Dr Cara Courage
Co-Founder/conference Organiser
Dr Cara Courage, Culture, Communities & Place Consultant, has dedicated her career to championing the transformative power of art in communities, working alongside artists and residents to create meaningful change through cultural participation. Cara’s most recent project is ‘Trauma-Informed Placemaking’, with Dr Anita McKeown, a research platform and textbook (Routledge, 2024). Cara is Editor and Convenor of The Routledge Handbook of Placemaking (Routledge, 2021); Co-Editor of Creative Placemaking and Beyond (Routledge, 2018); and author of Arts in Place: The Arts, the Urban and Social Practice (Routledge, 2017).
Cara has been listening to The Archers for around 20 years and grew up with the programme ‘always on’ at her grandmothers farm on Exmoor. She talks about the pleasure and plain of her Archers fandom in a talk My BDSM relationship with The Archers (listen to it here.)
Dr Nicola Headlam
Co-Founder
Dr Headlam is a Policy Fellow at the University of Birmingham’s LPIP (Leadership for Place-based Innovation and Policy) and the host of Placecast, a new podcast launched in 2025 spotlighting cutting-edge thinking in place research and leadership. With over 20 years’ experience across the multi-helix innovation system - spanning central and local government, civil society, academia, and industry - Dr Headlam brings a deeply interdisciplinary perspective to the challenges and opportunities facing places today. Her expertise lies in urban and regional economic development, the role of government in making and shaping place, and using data and evidence to drive transformation. Nic has also worked extensively on the spatial consequences of public policy, exploring the critical intersection between governance, leadership, and infrastructure delivery.
These social and spatial concerns bleed into her engagement with The Archers and she also works as the self-appointed network analyst for Ambridge, with forensic attention paid to the interactions within the clans of the village and the ways in which intergenerational capital is protected and transferred over time. She is often found trying to ensure that the Academic Archers Facebook group remains curious, generous and joyful in tone and is working on a new project looking at the 5-day micro-seasons which can be observed in the natural world.
The Acdemic Archers Conference Committee
Cara is most wonderfully supported in the year-round running of the conference by Helen Burrows, Louise Gillies, Nicola Maxfield and Sarah Kate Merry.
All time on Academic Archers is given on a voluntary basis and support from others is given in-kind, and gratefully received.