Community arts and music, community media: cultural politics and policy in Britain since the 1960s

This chapter considers ways in which ‘community’ has been understood and constructed in arts and media movements concerned with a progressive social change agenda in Britain since the counterculture of the 1960s and early 1970s. This will help us to understand what the meanings of the term ‘community’ are in today’s cultural economy.... My view will be taken from those working in the fields of community arts, music, media over the decades, that is, from the ways in which workers and participants in these movements, primarily in Britain, have themselves understood and employed, and possibly strategically redefined, the term