Date/Time: Wednesday 31 October 2018, 13:00-14:00

Venue: Agriculture Building, Room 3.05

Abstract

What is the potential of art in the countryside? What does art ‘do’ and how can we use artistic practice in interdisciplinary research designs?

The presentation will explore these questions drawing on two experimental research projects of socially-engaged contemporary art practices.

First, through a collaborative artist residency co-organised by the Centre for Rural Economy and Berwick Visual Arts, which invited an artist to respond to a highly contentious topic in rural England: housing development.

Secondly, the presentation will discuss the potential of art through empirical fieldwork during a contemporary art festival (the Oku-Noto Trienalle) organised in a remote and depopulated rural area in Japan.

Biography

Dr Menelaos Gkartzios is Senior Lecturer in Planning & Development at Newcastle University’s Centre for Rural Economy. He has spent a semester as Visiting Associate Professor at the University of Tokyo.

He has published widely on:

• rural governance and housing policy
• urban-rural mobilities and social change in the countryside
• the relationship between art and local development

He recently co-edited the first Routledge Companion to Rural Planning and he is currently co-editing a special section on ‘Doing Art in the County’ for the journal Sociologia Ruralis.