There is a well-documented social turn happening within the arts. This can be seen in festival programming, creative recovery, arts/health and funding models that increasingly require artistic and community outcomes to align. As we see terms such as “socially engaged practice” and “social change” being used more frequently within global art contexts, let’s take a moment to consider the rigour with which we interrogate these claims of social engagement and social change.
I have placed my PhD in the Faculty of Medicine and Health because I want my claims of socially engaged practice to be critiqued not only by the arts sector, but by the sector that I am engaging with, in this case health. I want this critique to come from the clinicians and patients I work with, as well as curators, reviewers and artistic peers. How can I engage with this multiplicity of languages and perspectives?
