Remaking Society will be: 1) Working with local partners in demonstrating and assessing participatory cultural activities in four contrasting contexts of deprivation - Bradford, Glasgow, Fraserburgh and Newcastle. 2) Using these four pilots to generate new forms of evidence about the lived experience of poverty and exclusion. 3) Creating opportunities for marginalised and less visible sections of society to communicate with wider audiences, including policy-makers. In this project, the concept of community is not restricted to communitarian accounts of 'a group of people in a given place', or as a site of consensus and constructed oneness based on social categories such as race, class, gender or location. Ours is a dynamic model in which community formation is seen as a continual re-negotiation of co-existence and interdependence, not confined by place, as illustrated by the thirty years of pioneering work by Southall Black Sisters. Questions about how communities conduct these negotiations become particularly important now, at a time of economic crisis, when resources are scarce and stress levels among vulnerable individuals are high. The study will make critical connections between our understanding of community performance and participatory process across academic fields - including conflict resolution, cultural geography, public health, social psychology and sociology. It will allow a re-examination of inter-disciplinary concepts of community through arts and media practices. Belonging to a community is critical to a sense of wellbeing for individuals and families, particularly significant for those who live on the breadline. The second element of Remaking Society is the generation of narrative evidence on the cultural dimensions of poverty and social exclusion. It will add a unique inter-disciplinary arts and humanities perspective to the ESRC's national study, Poverty and Social Exclusion in the UK (www.poverty.ac.uk). Running until 2013, it is the UK's largest ever research project on the impact of poverty.