Creating Inclusive Knowledges
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Creating Inclusive Knowledges

Christopher C. Sonn, Alison M. Baker, Christopher C. Sonn, Alison M. Baker

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eBook - ePub

Creating Inclusive Knowledges

Christopher C. Sonn, Alison M. Baker, Christopher C. Sonn, Alison M. Baker

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There has been a growing interest in the role of arts and cultural practice in tackling perennial forms of social exclusion, marginalization, and oppression. Researchers and educators from different disciplines have been collaborating with community-based agencies and community groups to forge new ways to challenge these forms of exclusion. This volume discusses how various social actors, work in interdisciplinary and cross-institutional ways to push an agenda that privileges those individuals and groups, who experience and live at the front line of social inequality, discrimination, racism and oppression. For instance, what new understandings are generated through creative, interdisciplinary, action oriented work, and the implications for social action and transformation? How are community pedagogies constructed and communicated through arts-based research, contemporary and innovative mediums such as creative performances, arts, technologies, mixed-cultural practices and social media and networking?

This collection of articles, blurs the lines between cultural practice and knowledge production, with the process and products coming in the forms of theories, creative methodologies, and a range of arts. Together these act as powerful pedagogical tools for engaging in social justice and transformative work. The contributions further highlight the multifaceted and diverse ways of creating and disseminating knowledge, and the attempts to decenter text-based ways of communicating in hopes of sharing collaborative knowledge beyond the academy and engaging the 'public'. This volume was originally published as a special issue of the International Journal of Inclusive Education.

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Publisher
Routledge
Year
2019
ISBN
9781351348508
Edition
1

Creating inclusive knowledges: exploring the transformative potential of arts and cultural practice

Christopher Sonn and Alison Baker
Arts and cultural practice are gaining attention in numerous disciplines and sectors as a vehicle for community building, and to promote wellbeing and social change. In this article we overview the links between community and liberation psychologies, community arts, and public pedagogy. We put forward the notion of community pedagogies to capture where these areas intersect. The different contributions that make up this special issue are examples of the similarities and divergences in the mobilisation of arts and cultural practices across different countries and in relation to different issues. Community pedagogies seek to challenge oppression, marginalisation and social exclusion and it draws from diverse critical epistemological and methodological tools, is participatory, and guided by relational ethics.
In numerous countries, researchers and educators from different disciplines have been collaborating with community-based agencies and community groups to forge new ways to tackle perennial forms of social exclusion, marginalisation, and oppression. In some areas, there has been a growing interest in the role of arts and cultural practice in tackling these forms of exclusion. For example, the special issue edited by Bell and Desai (2011) connects arts practice with social justice in the field of education. In community psychology, Stein and Faigan (2015) also explore how arts and community-based research can be combined to promote social justice and empowerment agendas in a number of countries with diverse groups in both educational and community settings. The interest in arts and arts practice is nothing new. However, the linkages and collaborations people are forming across disciplines, sectors, and communities, which specifically mobilise arts and arts practices for community building, mental health promotion, and enhancement of educational outcomes, in our view, represent a resurgent or revitalised engagement with arts and culture.

Community and liberation psychologies

The editors are researchers based in community psychology within a broader framework of liberation-oriented approaches (Montero 2004), and have been working alongside community-based agencies that use arts practice in different ways to promote social inclusion, empowerment, and wellbeing of individuals and groups. Our work has spanned across a number of contexts and has been in collaboration with diverse populations, particularly those stigmatised and minoritised along dimensions such as race, gender, age, and social class. Community psychology is explicitly committed to promoting empowerment and building on the strengths of communities as part of this goal (Rappaport 1977). Community psychology, like liberation psychology, emphasises developing partnerships with communities situated at the margins, a stance that Martín-Baró (1994a) referred to as a preferential option for the poor, to leverage resources and co-create strategies to transform oppressive social environments and to bring about positive individual, group, and collective change (Nelson and Prilleltensky 2010). Conscientisation and consciousness-raising, which has its roots in the critical pedagogy of Paolo Freire (Freire 1970, 1972), has become an important mode of praxis in community psychology as part of the tools to transform oppressive environments. It refers to the process of people developing critical awareness of themselves and their social realities and ‘supposes that persons change in the process of changing their relations with the surrounding environment and, above all, with other people' (Martín-Baró 1994b, 41, see Montero 2007, 2009).
Along with these commitments, community and liberation psychologies take the value explicit stance that is expressed in the commitment to relational or social ethics. Relational ethics emphasises our interconnectedness with each other and the importance of acknowledging, witnessing, and taking responsibility to expose and challenge exclusion and oppression (Montero 2007, 2009; Nelson and Prilleltensky 2010; Watkins and Shulman 2008). Austin (2008) noted:
If ethics is about how we should live, then it is essentially about how we should live together. Acting ethically involves more than resolving ethical dilemmas through good moral reasoning; it demands attentiveness and responsiveness to our commitments to one another, to the earth, and to all living things. (749)
This ethical commitment is anchored in ontological and epistemological foundations that view knowledge as constructed within and by social relations (Kingry-Westergaard and Kelly 2000; Montero 2007). Community psychology research and action is often characterised by the use and integration of epistemologies and methodologies from different disciplines, including inclusive research and action methodologies such as Participatory Action Research (PAR). Community psychology is not unique in this goal of liberation and transformation of oppressive social realities or in the collaborative applied approaches to research that involves agencies, communities, and multiple disciplines (see Teo 2015). However, it is from this disciplinary standpoint that we have sought to explore and generate insights into the possibilities and synergies that can and are being forged across the different areas of research and practice for social change and social inclusion, especially the intersections with community arts and cultural development (CACD) practices in educational and community settings.

