Arts, Culture and Community Development

by Nilanjana Premaratna (Contribution by), Jennifer Beth Spiegel (Contribution by), Fiona Whelan (Contribution by), Samson Kei Shun Wong (Contribution by), Miikka Pyykkönen (Contribution by)

Overview

How and why are arts and cultural practices meaningful to communities? Highlighting examples from Lebanon, Latin America, China, Ireland, India, Sri Lanka and beyond, this exciting book explores the relationship between the arts, culture and community development. Academics and practitioners from six continents discuss how diverse communities understand, re-imagine or seek to change personal, cultural, social, economic or political conditions while using the arts as their means and spaces of engagement. Investigating the theory and practice of ‘cultural democracy’, this book explores a range of aesthetic forms including song, music, muralism, theatre, dance, and circus arts.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781447340508
Publisher:	Bristol University Press
Publication date:	08/12/2021
Series:	Rethinking Community Development
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x (d)

About the Author

Rosie R. Meade is Lecturer in the School of Applied Social Studies at the UniversityCollege Cork, Ireland. Mae Shaw is Honorary Fellow in the Moray House School of Education and Sport at the University of Edinburgh, UK.

Table of Contents

Culture and Community Development – Introductory Essay ~ Rosie R. Meade and Mae Shaw Section 1: Making and Sharing Collective Meanings Reflections on the Decolonizing Dance Praxis of Grupo Bayano ~ Antonia Darder and Sharon Cronin The Power of Song ~ Leon Rosselson The People Awoke Awake - Observations from Beirut's Walls in the October 17 Moment ~ Arek Dakessian, Célia Hassani and Sarah Shmaitilly Muralism, Disputes, and Imaginaries of Community Resistance: Case-studies from Settlements in Santiago de Chile and Rio de Janeiro ~ Alexis Cortés, Palloma Menezes and Apoena Mano Contemporary expressions of arts and culture as protest: Consonance, dissonance, paradox and opportunities for community development? ~ Daniel H. Mutibwa Queering Community Development in DIY punk spaces ~ Kirsty Lohman and Ruth Pearce Section 2: Negotiating Practice and Policy Access to Communication as Resistance and Struggle in the 21st Century ~ Pradip Ninan Thomas Unholy Alliance or Way of the Future? The intertwinements of community development, cultural planning and cultural industries in municipal and regional cultural strategies in Finland ~ Miikka Pyykkönen Frameworks for Assessing and Reconsidering Empowerment in Community Arts ~ Samson Kei Shun Wong Maintaining a critical approach to collaborative art and youth work practice in neoliberal times ~ Fiona Whelan and Jim Lawlor The Kinaesthetics of Community: social circus, corporeal aesthetics and the balancing act of a development practice in (post)neoliberal conditions ~ Jennifer Beth Spiegel Building peaceful communities: Collaboration and co-creation through theatre ~ Nilanjana Premaratna Afterword

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"This is an important global contribution to understandings of how the arts work as critical and creative mechanisms of both community development and cultural democracy." Darlene E. Clover, University of Victoria

"This book affirms how communal arts practices and cultural knowledge can nurture the hope that a radical democracy is, indeed, possible. A must-read for cultural activists!" Astrid von Kotze, Popular Education Programme, South Africa

"Beyond the mechanistic and reductionist paradigms of community development, the volume offers a fabulous account of creative and collective endeavours of communities in rescripting the conditions of their own lives. The editors and authors must be congratulated for providing a nuanced understanding of aesthetic expressions emanating from disempowered community contexts." Pushpesh Kumar, University of Hyderabad

Editorial Reviews

"This is a very important book that can help us to be more transgressive against our present conditions. In my opinion, too many books about the arts and culture focus solely on the individual act of creation, so this volume is an exception as it emphasises collectivity." Concept

From the Publisher