On 15 February 2016, my dad (Maurice MacLean) died aged 96. On 17 April our son Simon will do the Great Edinburgh Run to raise money for his grandpa’s favourite charity, the Red Cross. Can I explain the background?
Maurice always hated what war did to people, but he also believed that sometimes war was necessary to confront a great evil. He summed up his thinking in a talk he gave long after the war:
A few months ago a group of students gathered in the centre of London to take a short course on portrait photography. The students were taken through the workings of the camera, the use of settings, different kinds of lighting and tips and techniques for creating a portrait. The students did not have make a cash payment for the course but the teacher did not go away empty–handed either.
In the field of Complexity studies, one of the characteristics of a complex system is that it will often show sudden discontinuities, tipping points after long periods of apparent stability. For those of us interested in the way societies adapt and evolved, it might be something of a comfort to think that radical change is indeed a possibility, regardless of how dominant and intrusive the current status quo seems to be.
This isn’t a particularly unique insight, but it comes up whenever I start thinking about the way new trends bubble up out of nowhere and are sometimes able to leave a trace after the inevitable denouement. I like to think that the resurgent interest in the genre of AfroFuturism is one such trend – one that will leave a more interesting world of genre fiction, media and even technology in its wake. Read more…
We often hear rhetoric about the need to create more food and manipulate plants and animals genetically to meet this demand, however we are overlooking one vital fact: we overproduce food and waste a terrible amount of the food that is produced. This is why groups like Foodsharing Edinburgh are so important.
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Alex Dunedin of Ragged University and I were introduced through a mutual acquaintance who simply said “You both need to talk” because we are both involved in the idea of cultivating community and trying to create opportunities for people where they are most needed. Alex is a gifted listener and ideas person, keen to listen to people, appreciate the time and energy they have invested in their subject, and try and support them to get where they want to be – wherever that is. Read more…
Run by Abi Lewis and Susannah Leake, place+platform provides emerging creative talent a place in which to create and a platform to showcase their talents by hosting inventive and unique events to break down boundaries in the arts.
place+platform is a creative support hub for Edinburgh, aiming to do more than providing just a sterile place, but acting as a dynamic platform for creatives in the city. place+platform organises inventive and exciting cross-platform events to encourage a vast and varied experience of creative arts. Read more…
On meeting Glenn Liddall of People Know How, I was very pleasantly surprised. We had been introduced because we are both involved in the idea of cultivating community and trying to create opportunities for people where they are most needed. My role in Ragged University is to listen to people, appreciate the time and energy they have invested in their subject, and try and support them get where they want to be – wherever that is.
Glenn has a similar vision, and we met and discussed the possibilities of People Know How and Ragged University working together in partnership. What grabbed me is the humanity that Glenn carries around with him. From the off I got the sense that he understands that life is messy, complex and non-standard; and that helping people starts with listening and forming a conversation. Read more…
“Littoral: the zone between the low and high tide marks”
I am a member of Ragged University, an artist, and activist I have spent the last 18 months cataloguing the litter on 18 beaches along the NW coast of Scotland, as part of Littoral Art Project which I set up 2 years ago to investigate and draw attention to draw attention to the volume, nature and effects of beach litter. Read more…
What is learning? This is the question I have been exploring through the development of Community Open Online Courses (COOCs), where anyone and everyone can contribute to the curriculum and decide how and what they want to learn. Initially, answering this question from an institutional perspective, seemed easy enough to do – there are a plethora of accreditation routes, standardisation measures and statistics that can be used as evidence. But, we all know that the structure of formal education can leave people as diminished by their experiences as it does enriched. Read more…