Community arts and cultural development

We have been interested in the work that has been grouped as community arts, CACD, arts practice, community-based arts and cultural practices, that is, work that uses arts and cultural practices in its processes aimed at effecting change at individual and collective levels. For convenience, in this article we will use CACD and community arts interchangeably. In Australia, CACD is defined by the Australia Council for the Arts (n.d.) as:
a community-based arts practice and can engage any art form. There are many variations of how community arts and cultural development works are made, developed and shared, and as such, there is no one model. What is at the core of this practice, however, is the collaboration between professional artists and communities to create art. (para 1, lines 1–3)
Others (Goldbard 2013; Kasat 2013) have offered similar definitions highlighting that it is a collaborative process between artists, arts workers and producers, and different stakeholders, where diverse modalities of arts are used as a platform for communities to work together, express identity, and promote community wellbeing. In CACD work:
community artists, singly or in teams, use their artistic and organizing skills to serve the emancipation and development of a community, whether defined by geography (e.g. a neighborhood), a common interest (e.g. members of a union) or identity (e.g. members of an indigenous group). (Adams and Goldbard 2002, 8)
Similar to what Watkins and Shulman (2008) have highlighted as liberation art projects, CACD activities are often formed in contexts of exclusion and in response to oppressive social, political, and economic conditions. Such projects can take the form of music and dance, community radio, altars and memorials, storytelling circles, theatre practices, film and video, and the use of arts in PAR. Researchers in the field of community psychology have explored the importance of community arts projects and arts-based methods for a range of groups in a number of different contexts and countries (Stein and Faigan 2015). Recent research has identified the ways in which community arts practice can initiate social change by creating channels for participation, dialogue, and connection (Madyaningrum and Sonn 2011; Matarasso 2007). For example, CACD, as practised by the Community Arts Network Western Australia, is underpinned by important principles and values, including active participation, trust building, respect, reciprocity and self-reflection, intentional inclusivity, and ongoing learning (Kasat 2013). These values and principles inform CACD projects, such as the Voices of the Whealbelt project, which incorporated a range of different artistic media such as photography and photo-elicitation, singing and song writing, which have been used in communities in Western Australia's Wheatbelt region to promote intergroup conversations and a sense of place (Sonn, Quayle, and Kasat 2015). CACD work, broadly speaking, helps develop people's awareness of the value of arts in their lives, develop their skills and creativity, and often lays the ground work for future projects aimed at addressing common issues such as isolation and social exclusion. Another example is Artibarri, a community-based arts organisation in Barcelona, Spain, that is focused on working with young people at risk of social exclusion. The collective was officially established in 2003 and uses artistic projects for community intervention; in other words, it is concerned with advocating cultural democracy through arts practice. Artibarri uses various forms of arts practice with amateurs and professionals, while questioning those distinctions, and emphasise personal and collective creativity as a tool for social and personal transformation (Artibarri n.d., see, FernĂĄndez Carrasco, Carmona Monferrer, and Di Masso Tarditi, this issue).
With its goal of promoting social justice and social inclusion, the emphasis on collaboration and participation, and promotion of creativity, CACD has strong synergies with community and liberation psychologies. The value and effectiveness of CACD is supported by a growing body of literature identifying the individual and collective benefits of the practice across many disciplines (Daher and Haz 2011; Hamilton, Hinks, and Petticrew 2003; McHenry 2009; Stein and Faigan 2015). There has also been criticism aimed at writing that solely focuses on the instrumental outcomes of arts practice (Matarasso 1997; Mills and Brown 2004; Putland 2008; Sonn and Quayle 2013). These critiques seek to reposition arts practices ‘as experiences that produce culture’ (Abodeely et al. 2013, 514) within broader history and contexts of power relations. This focus on culture and cultural practice has been echoed by those calling for a performative social science (Gergen and Gergen 2011), decolonising methodologies (Smith 1999), and in public pedagogy (Denzin 2003; Giroux 2005; Sandlin, O'Malley, and Burdick 2011).
Viewed through a critical social constructionist lens, arts involve performativity and can be conceptualised as ways in which individuals and communities can act on the social world (Gergen and Gergen 2011, 2014), particularly through symbolic and embodied means. Community arts processes and products open up alternative ways for examining identity, community, and engaging in social change. Community arts in particular offer a mode of collective inquiry and allows for creative ways of communicating, disseminating, and translating knowledge (Gergen and Gergen 2011, 2014), which ultimately democratises research and knowledge production.

