Convenors: Dr Eifiona Thomas Lane, Dr Rebecca Jones and Elen Bonner (Prifysgol Bangor University)

While the small scale of rural communities offers great opportunities for genuine community participation based on the cultural economy, rural contexts can also accentuate practical challenges due to the dispersed population, uneven skills base and limited financial resources. Whilst it is recognised that there is a rich community of practice involved in this area of creative regeneration and placemaking /maintaining there has been limited academic reflection on its local value. This session aims to facilitate knowledge sharing on such community lead creative development e.g. pub-based events, rural heritage-based projects, arts and crafts-based projects, schools and youth projects, play-based and similar projects and events such as county shows and festivals. These may include projects with diverse creative outputs and may focus on heritage interpretation, the cultural economy and community scale performances or similar. This will inform interdisciplinary cross sector good practice and contribute to supporting a more holistic appreciation and understanding of diverse creative community development processes.

The session convenors warmly welcome contributions that report and reflect on:

· Dissemination of successful and unsuccessful cultural economy-based research projects with rural communities, including responding to locally defined research questions and priorities.

· Enabling inclusive participation and engaging hard-to-reach groups in rural communities.

· Reflections on critical and theoretical perspectives on community led creative and cultural economy-based development.

The primary objectives are to facilitate the sharing of experiences and lessons between researchers and to enable knowledge exchange of good practice and effective strategies, to support the wider adoption of creative rural community focussed co-production methods.

This two-part, hybrid session will consist of 6x 15-minute presentations, plus brief Q&A, followed by a Creative Workshop session, with small group activities and plenary feedback, to discuss experiences and questions, identify good practice, lessons and conclusions, and consider follow-on activity.

If you would like to present a paper, please send contact details and abstracts to Dr Eifiona Thomas Lane (eifiona.thomaslane@bangor.ac.uk) by 12:00 noon on Monday 24th February 2025.