Arts and Community Change: Exploring Cultural Development Policies, Practices and Dilemmas addresses the growing number of communities adopting arts and culture-based development methods to influence social change. Providing community workers and planners with strategies to develop arts policy that enriches communities and their residents, this collection critically examines the central tensions and complexities in arts policy, paying attention to issues of gentrification and stratification. Including a variety of case studies from across the United States and Canada, these success stories and best practice approaches across many media present strategies to design appropriate policy for unique populations. Edited by Max Stephenson, Jr. and A. Scott Tate of Virginia Tech, Arts and Community Change presents 10 chapters from artistic and community leaders; essential reading for students and practitioners in economic development and arts management.

How and why are arts and cultural practices meaningful to communities? Highlighting examples from Lebanon, Latin America, China, Ireland, India, Sri Lanka and beyond, this exciting book explores the relationship between the arts, culture and community development. Academics and practitioners from six continents discuss how diverse communities understand, re-imagine or seek to change personal, cultural, social, economic or political conditions while using the arts as their means and spaces of engagement. Investigating the theory and practice of ‘cultural democracy’, this book explores a range of aesthetic forms including song, music, muralism, theatre, dance, and circus arts.

Community music as a field of practice, pedagogy, and research has come of age. The past decade has witnessed an exponential growth in practices, courses, programs, and research in communities and classrooms, and within the organizations dedicated to the subject. The Oxford Handbook of Community Music gives an authoritative and comprehensive review of what has been achieved in the field to date and what might be expected in the future. This Handbook addresses community music through five focused lenses: contexts, transformations, politics, intersections, and education. It not only captures the vibrant, dynamic, and divergent approaches that now characterize the field, but also charts the new and emerging contexts, practices, pedagogies, and research approaches that will define it in the coming decades. The contributors to this Handbook outline community music's common values that center on social justice, human rights, cultural democracy, participation, and hospitality from a range of different cultural contexts and perspectives. As such, The Oxford Handbook of Community Music provides a snapshot of what has become a truly global phenomenon.

My thesis explores how critical place-based pedagogy and decolonial education strategies contribute to civic leadership through a qualitative ethnographic study of leaders and organizers who catalyze positive community change. The purpose of this study is to better understand effective grassroots leadership in public arts organizing and cultural sectors. I am a teaching artist with 4 years of experience teaching in community art practice, and my research and experience contribute to this autoethnographic study. The primary question I sought to answer was, what factors contribute to civic leadership and effective positive change in collective organizing? Following this I asked, how might teaching with decolonial methods through the lens of critical pedagogy of place inform a community arts practice? In order to answer these questions, I interviewed practitioners whose life works are exemplary examples of positive community change. These organizers included Emory Douglas, the former Minister of Culture of the Black Panther Party, Blanche Suggs-Killingworth, a representative of Neighborhood Housing Services and active founder of the North Lawndale Historical and Cultural Society, and Dr. Azure Thompson, who uses place-based approaches in community research. Over the course of one year, I collected data in many forms, including field notes and personal interviews. I transcribed conversations and wrote journal entries based on my own observations. I discovered that these dynamic leaders consider environment as more than simply “site.” They critically analyze current spatial relationships to better understand their own professional practices, operations, and codes of conduct. By recognizing their own leadership as functioning within a hierarchical structure, these leaders challenge this structure by fostering earnest and active connections to the communities they serve. There is a gap in existing research concerning the ways in which leadership methods inform community art practice in art education. By uniting decolonial methodologies and critical pedagogy of place theory in my research and analysis, my goal was to identify effective orientations toward and strategies for grassroots leadership in public arts organizing, thus providing future teaching artists and arts administrators with frameworks reflecting critically on their own agency as artists and leaders functions within larger power dynamics.