The University of Local Knowledge

The University of Local Knowledge (ULK) is an interdisciplinary project tackling the challenges of understanding and supporting local communities. Our team works across institutions, institutes, community hubs and public centres across the Bristol area of the UK. Knowle West in Bristol is one of the most deprived urban areas in the UK and has one of the lowest take up rates of higher education. The Knowle West Media Centre (KWMC) is embedded within this community and is involved in a variety of projects to help sustain, support and mobilise its population. The ULK is a community project that celebrates local skills and knowledge, helping community members to value and spread their knowledge. Working with US artist Suzanne Lacy, KWMC has developed some 900 video classes in which residents share expertise and co-construct knowledge through events and performances. The funded ULK project is studying the deployment and use of technologies and techniques to collaboratively develop knowledge to enhance our understanding of the relationships between physical and digital communities. We deliberately capture skills in a university-like structure in order to teach and publicise to others within and beyond the community, and to provoke questions about the nature and performance of knowledge and ways of knowing across communities. We are building online systems through which further classes can be added, and pedagogic structures can be changed by contributors via a range of crowd-sourcing methods. In this workshop, members of the team with discuss the project from their different positional perspectives and introduce the audience to the online tool. The team will be particularly interested in receiving feedback from audience about the transferability and usability of our model within different communities.