Creative Voices, Activist Voices includes stories, photographs, and objects shared by participants and items ranging from a cookbook to bubble-making activities, bringing to life the experiences of Fun Palaces Makers from across the UK.
Fun Palaces is a campaign that seeks to put culture at the heart of communities and communities at the heart of culture. On the first weekend of October every year people across the country make Fun Palaces sharing their skills, passions and interests with others.
By doing so they put their town, village, city or street on the Fun
Palaces map and declare ‘Culture happens here!’
This exhibition presents findings from a research project and exhibition tour funded by the Collaborate Fund (Centre for Cultural Value) and the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), jointly led by Fun Palaces and sociologist Dr Katy Pilcher
from Aston University.
Together they addressed the question: To what extent can finding your creative voice unlock your wider civic activist voice and what might be the potential barriers or social inequalities preventing this from happening?
The project highlights how communities come together across social divides to share knowledge, create cultural value and unlock wider civic activism.
There will be a workshop on Saturday 4th October (1pm-4pm) as part of our Fun Palaces event:
Placard Making, a fun and creative drop-in activity for all the family
What social justice issues are you passionate about? Is this something local to you or an issue that came up in the exhibition? Contribute to a sharing of creative protest messages.
Dr Katy Pilcher is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Aston University. Katy’s research focuses upon questions of power and inequalities in relation to: gender and sexualities; ageing; work and employment relations; leisure spaces; digital exclusion;
creative community activism.
The Centre for Cultural Value is a national research centre based at the University of Leeds. Its core mission is to build a shared understanding of the differences that arts, culture, and screen make to people’s lives and to society.
We are very grateful to the Economic and Research Council (ESRC) who have funded the touring of this exhibition through an ESRC Social Science Innovation Award (Aston University, 2025-6). ESRC is the UK’s largest funder of economic, social, behavioural and human data science.
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