Arts, Culture and Community Development

Description

How and why are arts and cultural practices meaningful to communities? Highlighting examples from Lebanon, Latin America, China, Ireland, India, Sri Lanka and beyond, this exciting book explores the relationship between the arts, culture and community development. Academics and practitioners from six continents discuss how diverse communities understand, re-imagine or seek to change personal, cultural, social, economic or political conditions while using the arts as their means and spaces of engagement. Investigating the theory and practice of 'cultural democracy', this book explores a range of aesthetic forms including song, music, muralism, theatre, dance, and circus arts.

Rosie R. Meade is Lecturer in the School of Applied Social Studies at the University College Cork, Ireland. Mae Shaw is Honorary Fellow in the Moray House School of Education and Sport at the University of Edinburgh, UK.

"This is an important global contribution to understandings of how the arts work as critical and creative mechanisms of both community development and cultural democracy." Darlene E. Clover, University of Victoria "This book affirms how communal arts practices and cultural knowledge can nurture the hope that a radical democracy is, indeed, possible. A must-read for cultural activists!" Astrid von Kotze, Popular Education Programme, South Africa "Beyond the mechanistic and reductionist paradigms of community development, the volume offers a fabulous account of creative and collective endeavours of communities in rescripting the conditions of their own lives. The editors and authors must be congratulated for providing a nuanced understanding of aesthetic expressions emanating from disempowered community contexts." Pushpesh Kumar, University of Hyderabad