Search

Introduction: Mounting empirical evidence underscores the health benefits of the arts, as recently reported in a scoping review by the World Health Organization. The creative arts in particular are acknowledged to be a public health resource that can be beneficial for well-being and health. Within this broad context, and as a subfield of participatory arts, the term social arts (SA) specifically refers to an art made by socially engaged professionals (e.g., artists, creative arts therapists, social workers, etc.) with non-professionals who determine together the content and the final art product (in theater, visual arts, music, literature, etc.) with the aim to produce meaningful social changes. SA can enhance individual, community, and public health in times of sociopolitical instability and is an active field in Israel. However, SA is still an under-investigated field of study worldwide that is hard to characterize, typify, or evaluate. This paper presents a research protocol designed to examine a tripartite empirically-based model of SA that will cover a wide range of SA training programs, implementations, and impacts. The findings will help refine the definition of SA and inform practitioners, trainers, and researchers, as well as funding bodies and policymakers, on the content and impact of SA projects in Israel and beyond., Methods and Analysis: This 3-stage mixed methods study will be based on the collection of primary qualitative and arts-based data and secondary, complementary, quantitative data. Triangulation and member checking procedures will be conducted to strengthen the trustworthiness of the findings obtained from different stakeholders., Discussion: Growing interest in the contribution of arts to individual and public health underscores the importance of creating an empirically grounded model for SA. The study was approved by the university ethics committee and is supported by the Israel Science Foundation. All participants will sign an informed consent form and will be guaranteed confidentiality and anonymity. Data collection will be conducted in the next 2 years (2022 to 2024). After data analysis, the findings will be disseminated via publications and conferences., Competing Interests: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2022 Shefi, Orkibi and Huss.)

This paper explores the impact of self-chosen arts-based recreational activities, as opposed to the traditional arts therapy activities, on the well-being of healthcare providers. Three qualitative case studies of programs in which arts-based activities were used to work with healthcare providers, lasting for 10 weeks each, are phenomenological-hermeneutically evaluated using interviews and focus groups. The findings show what we refer to as an "ecological" ripple of effects: (1) the arts-based activities helped to reduce individual stress and to enhance mood over time, (2) the activities helped to transform workplace relationships within wards, and (3) the arts humanized the overall work climate in the healthcare setting. These effects go beyond those of using the art production as a strategy for stress reduction and imply potential for a more encompassing role for the arts within healthcare.

Use of the arts in international aid is common in an ad hoc form, but it has not been systematically theorised or evaluated. The arts have the potential to be a culturally contextualised and sustainable intervention for adults and children in the aftermath of war or disaster. On the micro level, the arts are a method to enable the retrieval and reprocessing of traumatic memories that are often encoded in images rather than in words. On a macro level, they can help to reconstruct a group narrative of a disaster as well as mobilise people back into control of their lives. This paper researches a long-term project using arts in Sri Lanka following the civil war and tsunami. A central finding is the need to understand arts within their cultural context, and their usefulness in strengthening the voices and problem-solving capacities of the victims of the disaster., (© 2016 The Author(s). Disasters © Overseas Development Institute, 2016.)

War poses a challenge for social workers, adding exposure to direct risk of personal harm to the general stress of social work practice. Artworks are frequently used in health care settings with people in high distress. This study had three goals: (1) to characterize the stressors of social workers living in a war zone, (2) to teach social workers in crisis situations to identify stress and resilience factors in their artworks, and (3) to develop a general self-care model for arts intervention for professionals in these situations. Common stressors experienced by participants were anxiety and fear as a result of bombs, sirens, worry over loved ones, and overexposure to media. These were layered onto professional stressors, including constant work communication on cell phones during war and dilemmas related to work-family conflicts. Allowing social workers to name and identity the sources of their stress and then change their artwork to enhance resilience helped them to gain a sense of control over diffuse sources of anxiety. The authors propose this method as an effective intervention model with social workers in high-stress situations.

