Creating Social Change Through Creativity Anti-Oppressive Arts-Based Research Methodologies

This book examines research using anti-oppressive, arts-based methods to promote social change  in oppressed and marginalized communities. The contributors discuss literary techniques, performance, visual art, and new media in relation to the co-construction of knowledge and positionality, reflexivity, data representation, community building and engagement, and pedagogy. The contributors to this volume hail from a wide array of disciplines, including sociology, social work, community psychology, anthropology, performing arts, education, medicine, and public health.

1. “To Speak in Our Own Ways About the World, Without Shame”: Reflections on Indigenous Resurgence in Anti-Oppressive Research.- 2. Listening through Performance; Identity, Embodiment, and Arts-Based Research.- 3. The Role of Privilege and Oppression in Arts-Based Research: A Case Study of a Cisgender and Transgender Research Team.- 4. Struggling to See through the Eyes of Youth: On Failure and (Un)Certainty in a Photovoice Project.- 5. Listen: The Defeat of Oppression by Expression.- 6. Conversations with Suzanna: Exploring Gender, Motherhood, and Research Practice.- 7. Insistent Humanness in Data Collection and Analysis: What Cannot Be Taken Away: The Families and Prisons Project.- 8. Hearing Embodied Narrative: Use Of The Listening Guide With Juvenile Justice Involved LGBTQ Young People.- 9. Mapping Social and Gender Inequalities: An Analysis of Art and New Media Work Created by Adolescent Girls in a Juvenile Arbitration Program.- 10. Smoking Cessation In Mental Health Communities: A Living Newspaper Applied Theatre Project.- 11. What’s in an Image?: Towards a Critical and Interdisciplinary Reading of Participatory Visual Methods.- 12. From Visual Maps to Installation Art: Visualizing Client Pathways to Social Services in Los Angeles.- 13. Fragments/layers/juxtaposition: Collage as a Data-Analysis Practice.- 14. This is not a Lab Coat: Claiming Knowledge Production as Power.- 15. Making Research and Building Knowledge with Communities: Examining Three Participatory Visual and Narrative Projects with Migrants Who Sell Sex in South Africa.- 16. AEMP Handbook by The Anti-Eviction Mapping Project (AEMP).- 17. From the Inside Out: Using Arts-Based Research to Make Prison Art Public.- 18. Envisioning Home: The Philadelphia Refugee Mental Health Photovoice Project as a Story of Effective Relationship Building.- 19. Spoken Word as Border Pedagogy with LGBTQ Youth.- 20. Lessons in Dialogue, Ethics, and the Departure from Well-Laid Plans in the Cultivation of Citizen Artists.

Moshoula Capous-Desyllas is Associate Professor of Sociology at California State University, Northridge, USA. She teaches various courses related to anti-oppressive social work practice, diversity and social justice, and qualitative and arts-based research methods.  Her passion lies in highlighting the voices of marginalized communities through the use of art as a form of activism, empowerment, and social change.

Karen Morgaine is Associate Professor of Sociology at California State University, Northridge, USA.  She teaches a variety of courses related to community organizing, anti-oppressive social work practice, and LGBTQQIP communities. Her research leans toward investigating social movement framing and power and privilege within social movements.