Abstract
Growing networks of artists, arts-based interdisciplinary researchers, and social justice organizers are exploring how creative practices may help to shape sustainable food systems in farming communities across the world. As curatorial spaces that have been created for knowledge production, these farming communities might be seen as living museums, presenting vistas of possibilities as well as archiving practices, seeds, stories, landscapes. This paper examines advocacy from arts-based practitioners to create communities and visions for sustainable (food) futures, acknowledging also the ways in which collaboration with any social group must recognize the integrity and needs of those particular communities and the traditions and knowledge they seek to preserve and vitalize. Communication strategies that engage the use of social justice rhetoric including collective decision-making, negotiation, facilitation and mediation place the inhabitants at the center of the curation of these living museums, identifying them as “subjects of action and not as objects of intervention.”
Presenters
Alison WilliamsLecturer, Writing Program, University of California, Santa Barbara, United States Sarah Hirsch
Continuing Lecturer, Writing Program, University of California, Santa Barbara, California, United States Deborah Harris
Associate Director and Continuing Lecturer, Writing Program, University of California Santa Barbara, California, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
2023 Special Focus—Museum Transformations: Pathways to Community Engagement
KEYWORDS
Community Engagement, Advocacy, Visual Rhetoric, Curating/Curation, Alternative Museums, Access
