Creating Social Change Through Creativity, Softcover reprint of the original 1st ed. 2018
Anti-Oppressive Arts-Based Research Methodologies

This book examines research using anti-oppressive, arts-based methods to promote social change  in oppressed and marginalized communities. The contributors discuss literary techniques, performance, visual art, and new media in relation to the co-construction of knowledge and positionality, reflexivity, data representation, community building and engagement, and pedagogy. The contributors to this volume hail from a wide array of disciplines, including sociology, social work, community psychology, anthropology, performing arts, education, medicine, and public health.

Section 1: Co-construction of Knowledge & Positionality 

1. “To Speak in Our Own Ways About the World, Without Shame”: Reflections on Indigenous Resurgence in Anti-Oppressive Research 

2. Listening through Performance; Identity, Embodiment, and Arts-Based Research 

3. The Role of Privilege and Oppression in Arts-Based Research: A Case Study of a Cisgender and Transgender Research Team 

Section 2: Reflexivity 

4. Struggling to See through the Eyes of Youth: On Failure and (Un)Certainty in a Photovoice Project

5. Listen: The Defeat of Oppression by Expression

6. Conversations with Suzanna: Exploring Gender, Motherhood, and Research Practice

Section 3: Methodological Processes 

7. Insistent Humanness in Data Collection and Analysis: What Cannot Be Taken Away: The Families and Prisons Project

8. Hearing Embodied Narrative: Use Of The Listening Guide With Juvenile Justice Involved LGBTQ Young People 

9. Mapping Social and Gender Inequalities: An Analysis of Art and New Media Work Created by Adolescent Girls in a Juvenile Arbitration Program

10. Smoking Cessation In Mental Health Communities: A Living Newspaper Applied Theatre Project

Section 4: Politics of Methodlogy and Data Representation

 

11. What’s in an Image?: Towards a Critical and Interdisciplinary Reading of Participatory Visual Methods

12. From Visual Maps to Installation Art: Visualizing Client Pathways to Social Services in Los Angeles 

13. Fragments/layers/juxtaposition: Collage as a Data-Analysis Practice

Section 5: Community Sharing for Social Change 

14. This is not a Lab Coat: Claiming Knowledge Production as Power

15. Making Research and Building Knowledge with Communities: Examining Three Participatory Visual and Narrative Projects with Migrants Who Sell Sex in South Africa

16. AEMP Handbook by The Anti-Eviction Mapping Project (AEMP) 

Section 6: Community Building and Engagement 

17. From the Inside Out: Using Arts-Based Research to Make Prison Art Public 

18. Envisioning Home: The Philadelphia Refugee Mental Health Photovoice Project as a Story of Effective Relationship Building 

Section 7: Pedagogical Approaches 

19. Spoken Word as Border Pedagogy with LGBTQ Youth

20. Lessons in Dialogue, Ethics, and the Departure from Well-Laid Plans in the Cultivation of Citizen Artists

Moshoula Capous-Desyllas is Associate Professor of Sociology at California State University, Northridge, USA. She teaches various courses related to anti-oppressive social work practice, diversity and social justice, and qualitative and arts-based research methods.  Her passion lies in highlighting the voices of marginalized communities through the use of art as a form of activism, empowerment, and social change.

Karen Morgaine is Associate Professor of Sociology at California State University, Northridge, USA.  She teaches a variety of courses related to community organizing, anti-oppressive social work practice, and LGBTQQIP communities. Her research leans toward investigating social movement framing and power and privilege within social movements.