Radical Listening Week 2025: Towards a Charter for Equity
Event: Lunchtime Podcast - Recruitment Practices
When: Friday 20th June 2025
Where: Online - YouTube
Time: 12pm - 1pm
About the Podcast
Hosted by Dr Lucy Lopez (Charter for Equity Researcher)
Contributors: Nikki Riggon, Tina Hofman, Hazel Sealeaf
This session draws on the Charter for Equity findings on exclusion in hiring and limited access to opportunity, we challenge who gets in and how.
We ask: what if recruitment was led by values, not credentials?
It supports the Charter’s push for sector-wide recruitment reform, co-designed with those most impacted by inequality.
This event is part of Radical Listening Week 2025. Expect provocation, collaboration, and a shift away from extractive consultations.
What is Radical Listening?
Radical Listening is rooted in the belief that power needs to be rebalanced across the cultural sector. It centres the voices and priorities of people most excluded from influence. Listening is a verb. It is about redefining whose realities shape the future of our work.
Radical Listening Week 2025: Towards a Charter for Equity
Radical Listening Week brings together cultural workers, freelancers, organisations, and communities across the West Midlands to explore what equity looks like in practice.
Through conversation, reflection, and shared provocation, we’ll explore key themes from the Charter for Equity research by Dr. Lucy Lopez. Together, we’re building towards a framework that centres lived experience, challenges structural inequality, and supports long-term change. This is a space to listen with intention and act collectively towards a more equitable cultural sector in the West Midlands.
Radical Listening Week is part of Culture Central’s Inclusive Network, a co-created programme that highlights the voices, insights, and needs of creatives from traditionally excluded backgrounds.
Host
Dr Lucy Lopez is an interdependent curator, writer and researcher. Currently she is Curator of Radar, a programme of commissions connected to research at Loughborough University, where she is working with artists Nat Raha, Helene Kazan and Dani Admiss & Luiza Prado as part of the programme Rehearsals (for a world we could live in). She is also a custodian of Birmingham Resistance Library, and is conducting research to inform a Charter for Equity forthe West Midlands Culture Sector, lead by Culture Central. Her PhD, titled Instituting with Care: how might art institutions care well? examines what it would mean to put practices of care at the forefront of institutional and infrastructural thinking. She was previously Guest Curator at Ormston House, Limerick, with the exhibition Get Well Soon (prologue). Together with Alba Colomo, she is co-founder of la Sala, a small ecofeminist art organisation. Her work draws on feminisms, practices of care, instituting, and the politics of work. She has curated exhibitions at organisations including Grand Union, Eastside Projects, and BALTIC, and she was previously Curator of Exhibitions and Research at BAK – basis voor actuele kunst. In 2014 she co-founded the London-based art organisation Jupiter Woods. She holds an MFA in Curating from Goldsmiths, University of London, and a PhD from Birmingham School of Art. She has lectured, taught, and published internationally.
Contributors
Nikki Riggon is a West Midlands-based Creative Producer, UK Music Futures Board member, and Head of Programme at Punch Records, leading live touring and artist development with a strong focus on diversity and inclusion. With 15+ years in music, arts, and entertainment, she has spearheaded programmes like Gallery37, Write the Future (META), and LEGACY - Birmingham’s first large scale Grime & Orchestra collaboration with CBSO & Punch Records.
Tina Hofman is a theatremaker, creative producer/collaborator and an academic. In Tina’s words: “I was born in a country that ceased to exist, came to UK, and has spent 25 years being ‘in-between’: living, working, relating to different geographical and made-up spaces. In my work I create and support experiences and conversation across genres and practices.” Tina is creative co-director of Notnow Collective, Origins artist at Birmingham Hippodrome, Resident Creative at Curve Theatre and Live & Local, and a co-founder of Migrants in Theatre. Funded by AHRC at University of Birmingham, Tina is researching the representation of artists from Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe in England.
Hazel Sealeaf is an artist, researcher and producer from Birmingham, who supports community and creative organisations; they facilitate, fundraise, evaluate, build digital resources, create events and design systems for growing teams. Hazel’s focus is supporting queer and disabled people to thrive, and collaborating with aligned organisers, artists and communities to understand the threats facing those communities.
Hazel produced the Disability Justice Labs with MAIA, researched Learning Disability Leadership with Spectra, and held spaces for queer memory, grief and conflict through Softly Spoken.