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Democracy as Creative Practice: Weaving a Culture of Civic Life offers arts-based solutions to the threats to democracies around the world, practices that can foster more just and equitable societies. Chapter authors are artists, activists, curators, and teachers applying creative and cultural practices in deliberate efforts to build democratic ways of working and interacting in their communities in a range of countries including the United States, Australia, Portugal, Nepal, the United Kingdom, and Canada. The book demonstrates how creativity is integrated in place-based actions, aesthetic strategies, learning environments, and civic processes. As long-time champions and observers of community-based creative and cultural practices, editors Tom Borrup and Andrew Zitcer elucidate work that not only responds to sociopolitical conditions but advances practice. They call on artists, funders, cultural organizations, community groups, educational institutions, government, and others to engage in and support this work that fosters a culture of democracy.This book is intended for undergraduate and graduate students in the humanities and social sciences, activists, funders, and artists who seek to understand and effect change on local and global scales to preserve, extend, and improve practices of democracy.

This book explores what art and artists can do to create democratic spaces, forms, and languages in a world devastated by multiple crises. Artists, activists, art historians, and art curators conduct timely and critical analyses across political divides, informing the public search for an agency, dialogue and self-representation. They analyze how artists transform these social relations through aesthetic means with a shared commitment to bridging political divides and conflicts. The book uses case studies from Australia, India, Mexico, USA, Turkey, Palestine, Israel, the Balkans, Russia, Italy, Ukraine to discuss the possibility or impossibility of building avenues for participation, equitable interaction, self-organization, as well as the common creation of the imaginary and a culture of dialogue. The book pushes for a broader and more conflict-oriented understanding of art and politics.

This book highlights the linkages between politics and governance and the arts. The essays in the volume show how visual and performative arts have challenged those in power – or conversely patronised by them – been used for propaganda, to stir up national fervour and found themselves at the receiving end of political censure. They focus on the tension and symbiosis between the politician and the artist foregrounding how they have always tried to influence, challenge and, in some cases, undermine one another.This volume will serve as an indispensable source for researchers and academics in political science, the humanities and performing arts.

This volume takes a global view of the emergence of public protest movements over the last decade, asking whether such movements contribute to the globalization of civil society. Through a variety of studies, organised around the themes of public agency, public norms, public memory and public art, it considers the tendency of political contestations to move beyond national boundaries and create transnational connections. Departing from the approaches of social movements perspectives, it focuses on public space as a site of social'mixity'and opens up a new field for the study of politics and cultural controversies. An analysis of the paradigmatic change in the way in which society is made and politics is conducted, this study of the new enactment of citizenship in public space will appeal to scholars of sociology, anthropology, geography and politics with interests in protest movements and contentious politics, citizenship and the public sphere, and globalization.