The ‘Workshop Ecology’: a grounded, unifying conceptualisation of socially engaged and participatory arts practice

Venue: Baines Wing SR 1.14

Join us for the second in in our Centre Research Seminar Series, with speaker Dr Anni Raw (Impact and Innovation Project Manager, Cultural & Creative Industries Exchange).

Participatory and socially engaged community-based arts practice is at an exciting point of development. Those working in this field, both as practitioners and as observers, critics and advocates, are beginning to reclaim the 'radical' within the work: they are reconnecting with histories of landmark practice and socially and politically-engaged art movements.  They are also redoubling their efforts at fighting for the most meaningful ways of exploring, understanding and articulating their practices, and the complex effects, both subtle and dramatic, on those who engage in such activity. But this energy for articulating and validating, critiquing and evaluating the work in meaningful ways has lacked satisfactory frameworks; most of the current, collective refocussing activity arrives at shared values and principles, and statements of intent, rather than firm concepts and theories based in actual practice.

In this presentation Annie will propose such a practice-based framework, emerging from evidence of a shared, transnational articulation of the key elements of participatory arts and practice. Using the 'Workshop Ecology' approach (Raw, 2013) to understanding the practice, Annie will suggest how we can use this framework to reflect on, critique and articulate the mechanisms of participatory arts processes, and understand the multiple layers of impacts, or 'domains of change' (Wright et al, 2013) that can result from the experience.

Dr. Anni Raw has worked in community and participatory arts for almost 25 years, including an early background as singer and community musician, and specialising for the past 15 years in arts project evaluation. Now an academic researcher as well as participatory arts evaluator, she is currently Associate Fellow with Bradford University's International Centre for Participation Studies (ICPS), and Post-doctoral Research Associate with Durham University's Centre for Medical Humanities (CMH), where she completed her PhD. Her doctoral project, exploring community-based participatory arts practice, involved intensive ethnographic study with over 40 expert participatory arts practitioners across the spectrum of arts disciplines, including practitioners in the UK and in Mexico. She publishes and presents in the UK, and in Mexico.

To book a place, please email us at ccsmghinfo@leeds.ac.uk