed a keen interest in further work developed by this research team. Such relationships will be developed further through this project and could lead to additional support (in kind through the publicizing of our work). Within the third sector significant impact has been secured through earlier work in the area of food cultures, cultural participation and allotments. Specifically the allotment work has received considerable media attention so far and relevant relationships have been forged with third sector stakeholders: the National Association for Allotments and Leisure Gardens; the Royal Horticultural Society; the Allotment Regeneration Initiative; Grow Sheffield, Feeding Manchester and Landshare. Further links that could be developed include the National Trust (through Professor Carys Swanwick, Landscape Department, Sheffield). Moreover further stakeholders to invite to the workshop include the Manchester Histories Festival, People History Museum, North West Film Archive. This in order to explore what they might offer to our 'imagining new trajectories' question and the potential for public programming in this area.
The end of project workshop, which will also be live blogged will further ensure that the project is disseminated and shared with the wider public and will play a big part in our impact strategy. Moreover the project will make use of social media to further share our work. Beyond our academic beneficiaries, our impact strategy thus engages the public sector, commercial and private sector, third sector and wider public.