A blog by Dr Lucy Wright, Post Doctoral Researcher on the Participatory Arts & DIY Cultures project:
It’s now more than six months since I took up the post of Senior Research Associate on the ‘Participatory Arts and DIY Cultures’ project at the University of East Anglia which seems like as good a time as any to take stock of progress so far!
It has been a fairly steep learning curve, coming as I do from a background in English folk and carnival, and much of the summer and autumn of 2017 was spent getting to grips with a whole area of literature on punk and DIY music that was previously unfamiliar to me. However, it has been an incredibly rewarding task, which has enabled me to draw new comparisons between two music communities which are, aesthetically at least, quite disparate. These comparisons have undoubtedly enriched my perspective on both folk and punk music cultures.
Perhaps the most rewarding aspect of the project so far—aside from the real privilege of reading and writing and thinking about what DIY means in the twenty-first century—was participating in the Punk in the Provinces event at the Norwich Arts Centre in November 2017. This informal discursive evening brought together key academics, practitioners and punk rock fans/participants to explore the specific nature of punk experience outside of the main centres of London and New York. It was great to meet so many passionate punks and to hear some of their wonderful stories!
Arts and DIY 
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