Arts and Culture in Global Development Practice: Expression, Identity, and Empowerment 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 is geared to practitioners, policy makers, students, and researchers from across the fields of global development, social work, art therapy, and visual and performing arts education.
Disciplines reflected in the book include: anthropology, education, sociology, visual/performing arts and humanities, women’s studies, political science, and cultural studies. The work presented is more transdisciplinary than inter/multi/cross/disciplinary in that it dissolves these boundaries to understand complexities in the world and develops tools to respond through creative means that don’t necessarily situate in any one discipline. Transdisciplinarity acknowledges the commonalities and richness various disciplines bring to the whole (Marshall, 2014), bringing a participatory approach that often involves non-academics as “equal participants in the process to reach a common goal” (Ramchandani, 2017). Similarly, the authors in this book are not exclusively academically trained, nor are they necessarily explicit about their work as ‘development’ practice (most are not).
International in scope, the projects are situated in multiple geographic locations around the world: Belize, Canada, China, Kosovo, Malawi, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, United States, the Western Saharawi refugee camps in Algeria, and other locations representing multiple continents in the case of one chapter. Taken together, the chapters provide examples of global arts and cultural development practices, emphasizing the complex relational contexts of the work, as well as the guiding principles in sustaining it. Each chapter is followed by related discussion questions to prompt dialogue and creativity.
References:
Marshall, J. (2014). Transdisciplinarity and art integration: Toward a new understanding of arts-based learning across the curriculum, Studies in Art Education, 55(2) 104-127.
Ramchandani, J. (2017, January 24). What is ‘transdisciplinary’? https://blog.welearnwegrow.community/what-is-transdisciplinary-13c16eacf57d