NCACE Meetup

Our Autumn Meetup will be of interest to those who would like to find out more about our second Festival of Cultural Knowledge Exchange due to take place in late-April 2026.

We held our inaugural NCACE Festival of Cultural Knowledge Exchange back in October 2022. Over the course of a week, we hosted 14 online events bringing together hundreds of people on topics including: Place-making, Culture Compacts, Decolonial Heritage Practices, Artists in the Academy and Diversity, Knowledge Exchange and Broadcasting. The festival presented a great opportunity to showcase ground-breaking cultural collaborative work being undertaken around the country, and to create much needed spaces for dialogue and debate around key themes.

We are therefore delighted to announce our plan to make the festival a biennial event. The next festival is due to take place in mid-April 2026 and will become our flagship initiative for showcasing collaborative research activities, cultural knowledge exchange and all kinds of partnerships between universities and the arts and cultural sectors. It is being conceived to:

• showcase the brilliant collaborations taking place between universities and the arts and culture sector and the transformative impacts of such work
• inspire fresh thinking about the values, scope and possibilities of cultural knowledge exchange
• contribute to current relevant policy developments
• encourage conversation, knowledge-sharing, discussion and debate as well as opportunities for further collaboration development.

The purpose of this Meetup is therefore to provide an opportunity for information exchange and discussion for those engaged in collaborative activities of all kinds between universities and the arts and culture sector who are interested in being involved. This could take the form of being part of a panel discussion or showcasing an event. We are also happy to explore platforming or otherwise supporting events that you may wish to curate that connect to the festival theme of cultural knowledge exchange.

We anticipate the festival being of interest to:

• Academics working with arts and culture sector partners, including those in the GLAM sector (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums)
• Arts and culture sector organisations, including those in the GLAM sector who are working with universities
• Research impact and knowledge exchange managers

As part of the festival, we will also be making a number of small Cultural Knowledge Exchange Future Icons awards to incentivise and reward vital work being undertaken and to support future leadership and experimentation in the field, with each award being made to a collaboration between at least one researcher and one artist or arts/cultural organisation.

Join us to hear more and get involved.