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Acting on the Margins: Arts as Social Sculpture

Project description

The arts: A social sculpture

The arts can move people, educate societies and question widely accepted narratives. The arts can also shed new light on the past, hold up a mirror to contemporary life and launch new perspectives for the future. AMASS, an arts-based action research project, aims to create concrete opportunities for people to come together and accompany artists as agents in creative projects and interpretations. This multidisciplinary project will consider a wide field of disciplines and through participatory approaches, it will use practical methods from the field of service design to explore the role of the arts in mitigating societal challenges, aiming at capturing, assessing and harnessing the societal impact of the arts and further generate social impact through policy recommendations. It will also identify, explore, collate, evaluate and analyse existing and new innovative productions, experiments and case studies from the perspective and the physical positioning of European countries ‘on the margins’ in the underserved northern, southern, western and eastern regions.

Objective

The central problem AMASS addresses is that the arts has not been harnessed to address societal challenges through comparative and European-wide Research Innovation Action (RIA), analysis, synthesis and policy development. This untapped potential of the arts undermines joint action between different artistic genres and geographic locations, and thus the advancement of the EU as a stronger global actor, the fostering of fundamental rights based on mutual trust and democratic change within the EU. The overall objective of the project is to address this European-wide lack of synthesis of the potential of the arts that can lead to generating alternative or unconventional solutions to societal challenges and policy development. The aims thus will be to discover and analyse the underpinning structures that influence the functioning of arts in societal challenges (specifically SC6) through arts-based RIA. The challenges addressed by AMASS are geopolitically oriented: the future of work in creative, cultural and other sectors; radical ideologies and extremism; societal polarisation and stratification; lack of civil society participation; populism; migration. Thus, this project will identify, explore, collate, evaluate and analyse existing and new innovative productions, experiments and case studies from the perspective and the physical positioning of the European countries “on the margins”. AMASS, which is located in Europe’s culturally often underserved Northern, Southern, Western and Eastern regions, will set up 5 experiments in these peripheries to investigate the educational effects of the STEAM model in integrating the arts with science through participatory and multidisciplinary approaches. This will be accomplished through technologically enabled visual expression and problem-based learning that will offer solutions to the geopolitical challenges, and policy recommendations and development that will foster inclusive, innovative and reflective societies.

Call for proposal

H2020-SC6-TRANSFORMATIONS-2018-2019-2020

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Sub call

H2020-SC6-TRANSFORMATIONS-2019

Coordinator

LAPIN YLIOPISTO
Net EU contribution
€ 472 825,00
Address
PL 122
96101 Rovaniemi
Finland

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Region
Manner-Suomi Pohjois- ja Itä-Suomi Lappi
Activity type
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
Links
Total cost
€ 472 825,00

Participants (7)