About

This project currently serves the basis for a follow-up, larger eponymous application to leverage interdisciplinary research funding

ACT for Inclusivity: Artivism, Community, Transformation is a pump-priming award (2020) from the Leeds Social Sciences Institute (LSSI) to Dr Martin Zebracki, School of Geography, in collaboration with Dr Maria Rovisco, School of Sociology and Social Policy, and in a new partnership with the Sheffield-based visual arts organisation Arts Catalyst. Arts Catalyst works across art, science and technology to produce ambitious new projects that critically engage with our changing world.

This project involves a Learning Lab, a method and pedagogy that primarily engages grounded, horizontal and tacit learning to facilitate new research-artistic methods and synergies, focused on equality, diversity and inclusive community art practices.

ACT in conjunction with Arts Catalyst, and their wider network of relevant key players in creative industries, has enabled the development of a novel toolbox, exploring how cultural practitioners tackle issues of inequality with a focus on pressing ecological issues through various methodologies of transdisciplinary inquiry.

This project website, accordingly, showcases resources and materials, including case studies and a series of commissioned interviews and creative presentations with artists and academics that seek to tackle questions around inequality within the contexts and systems that they operate in. Contributions include: decolonial approaches to environmentalism and environmental activism, commoning health systems and democratising governance, theatre of oppressed techniques and socially-engaged arts practice, and queer, feminist and decolonial approaches to migration, citizenship, ecology and planetary health.