Keele Management School Publications | Page 3

Keele Management School News 02 Two of the key events in the CASIC calendar in recent months have been the community food festival in June and the international CASIC launch in October. The ‘Local Food, Local Plates, Local People’ food festival brought CASIC’s knowledge to benefit the community close to home at Keele. Focussing on providing emergency food for local people in crisis, a number of community groups who work in this area took part in the event including urban gardening project, Status Grow, community bakery Bread in Common, Yoggi Delicatessen and New Vic Borderlines, an award-winning initiative which uses theatre in social contexts and is a founding partner of CASIC. CASIC‘s international launch at Keele Hall celebrated the ground-breaking work undertaken by the group so far, with a number of high-profile speakers including AHRC Associate Director Gary Grubb, who shared his vision of CASIC’s future prospects for creative, cross-disciplinary and community co-produced research. Dr Lai Yong Tan, Director of Outreach and Community Engagement at the College of Alice & Peter Tan (CAPT), NUS, shared his experience of community engagement in the Yunnan Province where he has spent 15 years training and educating community doctors in very remote villages. Dr Aki Koponen, Director of the Finnish Centre for Collaborative Research at the University of Turku, spoke about the significance of the relationship between his centre and CASIC. Participants also had the opportunity to experience the CASIC exhibition held in the Chancellor’s Building and curated by Kerry Jones, Keele’s Arts Officer. The exhibition, entitled ‘Look and look again’ comprised installations, film, music and photographs that celebrate the creativity and ground-breaking nature of the knowledge co-produced in collaborative research by CASIC academics and community partners. Images show the local community enjoying Local Food, Local Plates, Local People at Middleport Pottery.