A hands-on workbook for self-discovery through artistic expression. In this workbook, art educator and mentor Annette Luycx leads women through twelve dimensions of artistic expression from personal narrative to final exhibition. She encourages women to look inward, find inspiration in personal experiences, and generate their own themes, images and symbols, ultimately discovering what is meaningful to them and learning how to express that visually. Luycx takes women through a step-by-step process using self-reflective thinking, visualizing, journaling, and other creative practices. With twenty-four practical exercises and twelve art assignments, this book guides women in developing self-awareness and personal power through making art. Included are the first-hand experiences of three participating women, reflections about their studio process, and the impact of the workshop on their identity as they learned to trust their life experiences as sources of inspired art-making. From Art to Empowerment is an insightful, hands-on workbook that takes women on an empowering journey of self-discovery through artistic expression. “In the beginning it was difficult for me. Now I let myself. The process has become easier for me. Like I was searching for my own path. That’s why these lessons helped me. Because they revealed my way of thinking, my feeling, my path, to me.” (Anna) “I go deeper. I touch it more. There is more focus. I go to a deeper level. I saw things in myself that I hadn’t realized.” (Markella) “I learn, I learn about myself. In all that I learn I also learn about myself. About my sensitivities, my memories, my feelings.” (Tina)

Intimate partner violence leaves long-term effects. Survivors often struggle with issues of safety, self-esteem, and trusting their own ability to make healthy decisions and enter future relationships. This revolutionary treatment method uses art therapy to guide individuals through a journey of self-exploration, helping them to re-discover their confidence and grow beyond their experiences. Each sector of the Empowerment Wheel is supported by a creative project designed to help individuals examine their experience of red flags, boundaries, locus of control, relationship authenticity, self-talk, and integrated self. With this method, clients will learn to recognise the echoes of relationship abuse and begin to rebuild their self-esteem and individual sense of empowerment. Grounded in the authors' extensive experience in the field of trauma and recovery, the Empowerment Wheel provides a measured, client-directed way to guide survivors of intimate partner violence through the healing process to build a healthy, empowered future.

Outreach and engagement initiatives are crucial in promoting community development. This can be achieved through a number of methods, including avenues in the fine arts. The Handbook of Research on the Facilitation of Civic Engagement through Community Art is a comprehensive reference source for emerging perspectives on the incorporation of artistic works to facilitate improved civic engagement and social justice. Featuring innovative coverage across relevant topics, such as art education, service learning, and student engagement, this handbook is ideally designed for practitioners, artists, professionals, academics, and students interested in active citizen participation via artistic channels.

Profiles model arts-based substance abuse prevention programs for youth & communities in a variety of disciplines & settings. Highlighted programs include: Tuscon's Project Choli & Old Pascua Youth Artists; San Francisco's Vietnamese Youth Dev. Center Peer Resource Program; Bronx Council on the Arts, WritersCorp; CHIL'ART Playwrights Program of New Brunswick, N.J.; Little Rock's CornerStone Project NETworks Center; Chicago's Music Theater Workshop Under Pressure series; Iowa City's United Action for Youth Synthesis Arts Workshop; & Teen Resource Project/New Visions/Nueva Visiones Theater of Holyoke, MA.

There has been a growing interest in the role of arts and cultural practice in tackling perennial forms of social exclusion, marginalization, and oppression. Researchers and educators from different disciplines have been collaborating with community-based agencies and community groups to forge new ways to challenge these forms of exclusion. This volume discusses how various social actors, work in interdisciplinary and cross-institutional ways to push an agenda that privileges those individuals and groups, who experience and live at the front line of social inequality, discrimination, racism and oppression. For instance, what new understandings are generated through creative, interdisciplinary, action oriented work, and the implications for social action and transformation? How are community pedagogies constructed and communicated through arts-based research, contemporary and innovative mediums such as creative performances, arts, technologies, mixed-cultural practices and social media and networking? This collection of articles, blurs the lines between cultural practice and knowledge production, with the process and products coming in the forms of theories, creative methodologies, and a range of arts. Together these act as powerful pedagogical tools for engaging in social justice and transformative work. The contributions further highlight the multifaceted and diverse ways of creating and disseminating knowledge, and the attempts to decenter text-based ways of communicating in hopes of sharing collaborative knowledge beyond the academy and engaging the ‘public’. This volume was originally published as a special issue of the International Journal of Inclusive Education.

Drawing on new paradigms and evidence-based discoveries in neuroscience, narrative psychology, and creativity theory, Creative Arts in Counseling and Mental Health by Philip Neilsen, Robert King, and Felicity Baker explores the beneficial role of expressive arts within a recovery perspective. A framework of practice principles for the visual arts, creative writing, music, drama, dance, and digital storytelling is addressed across a number of settings and populations, providing readers with an accessible overview of techniques taught in counseling programs in the U.S. and abroad.

An edited volume discussing the underpinning concepts of citizenship, agency, and participation in the context of the everyday lives of people living with a dementia. The editors explain the theoretical underpinning of citizenship before the contributors show the way it can broaden the everyday lives of people with dementia.

Philosophy and Science are subject to conflicting interpretations, such as the rules of positivism and analytic thought. Bernard Lonergan and Gilles Deleuze have both assessed such issues in complementary fashion. This book examines their arguments through the application of mathematical theories and Buddhist-Christian ethics in an attempt to bridge the religious-secularist divide exacerbated by postmodernism.