Reflections on Social Glue: Culture as Catalyst in a Fractured World
- Frazer Macdonald Hay
- 21 hours ago
- 4 min read
Reflections on Social Glue: Culture as Catalyst in a Fractured World
Scottish Parliament Cross-Party Group on Culture and Communities – 4 June 2025
Written by #FrazerMacdonaldHay
On Wednesday evening, I had the privilege of attending Social Glue, an evocative and timely event convened by the Scottish Parliament’s Cross-Party Group on Culture and Communities. Chaired with warmth and openness by Foysol Choudhury MSP and orchestrated with care and insight by Kathryn Welch, Director of Culture Counts, the event brought together practitioners, policymakers, and researchers to consider the vital, often invisible role that cultural institutions play in addressing social division, polarization, isolation, and the rise of extremist voices.
The setting—one of Holyrood’s ground floor committee rooms—became, for two hours, a space of shared inquiry and creative resonance. The evening opened with a powerful performance by Katharine Macfarlane. Her poem “Welcome, to The Library” was a beautifully observed, gently humorous and deeply moving reflection on the life of libraries, a fitting prelude to the theme of culture as the connective tissue of society.
Richard Bellingham followed with a sweeping and hopeful account of the future of cities. Drawing from Cumbernauld to Singapore and back to Edinburgh, he explored the potentials and pitfalls of urban life: cities as joyfully messy, layered systems where culture, infrastructure, and human aspiration intersect. His reflections reminded us that the way we design and sustain urban spaces directly affects our ability to live together, to feel safe, and to belong.
Éadaoín Lynch then shared findings from the Scottish Book Trust’s recent report on public libraries, underscoring their quiet but essential role as safe places, providers of digital and educational access, and anchors of community trust. Her reminder that 97 libraries have closed in Scotland over 25 years was sobering. It called into question our collective priorities in safeguarding the spaces that support the most vulnerable, including the elderly, migrants, youth, and people navigating structural hardship.
Giulia Gregnanin’s presentation on the work of Timespan Museum in Helmsdale offered a rural counterpoint, exploring how museums can interrogate power, identity, and memory. Her community-rooted approach demonstrated how heritage institutions can challenge normative narratives and make space for voices historically excluded from the mainstream cultural record.
What followed was a rich discussion on success, failure, youth participation, and how others interpret the idea of “social glue.” It was a phrase that began to stretch under the weight of so many meanings, and rightly so.
For me, attending Social Glue brought into sharp relief my own work in places where the glue has been deliberately unstuck—where violence, displacement, and tyranny have fractured the bonds that allow societies to function. I thought of the university library in Mosul, destroyed by ISIS not as a strategic military target, but as a cultural wound. A calculated attack on collective knowledge, memory, and the shared spaces that allow communities to imagine futures. And I thought too of the quiet acts of solidarity that followed, libraries around the world donating books to restock Mosul’s shelves. The rebuilding of not just infrastructure, but of hope and social resilience.
From this perspective, libraries are not simply buildings filled with books. They are dynamic, democratized places of identity formation. Unlike museums—which, as Giulia noted, often operate through curatorial selection—libraries allow for multiplicity, contradiction, and co-authorship. They offer people the tools to build their own narratives, on their own terms. And that, in my view, makes them particularly potent catalysts for social glue.
Because that’s what cultural institutions are, not the glue itself, but the activators. All glue requires a catalyst: pressure, heat, time, or chemistry. Museums, libraries, theatres, community halls, they don’t contain social cohesion, but they foster the conditions in which it can set. The better the catalyst, the stronger the bond.
So, what is social glue? It is, perhaps, our collective capacity to hold and be held. A trauma-informed substance. It is made up of ideas, traditions, aspirations, and habits of care. It’s a language of belonging and difference. It protects the vulnerable, mitigates violence, and makes us more resilient. But like any adhesive, it has its limits. Once broken, the bond is rarely restored in its original form, it must be re-mixed, re-applied, and shared across all stakeholders: you and I, us and them, old and new.
Social glue is often elusive and invisible until it’s lost. And yet, it lives in our everyday, the bus route, the park bench, the corner library, the casual greeting between neighbours. These ordinary elements of life, so easily dismissed as background noise, are in fact the very terrain of cohesion. We must steward them with care, acknowledge their fragility, and protect the catalysts that keep them sticky.
On the train home, I found myself wondering: is social glue part of our “imagined community”? That imagined sense of collective belonging Benedict Anderson described, made up not just of flags and anthems, but of shared spaces, habits, and histories. If so, then culture—in all its forms—is not just a mirror, but a mender. Not just reflection, but repair.
is Social Glue a part of our Imagined Community.
We navigate our lives blissfully unaware of our every day and yet it is important to give it stewardship, and acknowledgement and safeguard its glue and the glue’s catalysts. You can read more about this idea here
