Song Lines to Impact and Legacy: Creating Living Knowledge through Working with Social Haunting

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This project arises out of the AHRC Connected Communities ECR Development Project 'Working with Social Haunting' and the AHRC 2106 Festival project 'Opening the 'Unclosed Space': Multiplying Ghost Labs as Intergenerational Utopian Practice'. In both of these projects, led by early career researcher, Dr Geoff Bright, the Ghost Lab model of community practice was developed as a means of reanimating aspects of "communal being-ness" concealed within contested pasts as living but subjugated knowledge. Dissemination of the Ghost Lab model into new areas with new partners is particularly relevant, given the 2016 Brexit vote and a proliferation of popular discourses about a north/south division fracturing along geographies of difference between metropolitan locations and de-industrialised areas - an agenda that emerged strongly during the lifetime of our projects.We will enhance the impacts and legacies of our two previous AHRC projects by disseminating one of the techniques that we designed as part of a repertoire of community 'ghost hunting' methods: the "community tarot" reading - a simple, playful device of community reimagination that originated during our research work in South Yorkshire, Lancashire and Staffordshire. Working with our new creative partners, Ribbon Road (professional folk musicians working with communities); our established partners Unite Community, Co-op College and the New Vic Theatre; and our new community partners East Lancashire Workers Education Association, East Durham Artists Network, Durham Participatory Research Hub, Sheffield Live and the World Association of Community Radio Broadcasters (AMARC) we will showcase the community tarot reading technique at six 'Impact and Legacy Ghost Labs' in five new communities (three in NE and two in the NW). As an innovation, four to six "song lines" (specially written and recorded songs in line with local dissenting song traditions) will be created from those impact events and disseminated regionally, nationally and internationally in video and audio form through: - our extensive community partner networks- a series of interactive community radio links facilitated through Sheffield Live and AMARC. Specific, international links will be with community radio stations in Slovenia, Haiti, the US, Hungary, Malawi and the Basque country- two large-scale public projections of commissioned video material (one each in the NE and NW) - a practioner/policy-maker conference at the People's History Museum, Manchester- a commissioned website. The three NE communities will be Seaham, Horden and Willington on the Durham coalfield, and the two communities in the NW will be Rochdale (Ghost Labs on two sites) and Hyde, Tameside - all of which are communities where the relationship to Brexit is complicated, ambivalent and potentially divisive. Through public-facing impact engagements at the 2017 Durham Miners' Gala, Great Yorkshire Show, Wigan Diggers' Festival, and the Co-operative College Conference, we will establish a 'living knowledge' in the form of songs, images and an ever multiplying "Community Tarot pack" that operates as a living visual and conceptual lexicon of community re-imagination. Drawing on the example of our input at the Somerset House festival, public "readings' will be offered by our New Vic theatre partners, who themselves were central to originating and piloting the community tarot readings in Staffordshire. The policy-maker and practitioner conference held at the People's History Museum will see the launch of the website; workshops exemplifying the whole repertoire of Ghost Lab techniques; and a showcasing of the music/visual "song lines" created by Ribbon Road, the internationally interactive community radio broadcast material, and the project film material.