Expert Workshop on Amateur and Voluntary Arts

The project proposes a PI Dr Jane Milling, and CI Angus McCabe as provocateurs of the discussion process and report writers, bringing the benefit of expertise across the arts and humanities and the social sciences.

Dr Jane Milling is Senior Lecturer at the University of Exeter, where she works on a variety of AHRC-funded projects centrally concerned with participation in cultural and aesthetic activity by non-professional makers. She co-authored the review of the current scholarship, grey literature and policy documentation around amateur, voluntary and grassroots arts participation for the scoping study The Role of Grassroots Arts Activity in Communities that feeds directly into the deliberations of the expert workshop. Currently, she is working on the large-scale Understanding Everyday Participation project that seeks a radical re-evaluation of the relationship between participation and cultural value, exploring the meanings and stakes people attach to their hobbies and pastimes, informal and amateur arts participation. For Amateur Dramatics: Creating Communities in Time and Space, she is examining the social and cultural significance of the craft, creative practice, and twentieth-century heritage of amateur theatre in England as part of the cultural ecology of many communities. In these projects Dr Milling has been responsible for the supervision of post-doctoral staff and co-delivery of report writing emerging from research findings.