North East England-based writer and founder of Thinking Practice, Mark Robinson has been widely influential with his writings about adaptive resilience in the cultural sector. He will provide a provocation that sets out why he has come to to see frameworks of adaptive resilience as crucial to coping with and resisting the negative aspects of what he has called 'contradictory times’: times of opportunity for co-creation and community voices in culture, but also times of fragmentation, inequality and privatization. The COVID-19 virus has added another layer to these times, but the need for adaptive resilience, and the opportunity for building it together may be strengthened by responses to it. Mark will argue for resilience as an act of resistance, and for the benefits of sticking around through this time of release and potential redesign.
Mark Robinson founded Thinking Practice in 2010, through which he writes, facilitates, coaches and advises across the cultural sector in the UK. His most recent publication is Multiplying Leadership in Creative Communities, commissioned by Creative People and Places. He is the author of influential papers such as Making Adaptive Resilience Real and The Role of Diversity in Building Adaptive Resilience (co-written with Tony Nwachukwu) and has given keynotes, talks and workshops across the UK and internationally. Mark was previously Executive Director of Arts Council England, North East and Director of Cleveland Arts. He has also run festivals, poetry publishers, community arts programmes and worked in community education. Before all that, he had a successful career as a vegetarian Head Chef. Mark is also a widely anthologised, translated and award-winning poet whose Selected Poems, How I Learned to Sing was published by Smokestack in 2013. (He is proud to share a publisher, therefore, with Victor Jara.)
8 Sep, 2020
Tue - 11 h
Free streaming through our Youtube channel or Facebook @centrogam.
Speaking session in English with simultaneous translation to Spanish.