What is Socially Engaged Art Research Creation?

Socially engaged art, at its core, seeks to dismantle the traditional artist-audience binary, fostering collaborative experiences that generate knowledge and catalyze social change. Within this realm, research-creation, a methodology that blends artistic practice with rigorous inquiry, becomes a potent tool for exploring the nuanced interplay between embodiment, emergence, and relationality. Research-creation, crucially, is not simply art that illustrates research findings, nor is it research that merely analyzes art. It's a dynamic interplay where creative processes are integral to the generation of knowledge, emphasizing the investigative journey and recognizing that artistic forms can produce unique and valuable insights. It is an approach to research that combines creative and academic research practices, and supports the development of knowledge and innovation through artistic expression, scholarly investigation, and experimentation. It is about the creation process being situated within the research activity and producing critically informed work in a variety of media (art forms). Rather than simply observing or documenting, artists become active participants, generating new forms of understanding through embodied action and shared experience, using methods that combine creative and academic research practices.   

Embodiment in this context moves beyond the individual body as a site of expression. It acknowledges the body as a locus of lived experience, memory, and cultural inscription, deeply intertwined with social and environmental contexts. Research-creation methodologies that prioritize embodiment often involve participatory workshops, site-specific performances, or interactive installations that invite participants to engage physically with the artwork and its surrounding environment. For instance, a project exploring urban displacement might involve walking workshops that map embodied experiences of navigating contested spaces, or collaborative movement exercises that explore the feeling of being uprooted. These methodologies, through the lens of research-creation, recognize that knowledge is not solely cognitive but is also felt, sensed, and lived through the body, contributing to the development of knowledge through artistic expression.

Emergence, a concept borrowed from complex systems theory, recognizes that meaning and understanding are not pre-determined but rather arise through the dynamic interactions between participants, materials, and contexts. In socially engaged art, this translates to a research process that embraces uncertainty and allows for unexpected outcomes. Research-creation methodologies that foster emergence might involve open-ended creative prompts, iterative prototyping, or collaborative world-building exercises. Rather than seeking to control the outcome, the artist acts as a facilitator, creating the conditions for collective exploration and discovery. For instance, a community garden project might employ emergent methodologies by allowing the garden’s design and purpose to evolve organically based on the participants' needs and contributions, demonstrating how the creative process itself is a site of knowledge production.

Relationality, the understanding that all beings are interconnected and interdependent, is fundamental to socially engaged art research creation. Methodologies that emphasize relationality prioritize dialogue, collaboration, and co-creation. This might involve participatory action research (PAR), where community members are actively involved in all stages of the research process, or collaborative storytelling projects that amplify marginalized voices and foster intersubjective understanding. Relational methodologies, when approached as research-creation, recognize that knowledge is not produced in isolation but rather through shared experience and mutual respect, producing critically informed work through collaborative art forms. For instance, a project addressing environmental justice might utilize collaborative mapping techniques to visualize the interconnectedness of human and ecological systems, or employ storytelling circles to create spaces for collective healing and transformative dialogue.

By integrating embodiment, emergence, and relationality through the lens of research-creation, socially engaged art moves beyond traditional research paradigms. It embraces the subjective, the affective, and the experiential, recognizing that knowledge is not a static entity but rather a dynamic and evolving process. The artist, in this context, becomes a facilitator of shared meaning-making, creating spaces for collective learning and social transformation. Through embodied action, emergent processes, and relational encounters, socially engaged art research creation has the potential to generate new forms of knowledge that are both deeply personal and profoundly social, contributing to a more just and equitable world, with the creation process itself situated within the research activity.