This edited volume analyzes participatory practices in art and cultural heritage in order to determine what can be learned through and from collaboration across disciplinary borders. Following recent developments in museology, museum policies and practices have tended to prioritize community engagement over a traditional focus on collecting and preserving museal objects. At many museal institutions, a shift from a focus on objects to a focus on audiences has taken place. Artistic practices in the visual arts, music, and theater are also increasingly taking on participatory forms. The world of cultural heritage has seen an upsurge in participatory governance models favoring the expertise of local communities over that of trained professionals. While museal institutions, artists, and policy makers consider participation as a tool for implementing diversity policy, a solution to social disjunction, and a form of cultural activism, such participation has also sparked a debate on definitions, and on issues concerning the distribution of authority, power, expertise, agency, and representation. While new forms of audience and community engagement and corresponding models for “co-creation” are flourishing, fundamental but paralyzing critique abounds and the formulation of ethical frameworks and practical guidelines, not to mention theoretical reflection and critical assessment of practices, are lagging. This book offers a space for critically reflecting on participatory practices with the aim of asking and answering the question: How can we learn to better participate? To do so, it focuses on the emergence of new norms and forms of collaboration as participation, and on actual lessons learned from participatory practices. If collaboration is the interdependent formulation of problems and entails the common definition of a shared problem space, how can we best learn to collaborate across disciplinary borders and what exactly can be learned from such collaboration?

From the contents:00I. Participatory art now01. The normalisation of participatory art 0II. What is participatory art?02. Concepts03. Defnitions04. The intentions of participatory art 05. The art of participatory art 06. The ethics of participatory art 0III. Where does participatory art come from?07. Making history 08. Deep roots 09. Community art and the cultural revolution (1968 to 1988) 010. Participatory art and appropriation (1988 to 2008).

This book examines cultural participation from three different, but interrelated perspectives: participatory art and aesthetics; participatory digital media, and participatory cultural policies and institutions. Focusing on how ideals and practices relating to cultural participation express and (re)produce different "cultures of participation", an interdisciplinary team of authors demonstrate how the areas of arts, digital media, and cultural policy and institutions are shaped by different but interrelated contextual backgrounds. Chapters offer a variety of perspectives and strategies for empirically identifying "cultures of participation" and their current transformations and tensions in various regional and national settings. This book will be of interest to academics and cultural leaders in the areas of museum studies, media and communications, arts, arts education, cultural studies, curatorial studies and digital studies. It will also be relevant for cultural workers, artists and policy makers interested in the participatory agenda in art, digital media and cultural institutions.

This book explores the practical delivery of participatory arts projects in international development. Bringing together an interdisciplinary group of academics, international development professionals and arts practitioners, the book engages honestly with the competing challenges faced by the different groups of people involved. Participatory arts are becoming increasingly popular in international development circles, fuelled in part by the increased accessibility of audio-visual media in the digital age, and also by the move towards participatory discourses in the wake of the UN’s Agenda 2030. The book asks: What do participatory arts projects look like in practice, and why are they used as an international development tool? How can we develop practical and sustainable development projects on the ground, localising best practice according to cultural, economic and linguistic contexts? What are the enablers of, and barriers to, successful participatory initiatives, and how can we evaluate past projects to learn and feed into future projects? Written to appeal to both academics and practitioners, this book would also be suitable for teaching on courses related to participatory development, community arts, and culture and development.

This book investigates the power of art to enhance human development and to initiate positive social change for individuals and societies recovering from conflict. Interventions aimed at reinforcing social justice and bringing communities together after conflict are often accused of being top-down, or failing to consider all groups and contexts within a society. The use of participatory arts can help to address these challenges by fostering community engagement, social cohesion, influencing public policy, and ultimately, advancing social justice. Arts-based methods can be particularly effective at reaching youth communities, providing voice and political agency to young people who are often not given a platform. Situated at the intersection of participatory arts, social and epistemic justice, this book brings together case studies from across the world to reflect on best practice for the use of bottom-up, participatory, co-produced, and co-designed arts processes in conflict settings. This book provides an important guide to the role that arts can play in addressing epistemic injustice and contributing to social justice and human development. As such, it will be of interest to international development and arts practitioners, policy makers, and to students and researchers across participatory arts, youth studies, international development, social justice, and peace and conflict studies.

Winner of the 2019 ASCA Book Award Participation is the utopian sweet dream that has turned into a nightmare in contemporary neoliberal societies. Yet can the participatory ideal be discarded or merely replaced with another term, just because it has become disemboweled into a tool of pacification? The gestures of participatory art insists that the concept of participation must be re-imagined and shifted onto other registers. Moving from reflections on institutional critique and impact to concrete analyses of moments of unsolicited, delicate participation and refusal, the book examines a range of artistic practices from India, Sudan, Guatemala and El Salvador, the Lebanon, the Netherlands and Germany. It proposes the concept of the gesture as a way of theorising participatory art, situating it between the visual and the performing arts, as both individual and collective, both internal attitude and social habitude.

As researchers are increasingly taking their research from the campus to the public arena, what are the ethics of, and expectations for, social impact? Going Public responds to the urgent need to expand current thinking on what it means to co-create, to actively involve the public in research, and to reconceptualize research for public consumption. Drawing on conversations with over thirty practitioners across multiple cultures and disciplines, this book examines the ways in which oral historians, media producers, and theatre artists use art, stories, and participatory practices to engage creatively with their publics. 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. Going Public offers insights into long-standing concerns around voice, aesthetics, appropriation, privilege, power dynamics, and the ethics of participation. It reveals that the shift towards participatory research and creative practices requires a commitment to asking tough questions about oneself and the ways that people’s stories are used.

The volume addresses the matter of participatory media practices as playful appropriations within current digital media culture and artistic research. The aim is to explore and trace the shifting boundaries between media production and media use, and to develop concepts and methodologies that work within participatory media cultures. Therefore the articles explore and establish nuanced approaches to the oftentimes playful practices associated with the appropriation of technology.

The Future of the Past is a biennial conference generally carried out during the commemoration date of the incorporation of Santa Ana de Los Ríos de Cuenca Ecuador as a World Heritage Site (WHS). It initiated in 2014, organized by the City Preservation Management research project (CPM) of the University of Cuenca, to create a space for dialoguing among interested actors in the cultural heritage field. Since then, this space has served to exchange initiatives and to promote coordinated actions based on shared responsibility, in the local context. The third edition of this conference took place in the context of the 20th anniversary of being listed as WHS and a decade of CPM as the Southern host of the PRECOM3OS UNESCO Chair (Preventive Conservation, Maintenance and Monitoring of Monuments and Sites). For the very first time, and thanks to the collaboration with the Raymond Lemaire International Centre for Conservation of the University of Leuven (Belgium), the conference expanded its local scope. On this occasion, contributions reflected round a worldwide challenge in the cultural field: revealing the paths towards participatory governance of cultural heritage. Participatory governance is understood as institutional decision-making structures supported by shared responsibilities and rights among diverse actors.