Creative Activism Research Pedagogy And Practice

This collection explores the growing global recognition of creativity and the arts as vital to social movements and change. Bringing together diverse perspectives from leading academics and practitioners who investigate how creative activism is deployed, taught, and critically analysed, it delineates the key parameters of this emerging field.

Originally published as a special issue of the International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, this volume explores how researchers, educators, artists, and scholars can collaborate with, and engage young people in art, creative practice, and research to work towards social justice and political engagement. By critically interrogating the dominant discourses, cultural, and structural obstacles that we all face today, this volume explores the potential of critical arts pedagogies and community-based research projects to empower young people as agents of social change. Chapters offer nuanced analyses of the limits of arts-based social justice collaborations, and grapple with key ethical, practical, and methodological issues that can arise in creative approaches to youth participatory action research. Theoretical contributions are enhanced by Notes from the Field, which highlight prime examples of arts-based youth work occurring across North America. As a whole, the volume powerfully advocates for collaborative creative practices that facilitate young people to build power, hope, agency, and skills through creative social engagement. This volume will be of interest to scholars, researchers, postgraduate students, and scholar-practitioners involved in community- and arts-based research and education, as well as those working with marginalized youth to improve their opportunities and access to a quality education and to deepen their political participation and engagement in intergenerational partnerships aiming to increase the conditions for social justice.

Arts for Change presents strategies and theory for teaching socially engaged art with an historical and contemporary overview of the field. The book features interviews with over thirty maverick artists/faculty from colleges and universities in the United States, Canada, and Great Britain, whose pedagogy is drawn from and informs activist arts practice. The issues these teaching artists address are provocative and diverse. Some came to this work through personal healing from injustice and trauma or by witnessing oppressions that became intolerable. Many have taught for decades, deeply influenced by social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, yet because the work is controversial, tenured positions are rare.

This collection reflects current and nuanced discussions of the ways collaboration and participation meaningfully inform the production, study, and teaching of art with innovative and unexpected results. It illustrates how the shifting boundaries of power, position, and identity, between domains of knowledge and collaborative participants, result in new relationships. The chapters in this book share stories applicable or relevant to readers’ own classrooms, art practice, or scholarship. As such, it directly appeals to college professors of studio art and design, art history, and art education, as well as to artists, scholars, and teachers who work collaboratively. It may also draw readership from business professionals seeking critical thinkers and creative problem solvers to energize their industries. The volume will inspire conversations about the ways relationships become crucial for construction, reception and display; meaning and power; design, content, and action.

Performance Action looks to advance the understanding of how art activism works in practice, by unpacking the relationship between the processes and politics that lie at its heart. Focusing on the UK but situating its analysis in a global context of art activism, the book presents a range of different cases of performance-based art activism, including the anti-oil sponsorship performances of groups like Shell Out Sounds and BP or not BP?, the radical pedagogy project Shake!, the psychogeographic practice of Loiterers Resistance Movement, and the queer performances of the artist network Left Front Art. Based on participatory, ethnographic research, Performance Action brings together a wealth of first-hand accounts and interviews followed by in-depth analysis of the processes and politics of art activist practice. The book is unique in that it adopts an interdisciplinary approach that borrows concepts and theories from the fields of art history, aesthetics, anthropology, sociology and performance studies, and proposes a new framework for a better understanding of how art activism works, focusing on processes. The book argues that art activism is defined by its dual nature as aesthetic-political practice, and that this duality and the way it is manifested in different processes, from the building of a shared collective identity to the politics of participation, is key towards fully understanding what sets apart art activism from other forms of artistic and political practice. The book is aimed at both specialist and non-specialist audiences, offering an accessible and engaging way into new theoretical contributions in the field of art activism, as well as on wider subjects such as participation, collective identity, prefiguration and institutional critique.

Novelists have long been attracted to theatre. Some have pursued success on the stage, but many have sought to combine these worlds, entering theatre through their fiction, setting stages on their novels’ pages, and casting actors, directors, and playwrights as their protagonists. The Routledge Companion to Theatre-Fiction has convened an international community of scholars to explore the remarkable array of novelists from many eras and parts of the world who have created fiction from the stuff of theatre, asking what happens to theatre on the pages of novels, and what happens to novels when they collaborate with theatre. From J. W. Goethe to Louisa May Alcott, Mikhail Bulgakov, Virginia Woolf, and Margaret Atwood, some of history’s most influential novelists have written theatre-fiction, and this Companion discusses many of these figures from new angles. But it also spotlights writers who have received less critical attention, such as Dorothy Leighton, Agustín de Rojas Villandrando, Ronald Firbank, Syed Mustafa Siraj, Li Yu, and Vicente Blasco Ibañez, bringing their work into conversation with a vital field. A valuable resource for students, scholars, and admirers of both theatre and novels, The Routledge Companion to Theatre-Fiction offers a wealth of new perspectives on topics of increasing critical concern, including intermediality, theatricality, antitheatricality, mimesis, diegesis, and performativity.

This text introduces readers to definitions and examples of arts-based educational research, presents tensions and questions in the field, and provides exercises for practice. It weaves together critical essays about arts-based research in the literary, visual, and performing arts with examples of artistic products of arts-based research (arts for scholarship’s sake) that illuminate by example. Each artistic example is accompanied by a scholARTist’s statement that includes reflection on how the work of art relates to the scholar’s research interests and practices. Arts-Based Research in Education: Foundations for Practice: helps the reader understand what arts-based research is – tracing the history of the field and providing examples; includes end-of-chapter questions to engage students in practicing arts-based inquiry and to generate class discussion about the material; features a diverse range of contributors -- very established scholars in educational and social science research as well those new to the field; represents a variety of voices – scholars of color, queer and straight orientations, different ages, experience, and nationalities; and presents beautiful illustrations of visual art, data-based poems, plays, short stories, and musical scores. First-of its kind, this volume is intended as a text for arts-based inquiry, qualitative research methods in education, and related courses, and as a resource for faculty, doctoral students, and scholars across the field of social science research methods.

This work explores in detail how innovative academic activism can transform our everyday workplaces in contexts of considerable adversity. Personal essays by prominent scholars provide critical reflections on their institution-building triumphs and setbacks across a range of cultural institutions. Often adopting narrative approaches, the contributors examine how effective programmes and activities are built in varying local and national contexts within a common global regime of university management policy. Here they share experiences based on developing new undergraduate degrees, setting up research centers and postgraduate schools, editing field-shaping book series and journals, establishing international artist-in-residence programs and founding social activist networks. This book also investigates the impact of managerialism, marketization and globalization on university cultures, asking what critical cultural scholarship can do in such increasingly adversarial conditions. Experiments in Asian universities are emphasized as exemplary of what can or could be achieved in other contexts of globalized university policy. Contributors include Tony Bennett, Stephen Ching-Kiu Chan, Kuan-Hsing Chen, Douglas Crimp, Dai Jinhua, John Nguyet Erni, Josephine Ho, Koichi Iwabuchi, Tejaswini Niranjana, Wang Xiaoming, and Audrey Yue.