Going Public is a book project and interactive project, bringing together interviews and short videos with over 30 practitioners using interdisciplinary methodologies founded on collaboration, transparency and shared authority to explore the social, political, and aesthetic dimensions of contemporary international public art practice.
The Book
Going Public: The Art of Participatory Practice responds to the urgent need to expand current thinking on what it means to co-create and to actively involve the public in research. New technologies, platforms, and methods are challenging community-engaged artists, academics, and media makers to rethink their approaches to collaboration. The book offers insights into long-standing concerns around voice, aesthetics, appropriation, privilege, power dynamics, and the ethics of participation. The authors provide an overview of community-engaged practices and present case studies that grapple with issues of class struggle, gentrification, violence against women, and Indigenous rights. What are the ethics of, and expectations for, social impact? This is a resource for students and researchers in theatre, communications, history, education, sociology, and anthropology, as well as practitioners interested in collaborative approaches to performance, documentary media, and oral history.
Order
https://www.ubcpress.ca/going-public
Back Story
We (Ted, Steve and Liz) worked together for seven years on the Montreal Life Stories project and our longstanding collaboration deeply informed our ongoing commitment to participatory processes in research, documentary, and theatre. As a result we began a series of conversations called “Out of the Box”, with our colleague Erica Lehrer of CEREV (Centre for Ethnographic Research and Exhibition), and sponsored by Concordia University.
For us, going public means far more than exploring the potential of new technologies and finding new audiences for our work – it means redefining the creative and research process itself and raises a series of questions; How can university-based researchers, artists and practitioners collaborate effectively and use technological innovations to reach larger publics or make a deeper impact? How do we include a wider circle in the conversation? How do, and how might, oral history, new media and community-engaged arts contribute to public knowledge and to healthy and sustainable relationships, organizations, institutions, communities, schools, and neighbourhoods? How can we transform our creative and intellectual work into public scholarship?
Credits
This project would not be possible without the financial support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, Concordia University, the Canada Research Chairs Programme and the support of the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling. We would also like to acknowledge the participation of Erica Lehrer, during the initial phase of this project, and the Scottish Oral History Centre in Glasgow. We would especially like to thank all of the individuals we had the pleasure of interviewing throughout this process!
