Since the mid-nineteenth century, cultural practice and its management have been attached to a discourse that constructs participation, in particular kinds of cultural activity, as "beneficial" to individuals on the basis that its effects have resonance beyond the cultural sphere. More recently, "leading edge" cultural practice and programmes have been based on the notion that benefit from such participation occurs via the facilitation of the active agency of participants through the making of their own meanings through co-curation and co-creation. Enlistment and involvement in, what we have termed "facilitated participation", is, in Nikolas Rose's terms, a tool of "advanced liberalism" whereby the governance of individuals operates on the basis of the governance of their "freedom", through making them self-governing subjects [Rose, N. (1999). Powers of freedom: Reframing political thought. Cambridge University Press]. In the particular case of young people living in care, we have found that the facilitation of their agency through cultural programmes is limited by an assumption that such groups' everyday cultural choices lack value and to facilitate them (and thereby their agency) would involve risk. Through a discussion of research undertaken with this group, this paper will explore how different domains of participation are understood by both the facilitators and the facilitated.

ABSTRACT:The Understanding Everyday Participation -Articulating Cultural Values (UEP) project is grounded in the belief that the current system for the support of culture promotes and privileges certain practices and activities, tastes, relationships and competences and that, crucially, this system has effects which extend outside of the cultural domain to the economic, political and social spheres. In order to challenge this dominance, UEP sets out to explore the meanings and values people attach to their 'everyday participation', with the aim of re-evaluating current understandings of cultural participation and cultural value (Miles and Gibson 2016). This article discusses UEP ethnographic research conducted within a charity shop in Manchester/ Salford. The charity shop is found to be a site fundamentally involved in the 'cultural economy', defined broadly to refer to the relations between the cultural and economic values of particular practices and institutions involved in cultural production and consumption. Existing research and theories on consumption have understood the charity shop as a place of cultural consumption, for certain subcultures that make informed or 'clever' choices regarding their identities (McRobbie 1989, Gregson and Crewe 2003). This article argues for an understanding of the charity shop as more than simply a place of consumption but as enmeshed within a set of relations between culture, economy and place which has effects in the social sphere.This research identifies a number of forms of participation, including consumption, but also extending to various production practices, volunteering and other forms of social interaction, which take place within and through the charity shop. We argue that these different types of participation are bound up in a differentially positioning cultural system which categorises people, places and values within and beyond the sphere of the charity shop.

This paper is based on a multi-sited ethnography of subjects engaged in performance-based participation – amateur theatre, community-based theatre and Carnival – in the market town of Moretonhampstead on Dartmoor in the South West of England. Given its setting, the case study examines the rural dimensions of participation and cultural value. In addition to understanding the meaning and value of performance-based participation taking place in shared communal spaces, including the parish hall and the high street, this article seeks to understand everyday participation as a fundamentally embodied and emplaced practice. Place is not simply a venue or site for performance (or any other type of) participation. Drawing on the place theory of Edward Casey, who follows the European school of phenomenology, it is argued that place is, rather, the fundamental ground of human experience: embodied subjects and places co-evolve in a dialogic process of inter-animation. The main question we ask is how rurality shapes participation and how participation re-produces material and imaginary rural spaces. A key characteristic of government funding of arts and culture in the UK is extreme inequality in the distribution of funds to the City of London compared to the rest of the UK. While the cultural ecosystems of all UK regions outside London are equally disadvantaged in this respect, economic and cultural development in the South West region exacerbates this unequal situation by focussing investment and service provision in urban hubs, leaving contrasting rural areas doubly disadvantaged. This case study argues that an idyll-ised rural imaginary re-produced in and through everyday participation is only compounded by government deficits. Furthermore, it asserts that cultural policy making concerned with the value of equality must adopt a co-ordinated approach that takes into account complex interdependencies of national, regional and local registers of place

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