Situated encounters with socially engaged art in community-based design

With the increased relevance of digital technologies in civil life comes the challenge of how to design research for citizen engagement. Drawing from three reflexive case studies presenting socially engaged arts (SEA) projects, we describe how, as artists, collaborators and researchers, we engaged in socially inclusive community-based projects. We argue that our roles required us to be both flexible and to adopt critical openness in practices of collaborative social facilitation. We conclude with insights to inform community-based research and enable nurturing and inclusive engagement in research design for the exploration of near-future digital technologies

Across the Bridge: A story of community, sociality, and art education

The article examines the planning, development, and outcome of an experiential learning project that brought together undergraduate studio art students and the workers of a power plant about to shut down. As one of the instructors for the project, I reflect on how our emergent pedagogical methods interfaced or conflicted with students interests, and plant employees. Principles of phenomenological research inspired my early steps to the study. However, its operative conceptual framework follows the thoughts of socially engaged artists Suzanne Lacy (2010) and Pablo Helguera (2011), guiding an analysis of the relationships between students and workers with instructors as observer-participants. I investigate how these roles and relations developed through different modalities that ranged from familial sentiments to memorializing impulses, including the industrial conditions that inspired various sensual and aesthetic student responses. I argue that the production of artwork as autonomous objects, which constituted the self-evident outcome of this community-focused experience, contributed only a transactional materiality to the project, and that the relational exchanges from which transformative experiences originated, offered unrivaled creative possibilities.Published versio

Crafting the Community

Purpose – Crafting the Community is a volunteering project run by the Textiles Department at the University of Huddersfield to promote and deliver textile craft activities to the wider community. The purpose of this paper is to explore how volunteering can be a powerful tool for enriching peoples’lives while deepening students’ textile-related competencies through placing their learning in social and communal settings. Design/methodology/approach – Initially the paper will articulate how the project has been developed to bring innovation to the forefront of the curriculum, equipping students with tools for playing a meaningful and constructive role in society. Subsequently the paper will investigate how volunteering can be used to affect real-life changes in homelessness, archival threats and rural transport. Findings – The paper uses a case study approach to realise the vision of Crafting the Community that enables students to put into practice their learning while capturing the imagination of local communities. Social implications – As active players in society, staff, students and external partners create an engaged and interrelated learning experience as an evolving process, mimicking the repetitiveness and structure of the warp and weft of cloth itself. Originality/value – In response to emerging debates concerning the value, relevance and impact of cloth on societies today the project’s aim is to share the course’s own unique philosophy and insight into the importance of a practical and creative engagement with materials and processes in the wider community. This paper would be suitable for academics that who are interested in textile culture and emergent textile volunteering and socially engaged practices in the public realm

The Exhibition and Other Learning Environments in The Millbank Atlas

The Millbank Atlas is an open-ended project that maps and remaps the neighbourhood of Millbank, an area of London, UK. This is home to Chelsea College of Arts (University of the Arts London) and our course, BA (Hons) Interior and Spatial Design, which has anchored the Atlas since 2016. We offer the following reflections as tutors on this course and co-researchers on the Atlas, along with our students and members of the local community. Central to this discussion is the kind of learning journey enabled by this type of project, and how it benefits from being distributed across cultural, social, geographical, discursive, and other environments. This raises fundamental questions for teaching and learning, especially the potential to complicate normative assumptions in higher education about where knowledge is produced and who learns from whom

