Arts And Community Change

Arts and Community Change: Exploring Cultural Development Policies, Practices and Dilemmas addresses the growing number of communities adopting arts and culture-based development methods to influence social change. Providing community workers and planners with strategies to develop arts policy that enriches communities and their residents, this collection critically examines the central tensions and complexities in arts policy, paying attention to issues of gentrification and stratification. Including a variety of case studies from across the United States and Canada, these success stories and best practice approaches across many media present strategies to design appropriate policy for unique populations. Edited by Max Stephenson, Jr. and A. Scott Tate of Virginia Tech, Arts and Community Change presents 10 chapters from artistic and community leaders; essential reading for students and practitioners in economic development and arts management.

Creative Arts in Research for Community and Cultural Change features illustrative articles describing the creative arts in research and practice within neighbourhoods, villages, and cities for community and cultural change. In these times of desperate need and ongoing unrest internationally, this collection--featuring leaders across disciplines--is a valuable source of information as well as a call for creative new approaches in contemporary research leading to action and change. The articles in this book will be of special interest to university based educators; artists and researchers; facilitators; practitioners; educators in the social sciences; social work and social justice professionals; activists and community change agents; heritage, cultural, and urban planners; healthcare professionals and public health educators; fundraisers and many others. Creative Arts in Research for Community and Cultural Change is a research book that provides firsthand insights into evolving and participatory processes unique to the CAIP, as well as a wealth of information and examples for relevant in-depth dialogue and debate.

Drawing on international examples, this book interrogates the relationship between the arts, culture and community development. Contributors from six continents, reimagine community development as they consider how aesthetic arts contribute to processes of peacebuilding, youth empowerment, participatory planning and environmental regeneration.

The field of expressive arts is closely tied to the work of therapeutic change. As well as being beneficial for the individual or small group, expressive arts therapy has the potential for a much wider impact, to inspire social action and bring about social change. The book's contributors explore the transformative power of the arts therapies in areas stricken by conflict, political unrest, poverty or natural disaster and discuss how and why expressive arts works. They look at the ways it can be used to engage community consciousness and improve social conditions whilst taking into account the issues that arise within different contexts and populations. Leading expressive arts therapy practitioners give inspiring accounts of their work, from using poetry as a tool in trauma intervention with Iraqi survivors of war and torture, to setting up storytelling workshops to aid the integration of Ethiopian Jewish immigrants in Israel. Offering visionary perspectives on the role of the arts in inspiring change at the community or social level, this is essential reading for students and practitioners of creative and expressive arts therapies, as well as psychotherapists, counsellors, artists and others working to effect social change.

Facilitating Community Research for Social Change asks: what does ethical research facilitation look like in projects that seek to move toward social change? How can scholars weave political and social justice through multiple levels of the research process? This edited collection presents chapters that investigate research facilitation in ways that specifically attempt to disrupt and challenge anti-Indigenous and anti-Black racism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, patriarchy, and sexism to work toward social change. It also explores what it means to develop facilitation practices across multiple contexts and research settings, including specific facilitation methods considered by researchers working with visual and community-based methods with Black, Indigenous, and racialized communities. The complexities of how scholars negotiate decisions within their research with people and communities have an effect not only on how researchers construct their participants and communities, but also on the overall purpose of projects, the ways their projects are shared and disseminated, and what is learned in the doing of facilitation. This book will be of great interest to both emerging and established researchers working within the social sciences. It specifically attends to diverse fields within the social sciences that include health, media studies, environmental studies, social work, sociology, education, participatory visual research methodologies, as well as the evolving field of digital humanities.

Beverly Naidus shares her passion and strategies for teaching socially engaged art, offering, as well, a short history of the field and the candid views of more than thirty colleagues. A provocative, personal look at the motivations and challenges of teaching socially engaged arts, Arts for Change overturns conventional arts pedagogy with an activist's passion for creating art that matters. How can polarized groups work together to solve social and environmental problems? How can art be used to raise consciousness? Using candid examination of her own university teaching career as well as broader social and historical perspectives, Beverly Naidus answers these questions, guiding the reader through a progression of steps to help students observe the world around them and craft artistic responses to what they see. Interviews with over 30 arts education colleagues provide additional strategies for successfully engaging students in what, to them, is most meaningful.

How and why are arts and cultural practices meaningful to communities? Highlighting examples from Lebanon, Latin America, China, Ireland, India, Sri Lanka and beyond, this exciting book explores the relationship between the arts, culture and community development. Academics and practitioners from six continents discuss how diverse communities understand, re-imagine or seek to change personal, cultural, social, economic or political conditions while using the arts as their means and spaces of engagement. Investigating the theory and practice of ‘cultural democracy’, this book explores a range of aesthetic forms including song, music, muralism, theatre, dance, and circus arts.