This book explores the role that arts and culture can play in supporting global international development. The book argues that arts and culture are fundamental to human development and can bring considerable positive results for helping to empower communities and provide new ways of looking at social transformation. Whilst most literature addresses culture in abstract terms, this book focuses on practice-based, collective, community-focused, sustainability-minded, and capacity-building examples of arts and development. The book draws on case studies from around the world, investigating the different ways practitioners are imagining or defining the role of arts and culture in Belize, Canada, China, Ethiopia, Guatemala, India, Kosovo, Malawi, Mexico, Peru, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Thailand, the USA, and Western Sahara refugee camps in Algeria. The book highlights the importance of situated practice, asking what questions or concerns practitioners have and inviting a dialogic sharing of resources and possibilities across different contexts. Seeking to highlight practices and conversations outside normative frameworks of understanding, this book will be a breath of fresh air to practitioners, policy makers, students, and researchers from across the fields of global development, social work, art therapy, and visual and performing arts education.

This book explores the practical delivery of participatory arts projects in international development. Bringing together an interdisciplinary group of academics, international development professionals and arts practitioners, the book engages honestly with the competing challenges faced by the different groups of people involved. Participatory arts are becoming increasingly popular in international development circles, fuelled in part by the increased accessibility of audio-visual media in the digital age, and also by the move towards participatory discourses in the wake of the UN’s Agenda 2030. The book asks: What do participatory arts projects look like in practice, and why are they used as an international development tool? How can we develop practical and sustainable development projects on the ground, localising best practice according to cultural, economic and linguistic contexts? What are the enablers of, and barriers to, successful participatory initiatives, and how can we evaluate past projects to learn and feed into future projects? Written to appeal to both academics and practitioners, this book would also be suitable for teaching on courses related to participatory development, community arts, and culture and development.

Culture is not simply an explanation of last resort, but is itself a rich, multifaceted and contested concept and set of practices that needs to be expanded, appreciated and applied in fresh ways if it is to be both valued in itself and to be of use in practical development. This innovative book places culture, specifically in the form of the arts, back at the centre of debates in development studies by introducing new ways of conceptualizing art in relation to development. The book shows how the arts and development are related in very practical ways – as means to achieve development goals through visual, dramatic, filmic and craft-inspired ways. It advocates not so much culture and development, but rather for the development of culture. Without a cultural content to economic and social transformation the problems found in much development – up-rooting of cultures, loss of art forms, languages and modes of expression and performance – may only accelerate. Paying attention to the development of the arts as the content of development helps to amend this culturally destructive process. Finally, the book argues for the value of the arts in attaining sustainable cultures, promoting poverty alleviation, encouraging self-empowerment, stimulating creativity and the social imagination, which in turn flow back into wider processes of social transformation. Discussion questions at the end of each chapter make this book ideal to help foster further thinking and debate. This book is an inspiring read for postgraduate students and researchers in the fields of development studies, cultural studies and sociology of development.

This book brings together a leading team of international experts in arts and global development to showcase effective practice and to explore how this vibrant interdisciplinary field has developed and what the latest research can teach us. Although arts play a central role in human development, and in the health and wellbeing of individuals and communities, few have attempted to comprehensively explore arts practice as global development. This Handbook first provides a theoretical framework for exploring arts and global development, before surveying a comprehensive range of art forms and development practices to explore the potential of the arts to strategically and beneficially contribute to more just and equitable conditions for communities across the globe. Stretching across the arts from theatre, dance, and music to poetry, film, and visual arts, the book covers topics as diverse as health, education, peacebuilding, livelihoods, sustainability, activism, and arts as research method in programming. The Handbook also identifies gaps in the literature, pointing towards the most pressing and promising avenues for further research over the next few years. This book will be an essential resource for any researcher, student, or practitioner wishing to understand the role of the arts in global development and in the global south more generally.

Arts and Community Change: Exploring Cultural Development Policies, Practices and Dilemmas addresses the growing number of communities adopting arts and culture-based development methods to influence social change. Providing community workers and planners with strategies to develop arts policy that enriches communities and their residents, this collection critically examines the central tensions and complexities in arts policy, paying attention to issues of gentrification and stratification. Including a variety of case studies from across the United States and Canada, these success stories and best practice approaches across many media present strategies to design appropriate policy for unique populations. Edited by Max Stephenson, Jr. and A. Scott Tate of Virginia Tech, Arts and Community Change presents 10 chapters from artistic and community leaders; essential reading for students and practitioners in economic development and arts management.

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.

Visual artists, craftspeople, musicians, and performers have been supported by the development community for at least twenty years, yet there has been little grounded and critical research into the practices and politics of that support. This new Routledge book remedies that omission and brings together varied perspectives from artists, policy-makers, and researchers working in the Pacific, Africa, Latin America, and Europe to explore the challenges and opportunities of supporting the arts in the development context. The book offers a series of grounded analyses which cover: strategies for the sustainability of arts enterprises; innovative evaluation methods; theoretical engagements with questions of art, agency, and social change; artists’ entanglements with legal and structural frameworks; processes of cultural mapping; and the artist/donor interface. The creative economy is increasingly recognized as a driver of development and this book also investigates the contribution made by the arts to the processes of international development, and considers how those processes can best be supported by development agencies. Contemporary Perspectives on Art and International Development gives scholars of Development Studies, Social and Cultural Geography, Anthropology, Cultural Policy, Cultural Studies, and Global Studies a contextually and thematically diverse range of insights into this emerging research field.