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WE USE STORYTELLING AS AN INSTRUMENT FOR CHANGE

About Our Work

Arc Up Australia is part of a global, but grassroots movement working across social, cultural, political and economic divides to achieve social justice through shared knowledge. It is a great way to connect with different people’s perspectives on a multitude of issues that affect us all daily.

 We work across three domains:

Projects

Podcast

Presentations

The Projects

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Our expertise is in the planning and development of intimate participatory projects. The projects we co-produce are snapshots of places and issues close to home. But our point of difference is in what we seek to understand. 

 

Designed to find the space between the official understanding of societal problems and the nuanced individual experiences of the issues at hand, our work creatively presents sociological data to explore the consequences and issues around the ideas we tend to take for granted.

 

Framed as social commentators and visionaries, everyday experts make connections between people, place and policy. They pass on these nuggets of insight to help expand the discussions important to them. Local governments, community places, cultural organisations and teachers are empowered with new ways to consider old problems. A little kitsch but always critical and ultimately, optimistic in style, our community projects create opportunities for knowledge to flow ‘up’ towards infrastructure and encourage those in positions of local authority to enact change from within.

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Arc Up projects are produced with funding sourced from small local council community grants, crowdsourcing and other independent funding pools.

The Podcast - Under Construction!

 

Our projects, have generated a collection of over 300 recorded conversations and interviews. The ARC UP podcast keeps the discussion going beyond the projects. Each episode you meet a person where we met them: in their homes, at work, at sporting matches, in cafes, pubs, on the street, in libraries, shops, at train stations and wherever else we could find them.

Each conversation offers a unique perspective, a nuanced history and an indication of the hopes and challenges people grapple with in order to succeed and sometimes, simply survive, within Australian society. 

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The style is rough, the content is compelling.

We are currently working to upload a cross section of our interviews as podcasts. In the meantime, unedited interviews are available to researchers and artists with permission. Please do not reproduce without permission, but feel free to contact us for more information about accessing unedited interviews  

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We reflect on the process

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We aim to contribute to the development of grassroots sociology and heritage practice in Australia. 

 

We cannot expect lasting social change unless innovation occurs inside the professional and governmental framework in which we operate.

 

Compact projects with little outlay in finance make great testing grounds for the exploration of questions in methodology and common ethical dilemmas in curating, ethnography, placemaking, sociology and heritage work. Just as we ask audiences to respond to the experiences of our project contributors, we critique and learn from our own experience of practice.

 

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  • City of Melbourne

  • City of Whittlesea

  • City of Moreland

  • City of Ballarat

  • Bland Shire

  • Fawkner Community House

  • Jewish Lesbian Association of Victoria

  • Griffin Speak spoken word

  • Culture Victoria

  • All The Best podcast and radio show

  • Public Records Office Victoria

  • Vietnam Veterans Association

  • Storytellers Victoria 

  • Sydney Road Street Traders

  • Save Brunswick Alliance

  • Jewish Holocaust Centre

  • Asian Australian Democracy Caucus

  • Proud to Play

  • White Night Melbourne

  • Federation Square Melbourne

  • Fawkner Library

  • Channel 31 TV

  • Storywise

  • Melbourne Metropolitan Fire Brigade

  • Brunswick historical Society

  • Museo Italiano

  • Southern Cross Residential Care (Keon Park)

  • Northcote Social Club

  • Bob Hawke Senior Citizens Centre

  • Brunswick East Primary School

  • Bonswick Street Traders

  • Anderson Road Traders 

  • Belgrave Heights Primary School

  • St Matthews Primary School Fawkner

  • St Gabriel’s Primary School Reservoir

  • Parents of Gender-Diverse Children Org. 

  • Oral History Victoria     

  • Brunswick Historical Society

  • Co. As.It, Museo Italiano

  • Southern Cross Residential Care (Keon Park)

  • Northcote Social Club

  • Bob Hawke Senior Citizens Centre

  • Brunswick East Primary School

  • Student Conservators for East Timor

  • City Library, Melbourne

  • Mercy College

  • Moreland Quilt

Past Community Partnerships Include:

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