Community in Focus
Jagiellonian University
Community-Based Research-Creation: A Proposal for Interjecting Community Making in Arts-Based Research
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session David Le Rue
In this paper, I will draw on my ongoing doctoral research to propose an inductive arts-based research method called Community-Based Research-Creation, which welcomes members of the public to engage in guided artistic making to create their own works of research-creation. Many arts-based research practices engage the public to share in the creation of meaning through interviews, artistic intervention and collaborative making. However, these projects' artistic outcomes are often realized by the artist-researcher alone. This method extends the logic, ethics and frameworks of oral history–which takes the interviewee as the expert in the research–to artist-researchers, who under the right conditions can welcome the public to create works of research-creation. I argue these conditions can be readily created in community art classrooms, where one can work with participants for prolonged periods to introduce the concepts of the research, build skills and help develop their own ideas and artistic projects responding to a given subject. Ideally, this research is less extractive, leaving participants with a fulfilling learning experience and a larger stake in the study. Using student examples in multiple mediums from my own teaching, I propose interpretive frameworks, ethics and how works might be used in a larger study, and how the manner of engagement requires an open mind on the part of the researcher to share in meaning-making. In my view, this method offers arts-based researchers a powerful option to engage communities and to diversify the perspectives and practices in the artistic component of the study.
Creating Agency - How the Intersections of Identity Help Form Inclusive Communities
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Kendra Wheeler
Artists, educators, and practitioners across artistic disciplines are working to dismantle harmful social and artistic value systems, stigmas, and hierarchies ingrained within our practices and creative outputs to form more sustainable inclusive communities. A vital step in accomplishing this requires that we recognize how our artistry works in tandem with the many intersections of our identity. Who we are as artists, educators, and practitioners is representative of social and political power relations as well as symbolic of the knowledge we have accrued from past and present experiences. Art cannot, and is not, created nor exists in a sociological vacuum. Drawing upon the contributions of thinkers such as Stuart Hall, Simon Frith and Audre Lorde, among others, the first part of this paper dissects the concepts of privilege, identity—its formation and continuous transformation—and intersectionality. Secondly, we explore how we may use these concepts to form stronger, more equitable artistic communities. While the focus of this study is to illuminate the role that the concepts of privilege, identity and intersectionality play in our practices, pedagogy, and artistry, the aim, however, is focused on agency. This agency will manifest itself in various ways such as political, social, aesthetic, and artistic. An agency where all people are affirmed, supported, and heard. Ultimately, our understanding of the intersections of identity aids in our ability to create agency within our communities. This agency will lead to the transformation of power structures and hierarchies and therefore, to the formation of sustainable inclusive communities.
Towards A Socially Engaged Curatorial Practice
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Aislinn White
In the UK, socially engaged art practices have been prominent in placemaking agendas and urban development schemas. Considering this increasing volume, and visibility, of such art in processes of urban regeneration, it is not a surprise for it to be used as an example of art instrumentalised, often against its own rhetoric, for economic gain and art-washing. Socially engaged art has held a complex position within both the contemporary global city and the artworld. The constructed narratives of place and the empowerment, and the disempowerment, of its inhabitants are often entangled in such art. In acknowledging these are problematic sites to negotiate, this paper readdresses the curatorial, as a fundamentally collaborative and dialogical praxis, to explore strategies for socially engaged art that is entangled in the changing city. By reflecting on a large-scale project in inner London, ideas for a socially engaged curatorial practice will be presented, where art projects can be co-produced with communities to create small, yet critical sites for narrative construction, discourse and exchange. These temporary sites can be conceived as 'un-curated' rather than spaces controlled by a curator as a mediator of civic and cultural engagement.
