*Critical Artscapes / Resilient Artists*
Session convenors:
Jason Luger (Geography, King’s College London)
Viktoria Vona (Geography, King’s College London)
“Art and activism are united under a sign of the mobilisation of creative
energies” (Berardi 2010) and as such art and non-party political
resistance sometimes serve as different approaches to the same problem.
This session aims to explore the creative, complex, and sometimes
counter-intuitive ways that the arts becomes involved in resistance, and
resistance utilizes the arts, in varying urban contexts around the world.
From Brooklyn, where gentrification both threatens and unifies the bohemian
milieu, to Singapore, where art becomes a voice to challenge and question
authoritarianism, the arts act as a lens through which to interrogate
broader political and cultural processes and paradoxes. It is hoped this
session will stimulate a lively discussion, and provoke questions, on the
different ways the arts are utilized, appropriated, co-opted and sometimes
corrupted by the state and various other actors. We invite submissions from
research in diverse settings (including the global south and north), with a
particular focus on atypical and lesser-studied cases of cultural activism:
“the use of cultural resources to affect social change” (Wallis 2010).
Some indicative areas of interest include (but are not limited to):
· Art as opposition; ‘creative resistance’
· Artistic movements in non-democratic or hybrid-democracy regimes
· Cultural responses to neoliberal urbanism
· Appropriation and co-option of the arts by the state and the
private sector
· Coalitions and alliances within, across and against artistic
movements
· Art’s unifying and dividing power over societal groups and around
particular causes or agendas
· Representations of and resistance to gentrification and other
social/economic problems
· The use of humour in art related resistance vs. ‘traditional’
forms of political activism
· Direct action through art; the use of cultural resources to induce
social change
· Artists as peacemakers (and art as a tool in the process)
Please send abstracts of no more than 250 words to [log in to unmask] or
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