Bread and Roses: Artistic Expression and Community Action

Faculty: Nancy Watterson
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How do words, movements, signs, and expressive traditions transform people, places and events in ways that bring about social change?  What are the motivations, methods, politics, and implications of “doing good work”?  In what ways does an understanding of such engagement depend on one’s position: as artist, non-profit worker, business person, social justice advocate, community activist?  Engaged ethnography begins from such questioning and proceeds through an attitude of mutual respect and reciprocal learning.  In this interdisciplinary seminar we will explore current initiatives as well as some long-standing issues surrounding socio-cultural expressions selecting across many forms: literature (fiction and non-fiction), performances, exhibits, Web-sites, on-line journals, grant proposals and ethnographic documentaries.  Students will be given an opportunity to do participatory and applied research on local concerns: witnessing, analyzing, and putting words into action (and actions into words).  By choosing a local venue in which to become involved—a local arts or cultural organization, a community arts or action group, a neighborhood development (or organizing) initiative, or a local advocacy or social justice movement (to name but a few opportunities), students gain—and share—practical knowledge about how both artists and cultural workers express themselves in ways that impact and empower local community arts, cultural policy, and education programs.  Students may, for example, work in programs to learn about how art and community performance can bring people together through location, spirit, and tradition; or they may focus their energy on projects in which people have joined together to address difficult social issues, or observe and document a pressing, community-defined need.  Such community meets artistic expression wherever artistic and cultural knowledge are disseminated, both informally and formally—on the streets, through schools, in museums and public programming, just to a name a few powerful venues.