This paper outlines a rationale and a methodology for an art-based community-visioning model to facilitate visioning of the community's future by young people from marginalized communities. The model presented was implemented among young people from the Mountain Jewish Community in Israel. It was found that the use of personal drawings made it possible to simultaneously identify and communicate personal narratives, and thereby develop a shared community vision. The theoretical and practical implications of the model are discussed, as well as its applied potential for community organization processes with young people from marginalized communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we aim to describe and demonstrate the use of a methodology for using arts-based techniques to co-produce knowledge with community members, thus making it accessible at both the theoretical and practice levels for social workers and social work educators. In this methodology, the arts are used not as a diagnostic tool or as fine art, but rather as a trigger for a reflective and socially critical dialogue with community members, with the aim of understanding how they experience their life situation. The proposed methodology includes three central compositional elements of art analyses: the inter-relationship between figure and background within a composition, the recourses and obstacles included in the picture background and the use of symbols and metaphors. The present manuscript illustrates this innovative analytical prism, providing examples of images and explanatory narratives of engaged and married young Muslim women in Israel, as self-defined by the participants rather than as an external anthropology. We further outline the implications of this methodology for other cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: This article aims to capture the self-defined holistic interaction between stressors, stress reactions and coping for social workers' stress. We utilised an arts-based intervention in the form of a single drawing with 80 social workers, who were actively guided to explore their own stressors, stress reactions and coping. Findings: Our findings suggest that whilst social workers define their stressors as being related to a lack of social work professional and managerial support (a macro problem), they experience this stress as lack of personal efficacy and self-worth and expect to cope by drawing on their inner strengths rather than by challenging the 'system' (micro solutions). Thus, they tend not to utilise available systemic ideas and theories in social work to address their own problems. Application: These findings offer a way of exploring stress and coping as an interactive whole that helps to understand both systemic stressors and the gaps in social workers' coping methods. It also explores the relationship between stressors, stress reactions and coping through the personal drawings and narratives of participating social workers. The findings are relevant for supervisors, and managers helping social workers to manage stress, and offer an example of how visual methods might be used as a pedagogic tool in social work education and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The arts have been used in social work practice with individuals and communities since the beginning of the profession, and yet an articulation of a rationale for their use is missing. An exploration of how the arts fit within the profession's mission is also lacking. The lack of a theoretical foundation for the arts in social work has thus resulted in the marginalization of arts practice in the field. This article examines fundamental questions regarding the use of the arts in social work: the relevance of the arts to clients, to social workers, and whether the arts can provide evidence to promote professional work. Addressing these concerns will clarify the relevance of the arts to social work theory and practice and explore their advantages and limitations, thus helping to create more nuanced collaborations between social work and the humanities, arts therapy, and the arts in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper outlines a set of art mechanisms that can help to co-produce knowledge between service users, social workers and policy makers. The paper will demonstrate how the arts can enable a space to reflect, to give concrete shape and to discuss and explore new meanings of an issue, for both 'sides' of the interaction together. Art enables situating subjective experience within social context with the help of the relationship between figure, background and spatial division of recourses (meaning material physical and also abstract recourses available to a specific group). Finally, arts enable negotiating multiple understandings and initiating new perspectives through using shifting symbols and shifting compositional elements. These mechanisms are demonstrated through images of a group of marginalised Bedouin women in Israel. The article discusses implications of conceptualising the relationship between social work and the arts and humanities as a way to enhance social workers' skills. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the advantages of arts-based research specifically for high-context, culturally diverse, power-infused, and chaotic or diffuse research settings as often found in international aid. It points to the ability of arts to concretize abstract concepts and to situate them within specific socio-cultural locations, enabling powerless groups to self-define and to adjust resilience-enhancing interventions to their own perceptions. The arts-based method as an indirect form of communication is shown to be effective in changing stands of power holders and experts, enabling a dialogue that creates culturally sustainable aid. The model used in this article is demonstrated and discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

BACKGROUND: A growing number of women are serving in the military in a variety of roles, yet information on their experience of stressors not associated with either combat or sexual harassment is not commonly reported. OBJECTIVE: To present phenomenological data on stressors experienced in military service, together with the use of coping strategies as a way to focus on women's mental needs following deployment from service. METHODS: Twenty women who had recently completed their compulsory army service in Israel drew a picture expressing stressors they experienced in the army. They analyzed their own pictures on three levels: the content, context, and the composition as expressing stress and the resources they used in coping with stress. RESULTS: Six themes were raised: proximity to war situations, coping with accidents in training soldiers under their command, a conflict between political values and military orders, witnessing the injury of another female soldier, responsibility for accidental injury of a civilian, and distress over the army placement. CONCLUSIONS: Coping resources were relational, primarily family and friend support, rather than from the army framework. This reliance on relational sources of support was both a resource and a source of vulnerability and is viewed as distinct from men's style of coping. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Food insecurity and hunger, which are on the rise in affluent Western countries, may negatively affect children's physical, social, emotional and cognitive functioning. Although there is growing evidence of the high rate of food insecurity and hunger among Bedouin families and their children in Israel, little is known about how the children themselves experience the problem and how it impacts their life. The present study sought to explore and clarify children's experience of food insecurity. The research population included forty-two Israeli Bedouin impoverished children, aged nine to eleven. The analysis of children's drawing was chosen as the research instrument because it enabled psychological as well as phenomenological insight into the children's experience of food insecurity. This study, however, goes beyond the use of art to assess children's emotional state, because enabling the children to draw food insecurity gave them a strong and communicative public voice of their own. After the study had been completed, the drawings also proved useful in efforts to promote awareness about the personal, community, cultural and social dimensions of the problem and the need for community action and policy change to mitigate and eliminate it. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper, based on a single case study of a social work research group using images in their research, offers a typology of methodological possibilities for combining verbal and visual elements in social work research. The analysis, based on both group process and group content, focuses on the possible connections between the visual and the verbal components of research, and includes the use of images located as data, method, subject or final product of the research. The relevance of each of these possible locations is discussed in relation to the specific needs of social work research and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article presents drawings and explanations of marginalized Bedouin women within the welfare system in Israel as a speech act that captures the lacks, pain, struggles, and integrations or solutions that they experience during cultural transition. One focus is the experience of rapid transition to modernity of marginalized women. Another is the theoretical challenge of finding a form of arts-based research in which to capture this. The article shows how the art captures not a dual but a multifaceted reality, conveying the emotional pain of economic and social lacks and a constant wish for and struggle toward physical and emotional spaces. The article presents the outcome of a theoretical model to analyze the art and explanations that relates both to the art as an inherent expression of self (according to humanistic and arts-based paradigms) and to art as a culturally embedded expression of self in context (according to critical theories). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The following work was presented at the Imagine Conference in Israel. It aims to show the ways in which the arts can help outsiders (including policy makers) to "imagine" and thus to understand, through the arts, the issues that marginalized Bedouin women face. However, most important, the symbolic depiction of the women's lives, drawn, exhibited, and discussed together among themselves, is shown to enable the women, through "imaging" the problems and oppressions that they face, to "imagine" ways of conceptualizing and solving these problems—understanding them as complex forms of social oppression rather than as manifestations of personal or inherent weaknesses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]