Interlocutrix

The research I performed during the MAA program was focused on establishing a theoretical framework for creative and collaborative participation, using dialogue and encounter in place-specific contexts. I discuss the development of this methodology through a narrative progression of four artworks. Performed over the course of the program, my practice-based research brought forward themes and questions related to institutional, public and social spaces as sites for dialogue and participation. For the graduate project, Archive Encounters, I worked with five community members inside the archive and collections of a regional social history museum. These individuals were associated with the Campbell River Arts Council in various ways, involved in public art, writing, education and community organization in the local area. In the archives, I played the role of interlocutrix to open up a space of dialogue with my participatory audience, responsive to each individual’s living archive of memory. The interlocutrix is the feminine form of interlocutor, a theatrical term for one who initiates dialogue with an audience. Inside the collections room, the audience/participants were given access to the artifacts in storage and a projecting digital camera. Each person used the tool to capture and project a series of images onto the artifacts. Encountering personal and collective narratives in the process, we played with the surfaces of memory and form, exploring shifting and contingent meaning. The projections were documented, resulting in a collection of digital images that formed a secondary body of work. To support dialogical and participatory aesthetics with an audience, I look to the critical theories of Paulo Freire (dialogue) Grant Kester (dialogical aesthetics), and Pablo Helguera (participation). Doreen Massey, Michel DeCerteau and Henri Lefevbre informed the development of a critical framework when working with the elements of space and place in an artwork. The writing of Liza Graziose Corrin informed a dialogical methodology for my artistic research performed inside the contemporaneous museum

A Review of the "Digital Turn" in the New Literacy Studies

Digital communication has transformed literacy practices and assumed great importance in the functioning of workplace, recreational, and community contexts. This article reviews a decade of empirical work of the New Literacy Studies, identifying the shift toward research of digital literacy applications. The article engages with the central theoretical, methodological, and pragmatic challenges in the tradition of New Literacy Studies, while highlighting the distinctive trends in the digital strand. It identifies common patterns across new literacy practices through cross-comparisons of ethnographic research in digital media environments. It examines ways in which this research is taking into account power and pedagogy in normative contexts of literacy learning using the new media. Recommendations are given to strengthen the links between New Literacy Studies research and literacy curriculum, assessment, and accountability in the 21st century

Blue space as caring space – water and the cultivation of care in social and environmental practice

This paper studies three sites or ‘landscapes of care’ in Leeds, Bristol and London where water and associated built and natural environments are used to co-construct and facilitate forms of social and environmental care. Our research narrates the ways in which blue spaces are cultivated for the production of particular forms of caring bodies and sensibilities. Interpreting care as both a doing (caring for) and emotion (caring about), we draw attention to the diverse practices and distributed nature of care in these environments. Our paper has three main insights. First, we draw attention to the role of water as both a material and site of care. Second, we identify a range of more-than-human benefits associated with blue spaces and how these emerge via collaborative, non-linear and reciprocal forms of care. Third, we argue that by understanding how care works in everyday social practice, new forms of ecological care and pro-environmental ways of living with the world can emerge

The Right to the Sustainable Smart City

Environmental concerns have driven an interest in sustainable smart cities, through the monitoring and optimisation of networked infrastructures. At the same time, there are concerns about who these interventions and services are for, and who benefits. HCI researchers and designers interested in civic life have started to call for the democratisation of urban space through resistance and political action to challenge state and corporate claims. This paper contributes to an emerging body of work that seeks to involve citizens in the design of sustainable smart cities, particularly in the context of marginalised and culturally diverse urban communities. We present a study involving co- designing Internet of Things with urban agricultural communities and discuss three ways in which design can participate in the right to the sustainable smart city through designing for the commons, care, and biocultural diversity

Troubling futures: can participatory design research provide a generative anthropology for the 21st century?

This essay argues there is value in considering participatory design as a form of generative anthropology at a time when we recognise that we need not only to understand cultures but to change them towards sustainable living. Holding up the democratically-oriented practices of some participatory design research to definitions of anthropology allows the essay to explore the role of intervention in social process. And, challenging definitional boundaries, the essay examines design as a participatory tool for cultural change, creating and interogating futures (and the idea of futures). In analysing how designing moves towards change in the world, the essay brings together design research and concepts from anthropology to help us better understand and operationalise our interventions and pursue them in a fair and sustainable manner