Webinar
Online
How can socially engaged arts drive social change and empower communities to address the most pressing challenges in Global Cities?
This multi-site research and dissemination initiative aims at creating a community of practice that explores how socially engaged arts address urban issues and amplify voices in the cities of the Global South and Asia. In these cities, artists navigate complex environments, and art is often more closely linked to community activism and historical and ongoing struggles with gender inequality, identity politics, political repression, poverty, colonial legacies, and environmental justice. Socially engaged arts illuminate the experiences of marginalized urban communities, offering a platform for storytelling and community-building. It highlights the transformative role of art in tackling urban and social challenges and fostering change. In these contexts, art serves as both cultural expression and a powerful tool for advocacy, activism, and community empowerment. It also emphasizes the interaction between global and local alliances, bringing the concept of “glocal” to the forefront.
Our goal is to bring together independent arts organizations, artists, and researchers who employ socially engaged arts practices for advocacy in global cities outside the West. Through a series of explorative, creative and collaborative activities, we aim to document global voices, discuss, and share experiences, perspectives, and knowledge, and build alliances with researchers and practitioners from diverse urban contexts across Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East.
We start this initiative with a series of webinars this Spring on April 3, 17 and May 8.
April 17th
- Matilde Cervantes Navarrete, M.Sc., member of Global Pax Collective and PhD student at Centre for Global Studies, University of Victoria, BC
- Title: Social Transformations through Arts-based and Indigenous Worldviews: Lived Experiences from Canada & Mexico
- Park Kyong Ju, Voice sculptor and representative of Salad Theatre in Seoul
- Title: Multicultural theatre and the diversification of cultural production entities
- Serkan Taycan, Artist and PhD candidate in Azrieli School of Architecture and Urbanism at Carleton University.
- Title: Between Two Seas: A Walking Trail as Activist Art in Istanbul
For more information about the initiative please visit: https://cset.ca/global-cities-and-socially-engaged-arts-initiative/
Deniz Ünsal, PhD. School of Communication and Culture, Royal Roads University and
Taiwo Afolabi, PhD. Centre for Socially Engaged Theatre, University of Regina