Public pedagogies

In shaping the call for this special issue, we were also motivated by some of the questions raised by Hattam and Atkinson (2006), who commented that backlash politics in Australia stifles critical reflection and critique, and as a result it is difficult to challenge racism in the public sphere. This crises has brought into:

 sharp focus the need for pedagogies that develop capacities for doubt and which work with the visceral and affective knowledges inherent in suffering, love, hate, hope and despair. Against critical pedagogy, there is still much to do to properly elaborate how we might learn to live together in societies that are marked by ever increasing cultural complexity (Torres 1998) on the one hand, and the conservative political urge to regulate identity of the other. (Hattam and Atkinson 2006, 685)
Drawing on the writing of Giroux (2004), Hattam and Atkinson (2006) expressed the vital role of a public pedagogy, one that extends beyond traditional educational settings to include both informal and everyday settings to address social exclusion. Public pedagogy is the work of:

 museums, the media, community organisations, advocacy groups, shadow ministries and government departments. Pedagogy in these sites is also, then, not solely a matter of explicit teaching, of organising and imparting information. It is also something that takes place without conscious agency or engagement, through countless banal and unexamined means, words, images and practices. (Hattam and Atkinson 2006, 685)
Giroux (2005) advanced the notion of public pedagogy as a form of cultural practice and production, which is inherently bound up with power and politics. Exploring the intersection of pedagogy and cultural studies, Giroux asserted that:
cultural studies can play an important role in producing narratives, metaphors, images, and desiring maps that exercise a powerful pedagogical force over how people think about themselves, engage with the claims of others, address questions of justice, and take up the obligations of an engaged citizenship. (2005, paragraph 30, lines 1–5)
Denzin (2003, 2009) has also offered a call to critical performance pedagogy. Performance texts can include poems, natural texts, plays, readings, ethnodramas, and so on. In his call, performance is viewed as an act of intervention, a method of resistance, and a form of critical citizenship. Performance arts pedagogy critiques the cultural practices that make and sustain oppression. Performances, according to Denzin (2003), ‘make sites of oppression visible. In the process, they affirm an oppositional politics that reasserts the value of self-determination and mutual solidarity’ (24).
Recently, Sandlin, O'Malley, and Burdick (2011) have pointed to the varied conceptions of the term and argued that public pedagogy coupled with cultural studies could provide scholars with new ways of understanding education within and outside traditional schooling. In their integrative literature review, Sandlin, O'Malley, and Burdick (2011) proposed five distinct categories of public pedagogy: (1) citizenship within and beyond schools, (2) popular culture and everyday life, (3) informal institutions and public spaces, (4) dominant cultural discourses, and (5) public intellectualism and social activism.
These different authors persuasively write about the power of public pedagogy for making visible and challenging oppression and to create alternative futures through diverse forms of education. This writing underscores the importance of critically examining the common sense and taken-for-granted understandings of self and other and of our social worlds that are produced through narratives and stories. These are stories told by people who are differently positioned in social hierarchies because of histories of colonialism and other forms of oppression along the intersecting dimensions of race, class, and gender (Fanon 1967, and we can add sexuality and ability). The stories reflect lived experiences of people with differential access to material and symbolic resources required for constructing meaningful lives in communities. Therefore, the everyday stories are sites where dynamics of power can be examined in terms of how they influence identities, subjectivities, and interpersonal and group relations (Sonn, Stevens, and Duncan 2013). Given that stories are not just reflective, but constitutive of power relations, they are also sites where power can be challenged.
In part, this special issue is in response to calls for extending the potential of public pedagogy by different authors (Bell and Desai 2011; Giroux 2005; Hattam and Atkinson 2006; S...

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