Abstract

Home Turf is a collaborative storytelling project exploring identity, masculinity and self-expression with working-class young men through football and fashion. The project demonstrates how local community, students and academic, technical and community engagement staff can collaborate on socially purposeful creative work. This pop-up brings the stories and outputs of the exhibition to CEdFest, including fashion photography and analogue photography alongside excerpts from recorded conversations with the young men who co-created it. Home Turf offers a case study in cross-disciplinary, community-led creative education and an invitation to consider whose voices we make space for and how.

Session and activities

Home Turf is the creative vision of Ashton Jones-Frame, a stylist whose practice is rooted in his working-class, multicultural East London upbringing and a lifelong relationship with football and fashion. Joining LCF through the Creative Newham Cultural Producers Programme and connecting with the Portal Centre for Social Impact, Ashton proposed a collaborative storytelling project exploring race, class, masculinity and vulnerability, using football and fashion to reach young men who rarely open up, and are rarely asked to. 

What began as Ashton’s proposal became a college-wide collaboration. Interdisciplinary MA students undertaking the Fashion Practices for Social Change elective co-created work with the young men local to East Bank, while BA (Hons) Critical Practices in Fashion Media students produced the exhibition launch event. The project brought together the Portal Centre with the Kit Room & Studios and Print Studio & Darkrooms for the first time, exploring new ways of collaborating between community engagement and technical teams, and new ways of working with multiple student disciplines and courses on a live brief. 

We propose to bring a selection of the exhibition to CEdFest as a pop-up. The work includes fashion photography shot in the LCF studios and on the football pitches of Hackney Marshes, alongside analogue photography and excerpts from the recorded conversations that sit at the heart of the project. 

Visitors are invited to engage with the work, encountering the stories of six working-class young men from East London through photography and their own words. These young men have stories worth telling, and worth listening to. 

The team who delivered the project will be available throughout to talk about the work, the process and the collaboration behind it, opening up conversations about how community, students and colleagues across the college can come together around a shared social purpose in creative education.