Blog | Michael Eades

Being Human: Hope and fear in 2016

September 28, 2016 by michaeleades2014

Our theme for the 2016 Being Human festival is ‘hope and fear’. We couldn’t have known how well chosen it would be. This has been a year in which fears around everything from Brexit, global terrorism, and the rise of political extremism across the world seem to have snapped into sharper focus. There’s no shortage of fear. At the same time however, as our programme demonstrates, there is also no shortage of hope. People have come forward with context, nuance, […]

Categories: Blog, Events, Festivals, Public Engagement • Tags: archives, Being Human Festival, curating, exhibition, Festivals, public engagement, school of advanced study

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Public Engagement as Method – July 2016

July 10, 2016 by michaeleades2014

Pic – Blue plaque badges distributed by Dr Debbie Maxwell at ‘Public Engagement as Method in the Arts & Humanities. Public Engagement as Method in the Arts and Humanities – University of Sheffield, 5 July 2016 Last week I took part in a one-day symposium at the University of Sheffield on Public Engagement as Method in the Arts and Humanities. The day offered a welcome opportunity for both academics and practitioners involved in public engagement to reflect on how engaging […]

Categories: Being Human, Blog, Projects, Public Engagement, research, Uncategorized

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Festival in a Box: a pop-up exhibition of stories – Oct 2015

December 23, 2015 by michaeleades2014

Back in late October (Friday 16), Dr Catriona Mcara and I curated a one day pop-up exhibition at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH), University of Edinburgh as part of the Luminate Festival of Creative Ageing. The event, ‘Festival in a Box: a pop-up exhibition of stories’ followed directly from our 2014 event Boxes of Delight: surrealism at 90. Drawing on Dr Mcara’s curatorial and exhibition making practice at the Leeds College of Art as well as […]

Categories: Arts and Health, Blog, Events, Exhibitions, Projects, Uncategorized • Tags: ageing, curating, dementia, festival in a box, Festivals, surrealism

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Being Human Summer Social – June 10

June 28, 2015 by michaeleades2014

This post is my personal take on the ‘soft launch’ event for the 2015 Being Human festival – which I organised at Senate House on June 10 2015. The blog was originally published on the Being Human festival website on June 12 2015. A feast of the humanities Preparations for the second Being Human festival of the humanities got underway in earnest on Wednesday 10 June at our first ever Being Human Summer Social. More than 150 people from across the country came to […]

Categories: Blog, Events, Festivals, Projects • Tags: Being Human Festival, Festivals, school of advanced study

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An ‘Unconference’ in a Box: Age Camp Leeds – June 2015

June 7, 2015 by michaeleades2014

Age Friendly Cities On Monday 1st of June I got up very early and took the train from King’s Cross up to Leeds for my first ever ‘unconference’. This was Age Camp Leeds, held at the Carriage Works Theatre and dedicated to the topic of creating an ‘age friendly city’. For those of you who have never been to one, an ‘unconference’ is effectively a conference with a defined focus – in this case ‘age friendly cities’ – but no […]

Categories: Arts and Health, Blog, Projects

Seaside Surrealism: Whitstable – April 2015

April 6, 2015 by michaeleades2014

One day project On Saturday 4th of April, 2015 I took a trip to the East Kent seaside town of Whitstable. As well as being a nice Easter weekend break, I saw this as the latest in a series of one-day excursions and ‘projects’ exploring the possibilities of what I have described before on this site, following Paul Nash, as ‘seaside surrealism’. I first became interested in this idea during my PhD, when I became aware of a sub-tradition of […]

Categories: Blog, Gallery, Projects, Surrealism • Tags: photography, seaside, surrealism

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Being Human at Glastonbury: the view from the field – July 2014

July 8, 2014 by michaeleades2014

My first Glastonbury Vivienne Westwood doesn’t like festivals. I know this because she opened her appearance at the 2014 Glastonbury Festival with just this assertion. Perhaps surprisingly for someone so closely associated with the punk movement, Westwood began her talk by stating that she’d never really been a big fan of all-night parties and has always been keen to get home to bed. I was glad to hear her say this, as it reminded me very much of my own […]

Categories: Blog, Festivals • Tags: Being Human Festival, D-Fuse, Festivals, fracking, glastonbury, public engagement

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Being Human: a curator’s perspective – April 2014

April 7, 2014 by michaeleades2014

Just before Easter, our steering committee met to discuss applications for funding for this year’s Being Human festival of the humanities. Representatives from the School of Advanced Study, the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and the British Academy came together to begin the difficult task of allocating funding, and whittling down more than 117 entries to an eventual 36 funded applications. One of the pleasures in taking part in this process, and seeing the Being Human applications coming in over […]

Categories: Blog • Tags: Being Human Festival, Festivals

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The Bloomsbury Festival, or the Bloomsbury Fair? – March 2014

March 29, 2014 by michaeleades2014

It’s the Bloomsbury fair, not the Bloomsbury Festival!’ Such was the reaction of one of my research participants upon our arriving at her flat with the Bloomsbury ‘Festival in a Box’ a couple of weeks ago. This participant is now in her late nineties and has lived in central Bloomsbury since the Second World War. Still living alone in a flat in not far from my own work place, she is just one of several participants whom I have encountered during […]

Categories: Arts and Health, Blog, Festivals • Tags: ageing, bloomsbury festival, dementia, festival in a box, Festivals

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Festivals in and Out of the Box: thoughts on ‘Being Human’ – Feb 2014

February 25, 2014 by michaeleades2014

A lot of my life over the last year or so has been taken up with festivals. That’s not to say that this year has been a hedonistic one (far from it), but rather that both my working life and my academic research has increasingly revolved around the planning, conceptualising, and programming of various forms of festivals. It seems like a good time therefore to put down a few personal thoughts about festivals and why they can be a good […]

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Bloomsbury Festival in a Box: opening the first archive – Nov 2014

November 15, 2013 by michaeleades2014

Earlier this week a plain, slightly damp cardboard box was delivered to my office. Whilst hardly looking like anything to get excited about, I knew that this was in fact a very important package indeed. It was nothing less than the first ‘output’ of my research project: the first (albeit very ‘prototype’) Bloomsbury ‘Festival in a Box’. For six days this October the streets and squares of Bloomsbury were transformed. They became impromptu venues for art, music, and cabaret; for […]

Categories: Arts and Health, Blog, Festivals

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