Song Lines to Impact and Legacy: Creating Living Knowledge through Working with Social Haunting

This project arises out of the AHRC Connected Communities ECR Development Project 'Working with Social Haunting' and the AHRC 2106 Festival project 'Opening the 'Unclosed Space': Multiplying Ghost Labs as Intergenerational Utopian Practice'. In both of these projects, led by early career researcher, Dr Geoff Bright, the Ghost Lab model of community practice was developed as a means of reanimating aspects of "communal being-ness" concealed within contested pasts as living but subjugated knowledge. Dissemination of the Ghost Lab model into new areas with new partners is particularly relevant, given the 2016 Brexit vote and a proliferation of popular discourses about a north/south division fracturing along geographies of difference between metropolitan locations and de-industrialised areas - an agenda that emerged strongly during the lifetime of our projects.
We will enhance the impacts and legacies of our two previous AHRC projects by disseminating one of the techniques that we designed as part of a repertoire of community 'ghost hunting' methods: the "community tarot" reading - a simple, playful device of community reimagination that originated during our research work in South Yorkshire, Lancashire and Staffordshire. Working with our new creative partners, Ribbon Road (professional folk musicians working with communities); our established partners Unite Community, Co-op College and the New Vic Theatre; and our new community partners East Lancashire Workers Education Association, East Durham Artists Network, Durham Participatory Research Hub, Sheffield Live and the World Association of Community Radio Broadcasters (AMARC) we will showcase the community tarot reading technique at six 'Impact and Legacy Ghost Labs' in five new communities (three in NE and two in the NW). As an innovation, four to six "song lines" (specially written and recorded songs in line with local dissenting song traditions) will be created from those impact events and disseminated regionally, nationally and internationally in video and audio form through:

- our extensive community partner networks
- a series of interactive community radio links facilitated through Sheffield Live and AMARC. Specific, international links will be with community radio stations in Slovenia, Haiti, the US, Hungary, Malawi and the Basque country
- two large-scale public projections of commissioned video material (one each in the NE and NW)
- a practioner/policy-maker conference at the People's History Museum, Manchester
- a commissioned website.

The three NE communities will be Seaham, Horden and Willington on the Durham coalfield, and the two communities in the NW will be Rochdale (Ghost Labs on two sites) and Hyde, Tameside - all of which are communities where the relationship to Brexit is complicated, ambivalent and potentially divisive. Through public-facing impact engagements at the 2017 Durham Miners' Gala, Great Yorkshire Show, Wigan Diggers' Festival, and the Co-operative College Conference, we will establish a 'living knowledge' in the form of songs, images and an ever multiplying "Community Tarot pack" that operates as a living visual and conceptual lexicon of community re-imagination. Drawing on the example of our input at the Somerset House festival, public "readings' will be offered by our New Vic theatre partners, who themselves were central to originating and piloting the community tarot readings in Staffordshire. The policy-maker and practitioner conference held at the People's History Museum will see the launch of the website; workshops exemplifying the whole repertoire of Ghost Lab techniques; and a showcasing of the music/visual "song lines" created by Ribbon Road, the internationally interactive community radio broadcast material, and the project film material.

The project will have an impact on key non-academic groups. It will impact on members of the public who participate in Ghost Labs through the opportunity to participate in a process that is, firstly enjoyable and social, but also offers opportunities to reflect on community histories and values and to reimagine alternative futures, thus contributing to a sense of community cohesion. As one of our participants from the previous project summed up: "We had a laugh, did something different, got to know each other and ourselves a bit better...It felt good to try to express myself through unusual means (for me) like poetry or even drawing. Doing it together created a powerful and lasting feeling...".

We will subsequently engage with local communities through spectacular large-scale, public open-air projections of the video ballads and the project film. These will take place at locations in the heart of the communities we are working with, allowing a wider group of local people to reflect on and respond to the issues raised through the Ghost Labs and ballads written in response. This community event will provide a further opportunity for local residents to come together as a community and reflect on their shared values and experiences. To impact on a wider regional audience, we will share project outcomes at a series of public events. The focus at these events will be pop-up theatre performances which bring to life the themes from the Ghost Labs. We will reach wide and diverse audiences through representation at the 2017 editions of Durham Miners' Gala (attendance 100,000 approx.), Great Yorkshire Show (2015 attendance: 132,000), Wigan Diggers' Festival (2015 attendance: 4,000), and the Co-op College Conference, which attracts co-operators, practitioners and researchers from the UK and internationally.

The project will also have an impact on our community-based education, activist, and arts partners (Unite Community, Co-op College, New Vic Theatre Borderlines, Workers' Education Association in the NW, East Durham Artists Network, Durham Participatory Research Hub) through increased capacity to creatively generate a living knowledge and respond strategically and practically to significant socio-political events that could affect community well-being by developing their understanding of the Ghost Lab approach, in particular the "Community Tarot. Our partners will also continue to disseminate the approach to new users linked to their networks.

In addition, this work will have an impact on wider policy and practitioner audiences regionally and nationally. A national Legacy Conference will be held towards the end of the project at which we will present the project outputs and provide opportunities for attendees to actively engage with the methodology through a series of creative workshops focusing on how they might adopt similar approaches within their own communities.

We will engage with international audiences through our planned radio broadcasts in the Basque country, Slovenia, US, Hungary, Haiti and Malawi. This process will go beyond simple dissemination as we will collect responses from communities of listeners. By incorporating these creative responses to our work, we will create an international cycle of reflexivity that will not only enrich our understanding of the original research through diverse perspectives, but also initiate an ongoing dialogue about the usefulness of the ideas around social haunting in considering current social and political concerns beyond the UK.

Finally, our project website will encourage diverse national and international audiences, including academics, practitioners, policy makers and the general public, to actively engage with the project by providing access to all the artistic outputs and encouraging discussion and collaboration to explore the notion of social haunting (as we have started to do through our blog in previous projects).