Professor George McKay
George is Professor of Media Studies at the University of East Anglia.
His research and teaching interests are in alternative culture and media, the cultural politics of popular music, disability, festivals, community music, alternative cultures, cultures of protest and social movements, and gardening. He has written and edited numerous books, collections and journals in these fields, including the following AHRC-funded monographs:
•Circular Breathing: The Cultural Politics of Jazz in Britain (Duke University Press, 2005)
•Shakin’ All Over: Popular Music and Disability (University of Michigan Press; Corporealities–Discourses of Disability series, 2013).
His new international collection, The Pop Festival: Music, Media, History, Culture, was published by Bloomsbury in the summer of 2015.
George was a member of the AHRC Peer Review College for Media, Music, and for Knowledge Exchange. His other involvement in Connected Communities projects includes being co-author of a 2011 scoping review entitled Community Music: History and Current Practice, Its Constructions of ‘Community’, Digital Turns and Future Soundings, alongside a 22,000 word, 90-entry annotated bibliography of the field, co-investigator on a 2012-13 project entitled Community Gardening, Creativity and Everyday Culture, and principal investigator for a small 2014 project in the creative economy, producing a film Carnivalising the Creative Economy: AHRC-funded Research on and with British Jazz Festivals.
George.mckay@uea.ac.uk
@george_mckay
Dr Lucy Wright
Lucy is a post-doctoral researcher with specialist interests in tradition, participation and DIY performance communities. From April 2016 to June 2017, she was employed as Research Associate on the AHRC-funded Digital Folk project at the University of Sheffield. Prior to this she worked at Manchester Metropolitan University on the AHRC-funded Gut Feeling project, following the completion of her practice-led PhD at MIRIAD, Manchester School of Art in 2014.
As a socially-engaged artist and maker, she is currently artist-in-residence at Bank Street Arts in Sheffield. She is also a member of Rogue Artists’ Studios in Manchester.
Lucy’s research interests include:
• participatory arts and DIY performance communities
• the ‘town carnival movement’ in the North of England, in particular girls’ (carnival) morris dancing.
• the English folk revival and the contemporary English folk scene
• practice-led, ‘artistic research’ methodologies, in particular dialogical / ‘socially engaged’ arts practice as research.
http://www.artistic-researcher.co.uk
Lucy.J.Wright@uea.ac.uk
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Rachel Daniel & Jessica Knights
Rachel and Jess provide administrative and event support for Prof George McKay and the Connected Communities programme from the University of East Anglia.
r.daniel@uea.ac.uk Jessica.knights@uea.ac.uk
Arts and DIY 