Playground is at once both a shared ground for the exchange of ideas, and a space in which both existing and new ideas can be played with, their meanings and possibilities examined and explored. We will explore lessons arising out of work to date by collaborators and guests, and consider their potential to inform future ways of working.
Playground brings together both Â鶹´«Ã½ staff and students active in civic-based learning and development, alongside a wide range of similarly-minded external partners.
Playground will operate as a series of lunchtime events, in which invited contributors will prompt and participate in a dialogue about their practice with other players in the room. Attendees are asked to bring their own lunch; tea/coffee and water/juice will be provided.
Playground is part of the Urban Dialogues Network.
All Playground sessions are held in The Sustainability Hub (Kirkby Lodge).
play ‘Play is finding expression; it is letting us understand the world and, through that understanding, challenging the establishment, leading for knowledge, and creating new ties or breaking old ones.’ (Sicart, M. (2014) Play Matters. Cambridge: MIT Press, p. 18)
ground 1) An area used for a specified purpose 2) An area of knowledge or subject of discussion or thought 3) Factors forming a basis for action or the justification for a belief. Oxford Dictionaries (2018) ‘Ground’, available online at https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/ground (Accessed 11.09.18)
Spring 2022
Please join us for the upcoming dialogues as part of the Urban Dialogues Playground Series.
This spring's series engages with a number of our external partners who advance civically-engaged learning projects in China, Malaysia and Sudan.
All Playground sessions are on Wednesdays from 1:00–2:00 and will be available via , passcode: 401996.
November’s Urban Dialogues Playground warmly welcomed Wendy Smith MBE and Andrew Dean of Well Connected; a Â鶹´«Ã½-based charity that was founded to establish outreach projects focusing on oral health and wellbeing. Wendy and Andrew talked through Well Connected’s aim to inform, inspire and innovate for the purposes of wellbeing for everybody.
They gave examples of projects such as ‘The Listening Project’ and ‘City of Smiles’ that foreground listening to the stories of local communities, focusing on kindness, caring and empathy in the co-creation of projects that have a broad reach and holistic approach to wellbeing. Well Connected then seeks to use this place-based expertise to inspire students and communities leading to impactful, award-winning initiatives (The Dental Awards 2021 Winner - Best Charity Initiative).
During the COVID-19 pandemic ‘The Listening Project’ heard ways in which people who had experienced disadvantage or marginalisation had adapted and developed resilience, this helped inform a workshop to help students returning to study after the pandemic on how to build resilience. Other key themes that emerged from these conversations was the importance of creative practices to deal with some of the issues people are facing and the need for outside space to connect with nature and to encourage greater wellbeing.
Hannah Sloggett (Nudge Community Builders) raised the need to keep in mind who benefits from any proposed interventions locally, asking how projects can generate value that can be passed on through generations and add value locally in a space at risk of gentrification. One instance of this is land ownership, how can local people make their own space and do great things locally in the existing neglected buildings? How can we facilitate this?
Both Richard and Hannah believe opportunity lies in collaboration, specifically practical collaboration – doing things and making things happen on the ground in turn, drawing out small but tangible benefits.
Roger Pike of the Milfields Trust raised the need to provide quality housing – providing a good stable home is vital. At the same time, wealth needs to be transferred through ownership of homes with a long-term view of turning around a community. He would also like to see investment into the local primary schools, a cornerstone for lifting families and an overarching shift to social enterprise and inclusive growth whilst protecting what the community already has. A new form of communication needs to be in place to collaborate better from the bottom up in order to fight structural inequality.
The three ‘Connecting the Dots’ Playground sessions have brought to the fore the deeply complex and entangled issues the Stonehouse community face. Contributors to these discussions have some great experience in pulling together with the community to draw upon and seek to make new opportunities for working together across sectors and ask some tough questions that won’t be answered overnight. How can city leadership begin to foster collaboration? How do people get to the table to be a part of these conversations? What can we contribute? What can we commit to the community in a process of building trust and for making more things happen or them?
At the third ‘Connecting the Dots’ meeting, Dr Richard Ayers (lead for Population Health for Â鶹´«Ã½ Peninsula Schools of Medicine and Dentistry), discussed how the global pandemic exacerbated key challenges facing the Stonehouse community’s existing inequalities – with many people afraid to leave homes.
Also of concern is the rise in digital inequity being made more visible through his work in the community. More and more processes and access to healthcare is predicated by digital access – making evident a need for increased fluency of digital technology and digital equity going forward.
Filmmakers and lecturers Dan Paolantonio and Dr Allister Gall have been present in Stonehouse community for over ten years, building long-standing engagement with the community through film making and screening, reactivating areas to be re-popularised, and a forging a new creative cultural centre that serves intergenerational needs. These creative processes encourage storytelling – urging all to pick up a camera and tell their story and articulate their own points of views, perspectives, issues and challenges.
During one such event, Dan and Al screened archival film of the Stonehouse area and in turn people started sharing wonderful memories of these same spaces through the years. This event led to a collective walk around the environments and people were re-inhabiting the spaces and talking about them in a free and open exchange. Rooted in the place and in time, the community talked about fantastic things, aspirational conversations that made everyone there feel positive about the future here.
Such creative exchanges are taking place in the street, a shared space for collaboration and dialogue capturing and celebrating the knowledge and stories of the community. Provoking, encouraging, facilitating and mutually learning from one another.
During this meeting, possible future projects began to emerge. Josanne Stewart of Millfields Inspired, drawing upon her work with schools in the area and children thinking about work in relation to the archival film Dan and Al were sharing. The possibility of a collaborative ‘Stonehouse Workplace’ workshop was discussed and how the history of the work in the area has developed over the years through archival film.
Similarly, Rosie Brenman of the UoP Law Clinic has been in communication with Nudge Community Builders about co-producing a facilitation space for helping the community with their needs. Also recognising a potential overlap of this space with creative opportunities, a hub that facilities the serious and the playful in the community.
The dialogue continues and areas of common interest are beginning to emerge as potential focus areas for even greater collaboration and community engagement.
At the second ‘Connecting the Dots’ meeting attendees were prompted by the question: how can we co-create community engaged learning and sustainable civic development through compassionate dialogue?
In previous weeks, we have brought to the table our layered and increasingly overlapping interdisciplinary work, sharing best practices that equally serve the needs of community partners, engaged student learning and sustainable civic development. What has become evident is the value we all place on the partnerships forged between the University and community through the creation of shared experiences in shared spaces.
Dr Richard Ayers talked us through his research and observations as a practicing GP in Adelaide Street Surgery, Stonehouse, the most deprived ward in the city.
Richard shared insights into the inverse care law, a policy that restricts care in relation to need; this has resulted in areas such as Stonehouse having a stark mismatch between need and resource with insufficient time to truly manage patient problems – something outlined in the Deep End analogy/ project. In response to the above, Adelaide Street Surgery now runs outreach services to the homeless in the city.
Hannah Sloggett lives in Stonehouse and has volunteered in the community for over ten years. With a backgrou
