Professor Fay Hield (University of Sheffield): 'Access Folk: A Participatory and Action Research Approach'
To address issues of narrow demographic engagement and participation decline, Access Folk are implementing participatory and action research methods to explore the folk music scene in England. We are half way through this five year UKRI funded project. This seminar will introduce the rationale of the study and our approaches to exploring the issues and embedding the findings within the community. Several novel methods have been designed for this context and the benefits and constraints of these will be discussed alongside our chosen formats for outputs.
Professor Fay Hield is undertaking a UKRI funded Future Leaders fellowship to investigate ways to increase and diversify participation in folk singing in England. She has been an academic at University of Sheffield since 2010, specialising in the fields of Ethnomusicology and Music Management. Alongside, she is a professional performer on the English folk scene and director of community folk arts organisation, Soundpost.