“Talkaoke is part and parcel of engagement in Pendle”

– Paul Hartley, In-Situ

The People Speak have been collaborating with In-Situ and Building Bridges for 15 years, helping the residents and stakeholders of Pendle Borough envisage a better and more connected borough of the future. As part of this ongoing project we have done a number of residencies, trained new Talkaoke hosts and produced events in the areas overlooked by the famous Pendle Hill: from Walkaoke – Talkaoke on the move, to Pendle Under The Hammer – a series of creative consultations with the residents of Colne, Nelson, Barnoldswick and Brierfield to inform the borough council’s corporate plan. Talkaoke is a regular feature of the annual Pendle Festival of Culture.

“Talkaoke helps us create the space to have challenging, difficult, fun and creative conversations with residents in Pendle. We’ve done hundreds of them in a variety of places – its mobile and flexible to fit into many scenarios. We’ve used Talkaoke in town centres, Council venues, shops, pubs, schools and colleges, outside McDonald’s and online. It’s a really effective tool for exploring all kinds of themes in our embedded work in Pendle; youth voice, climate engagement and psychology, racism, cohesion, creative careers and future of work, Covid and grief, health and wellbeing, mental health. Our ambition is to continue to train up local people who can host it within the community. It enables us to make sure our programme is relevant; we develop the ideas that come up around the table and these continually inform our practice in Pendle”

– Anna Taylor, Critical Engagement, In-Situ

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We have written a blog for our long-term collaborators In Situ on climate change, inequality and climate emotions as part of Climate Lab Pendle. In our writing we explore factors that inform people’s views and feelings about the crisis, mis and dis-information, numbness, neutrality and understanding the barriers we encounter in climate engagement work. 

Visualisation by Christopher Gerhardt at the Inside Out Pendle Talkaoke, 18th Nov 2024

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Was a project in collaboration with Manu Luksch & Mukul Patel (Ambient Information Systems) as part of the Public Voices in AI research program that ‘aims to ensure that public voices are front and centre in artificial intelligence research, development and policy’. We set out to understand and help articulate beliefs and concerns about AI held by two groups in Tower Hamlets: clients of Streets of Growth, a charity supporting vulnerable teenagers at risk of diverse harms, and older adult clients of mental health charity MIND.

What makes AI problematic as a technology is its opacity. The spread of surveillance cameras in the UK was visible to all, especially those that might have felt targeted. But how do you know you’ve been sorted by a system that exists across distant data centres, ‘somewhere in the cloud’? How can you understand its outputs when even its designers might not be able to fully explain them? And how can you discuss all of this with a neighbour when they see entirely different newsfeeds? Of course, the impact is greatest on those who are already vulnerable.

– Mukul Patel

‘A day in the life’ exercise to identify all interactions 
with technology in a typical day

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Between 22 and 25 August 2024, The People Speak team – Mikey, Margot and our multilingual host Timna – joined the University of Bielefeld, Germany as part of the public relations project Ö for the CRC1646 Linguistic Creativity in Communication. Over the next 4 years the CRC aims to investigate creativity of the German language. To combine research and public relations the project is using Talkaoke – our interactive talk show format. This year we had the opportunity to run Talkaoke in 4 different contexts: from a facilitation workshop with the Linguistic PhD students to public events in an adult education centre, a festival and at a democracy event at one of the contested public spaces in Bielefeld.

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