The Arts, Community and Sustainable Social Change

Dear Colleagues,

Recent decades have witnessed increasing interest in the role of the arts in stimulating economic change and in helping to create a sense of place for community residents. That same time frame has also seen the development of the field of community cultural development (CCD), a framework which has emphasized the potential role of the arts in encouraging conversations among otherwise disparate community actors concerning shared identity, social norms and common responsibilities in order to establish a common civic and social architecture for sustainable community change. To address these aims CCD practitioners have sought systematically to use arts-based strategies to identify possible shared goals among groups and individuals otherwise at odds or in conflict. In so doing, these efforts have typically sought to provide community residents opportunities to revisit their often-unspoken epistemic assumptions, [re]consider those and perhaps frame new norms and values for themselves and their relationship to their communities. This last is essential for the attainment of enduring community change. With these concerns foremost, the editors welcome a variety of empirical and theoretical contributions and analyses that explore or illumine:

• The role of arts-based strategies in establishing civic mechanisms to address endemic social or political conflict;
• The relationship between the arts and individual and social agency and social imagination;
• The ties between extant social claims and values and dominant community narratives or stories and the roles that arts-based interventions may play in highlighting those and providing space for individual and communal reflection and possible sustainable social change;
• Analyses of development, aesthetics or aesthetic theory and their implications for scholarly understanding of the above dynamics;
• Arts-based interventions that support community innovation and change;
• Explorations of examples of arts leadership that might result in sustainable social and/or political imaginaries.

Prof. Dr. Max O. Stephenson
Dr. Lyusyena Kirakosyan
Guest Editors

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• the arts and social change
• community conflict dynamics
• the arts and social imaginaries and social imagination
• individual and social agency and efficacy and the arts
• community cultural development and community change
• community innovation through the arts
• community arts