Participatory Arts in International Development

Paul Cooke is Centenary Chair of World Cinemas at the University of Leeds, UK. He is currently the Principal Investigator on Changing the Story, a project looking at the ways in which heritage and arts organisations can help young people to shape civil society in post-conflict countries.Inés Soria-Donlan is Project Manager of Changing the Story at the University of Leeds. Since 2008 Inés has worked internationally across the academic, cultural and creative sectors as a producer, project manager, creative practitioner and researcher, with a continual focus on youth, diversity and arts-led participation.

"This important and timely book brings together arts practitioners, academics and senior research and policy figures from NGOs with first-hand experience of the power of the arts to disrupt and refashion neoliberal development paradigms. They analyse projects that put a premium upon indigenous knowledge derived from grassroots participation as an antidote to the colonial models, releasing forces of self-development in order that different futures may be imagined where equality and social justice are not sacrificed to short-term profits. While the book is a significant resource for makers of development policy, it also reminds us of Arnold Wesker’s dictum: ‘Not to be a poet is the worst of our miseries’." — Tim Prentki, Emeritus Professor of Theatre for Development, University of Winchester, UK

• Introduction: ‘Post-Participatory’ Arts for the ‘Post-Development’ Era’ Part I: Organisational Perspectives 1. Imagining Power: Development, Participation and Creativity 2. Reflections on Practice: Integrating Creative Arts into INGOs to Promote Participation, Activism and Alternative Development Futures 3. Beyond the Development Imaginary: Alternative Policy in Brazil and Colombia 4. Challenging the Message of the Medium: Scaling Participatory Arts Projects and the Creativity Agenda in Kenya Part II: The Role of the Researcher in Development 5. When Elvis Dances: Activating Community Knowledge through Participatory Creative Practices in Santiago, Chile 6. Fragments on Heroes, Artists and Interventions: Challenging Gender Ideology and Provoking Active Citizenship through the Arts in Kosovo 7. Mobile Arts for Peace (MAP): Youth and Participatory Arts in Rwanda 8. Arts, Education and Reconciliation in Cambodia: Sociological Perspectives 9. Historical Research as an Advocacy Tool in India 10. Developing Dialogue through Participatory Design and Imaginative Graphic-Ethnography Part III: Exploring the Art Produced in Development 11. Filming the Margins: Documentary Film, Participation and the Poetics of Resistance in Contemporary Brazil 12. Taking the Product Seriously: Questions of Voice, Politics and Aesthetics in Participatory Video 13. Researching like an Artist: Disrupting Participatory Arts-Based Methods in Uganda and Bangladesh