This collection explores the growing global recognition of creativity and the arts as vital to social movements and change. Bringing together diverse perspectives from leading academics and practitioners who investigate how creative activism is deployed, taught, and critically analysed, it delineates the key parameters of this emerging field.

Originally published as a special issue of the International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, this volume explores how researchers, educators, artists, and scholars can collaborate with, and engage young people in art, creative practice, and research to work towards social justice and political engagement. By critically interrogating the dominant discourses, cultural, and structural obstacles that we all face today, this volume explores the potential of critical arts pedagogies and community-based research projects to empower young people as agents of social change. Chapters offer nuanced analyses of the limits of arts-based social justice collaborations, and grapple with key ethical, practical, and methodological issues that can arise in creative approaches to youth participatory action research. Theoretical contributions are enhanced by Notes from the Field, which highlight prime examples of arts-based youth work occurring across North America. As a whole, the volume powerfully advocates for collaborative creative practices that facilitate young people to build power, hope, agency, and skills through creative social engagement. This volume will be of interest to scholars, researchers, postgraduate students, and scholar-practitioners involved in community- and arts-based research and education, as well as those working with marginalized youth to improve their opportunities and access to a quality education and to deepen their political participation and engagement in intergenerational partnerships aiming to increase the conditions for social justice.

This collection reflects current and nuanced discussions of the ways collaboration and participation meaningfully inform the production, study, and teaching of art with innovative and unexpected results. It illustrates how the shifting boundaries of power, position, and identity, between domains of knowledge and collaborative participants, result in new relationships. The chapters in this book share stories applicable or relevant to readers’ own classrooms, art practice, or scholarship. As such, it directly appeals to college professors of studio art and design, art history, and art education, as well as to artists, scholars, and teachers who work collaboratively. It may also draw readership from business professionals seeking critical thinkers and creative problem solvers to energize their industries. The volume will inspire conversations about the ways relationships become crucial for construction, reception and display; meaning and power; design, content, and action.

Arts for Change presents strategies and theory for teaching socially engaged art with an historical and contemporary overview of the field. The book features interviews with over thirty maverick artists/faculty from colleges and universities in the United States, Canada, and Great Britain, whose pedagogy is drawn from and informs activist arts practice. The issues these teaching artists address are provocative and diverse. Some came to this work through personal healing from injustice and trauma or by witnessing oppressions that became intolerable. Many have taught for decades, deeply influenced by social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, yet because the work is controversial, tenured positions are rare.

Performance Action looks to advance the understanding of how art activism works in practice, by unpacking the relationship between the processes and politics that lie at its heart. Focusing on the UK but situating its analysis in a global context of art activism, the book presents a range of different cases of performance-based art activism, including the anti-oil sponsorship performances of groups like Shell Out Sounds and BP or not BP?, the radical pedagogy project Shake!, the psychogeographic practice of Loiterers Resistance Movement, and the queer performances of the artist network Left Front Art. Based on participatory, ethnographic research, Performance Action brings together a wealth of first-hand accounts and interviews followed by in-depth analysis of the processes and politics of art activist practice. The book is unique in that it adopts an interdisciplinary approach that borrows concepts and theories from the fields of art history, aesthetics, anthropology, sociology and performance studies, and proposes a new framework for a better understanding of how art activism works, focusing on processes. The book argues that art activism is defined by its dual nature as aesthetic-political practice, and that this duality and the way it is manifested in different processes, from the building of a shared collective identity to the politics of participation, is key towards fully understanding what sets apart art activism from other forms of artistic and political practice. The book is aimed at both specialist and non-specialist audiences, offering an accessible and engaging way into new theoretical contributions in the field of art activism, as well as on wider subjects such as participation, collective identity, prefiguration and institutional critique.

In Creativities in Arts Education, Research and Practice: International Perspectives for the Future of Learning and Teaching, Leon de Bruin, Pamela Burnard and Susan Davis highlight innovative arts practices and practices of enquiry that activate diverse creativities and transform learning and teaching across a variety of places, spaces and settings.