Nottingham Playhouse: an analysis of its community engagement
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis provides a detailed analysis of the community engagement activities of Nottingham Playhouse (NP), which has previously been unrecorded and unexplored for its implications for the theatre’s current and future community work. A mixed methodological approach interweaves semi-structured oral history interviews, participant observations, and archival research with secondary reading. The thesis is organised according to two chapters. Racial and Ethnic Diversity at Nottingham Playhouse identifies historical moments of progress in addressing and developing inclusivity and makes them visible by analysing them as case studies that exemplify the extent to which NP engaged with global majority communities between 1978 and 2022. It documents and analyses the Eclipse initiative (2001), Regional Black Theatre Initiative (1993) and the Black Regional Initiative in Theatre (1999) as key projects NP staff should consider and learn from. In 2020, following the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd in the midst of the COVID-19 (C-19) pandemic, like many other arts and cultural institutions, NP launched an Anti-Racism Action Plan which is considered here for its efficacy. Harnessing Change: Investigating Dynamic Shifts in Nottingham Playhouse's Community Work, 2019-2023 underlines my assertion that theatres are, and should be, considered as socio-cultural venues and analyses NP’s activities beyond its professional theatre-making and performance culture. It begins with a case study of the Coram Boy community project (2019), analysing and evidencing its relevance and impact on participants. NPs approach to the C-19 pandemic is assessed in detail through seven examples and the concepts of Hyperlocality and Mutual Aid are re-examined in the C-19 context. The chapter concludes with an analysis of the current challenges to community engagement: the UK government’s “hostile environment” in the context of NP as a Theatre of Sanctuary and the cost of living crisis (2022-2023). To operationalise the thesis a set of recommendations mapped to the chapters are offered which suggest work that NP could undertake to strengthen community engagement.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".