Creative practice, community, and the street: creative co-productions of place-based identities

In this panel session, researchers and creative practitioners will discuss how creative practices have been and could be used to (re)make, complicate and communicate place-based identities. As part of her broader interest in the historical geographies of protest, Hannah Awcock will reflect on how protest stickers impact urban landscapes and people's engagement with these spaces. Based on her ongoing research into the visual identity of urban spaces, Nadiia Lolina will discuss how street art contributes to the creation of urban identity. Drawing on The Stove Network's many years of community creative practice in Dumfries, Katherine Wheeler will consider how community-led creative practice engages with place-based histories to inspire regional place making and community change. Collectively, these speakers will raise questions about how creative practice and explicit or implicit co-production engage with established and emerging place-based histories as part of the ongoing process of shaping place-based identities. 

Hannah Awcock (Edinburgh Napier University). Hannah has many years of experience of researching the historical geographies of protest and has most recently published on the impact of protest stickers on urban spaces. You can read her open access article here. 

Nadiia Lolina (PhD, Cara Fellow of the SAS, IHR, London). With more than 20 years of teaching experience (last as Assistant Professor in the Environmental Design Department at Kyiv University of Economics and Law and guest lecturer in Hight School of Economics, Culture and Arts (EKA school) in Riga, Latvia), Nadiia also has practical experience as founder and chief designer of Lolina.Design.Bureau. She has always been concerned with the question of communication between citizens and the city and is also interested in cities’ branding and the image of the city. 

Katharine Wheeler (The Stove Network). Katharine Wheeler heads up The Stove Network’s What We Do Now Creative Placemaking Network that has public funding to ‘support partnerships between artists and community organisations, co-creating with communities to develop projects, visions, knowledge, and enterprise’. Central to Katharine’s work, and that of The Stove, is the use of creativity as part of communities to inspire real change and imagine new futures for the places we live. You can read more about The Stove Network here and the What We Do Now network here.