9th May 2025 – The Contemporary and Historical Potteries: A Case Study.

This first event within a series of three for 2025 focuses on the contemporary and historical Potteries as a case study. In this Stoke-on-Trent focused event we engage with its recent history, inspirational historic role in the development of adult education, and contemporary experiences of culture and the arts.

The event provides a presentation from Professor Linden West for discussion with members of the Research Circle on making change and re-imagining lifelong learning. We asked: ‘How do differnt forms of the arts – music, film and videomaking, photography, literary and poetic expression, storytelling, dance, drama, painting, sculpture, including their expression in the digital world – enrich the possibilities of lifelong and life wide learning?’ ‘What are the spaces and places – actual and desired – for these different forms of practice?’

Contributors:

Linden West – Centenary thoughts: distress in a city, culture is ordinary and a democratic education.

Linden provided the following overview for this session:

It’s a hundred years since Stoke gained city status, and just over 100 years since the famous 1919 Report on ‘Adult Education as a permanent national necessity’ was published by the Ministry of Reconstruction. In that report, produced after the horrors of World War, Stoke-on-Trent has an honoured place in the history of adult/workers’ education. Longton was home to the first ever tutorial class forged in an alliance between progressives in universities and workers’ organisations. Here were spaces, I suggest, for dialogue, profounder forms of learning, and the shaping of a democratic imagination/structures of feeling, which in turn helped build a more inclusive, healthier society. That experiment ended in the closing decades of the twentieth century in the rise of neo-liberalism, fierce individualism, the loss of manufacturing industry, the weakening of democracy, and the associated rage of racism, fascism, and Islamic fundamentalism.  Linden has chronicled some of these trends in his research and writing. He uses Stoke as a microcosm of a wider crisis of culture, democracy, and creative learning.

‘Culture is ordinary’ and ‘structures of feeling’ are phrases used by renowned adult educator, cultural critic, and writer Raymond Williams. Re-engaging with his inspirational work reminds of the two meanings of culture: as a whole way of life, but also of the role of the arts and learning in creating special processes of discovery, democratic reinvigoration and the social good. Williams helps us focus on how cultures, including rampant capitalism, can be top-down, manipulative and deeply disturbed. Or can, despite our troubles, be transformed in more inclusive, shared, vital and healthy ways.

Linden was born in Stoke, is Professor Emeritus at Canterbury Christ Church University, and author of Distress in the city, racism, fundamentalism and a democratic education. Linden is an award-winning international writer and researcher