Articles written by

Melanie Sarantou

Volume 15-Issue on socially engaged art and global challenges december 2021

Love Talks and Neighbourhood: Promoting encounters, tolerance and social inclusion by means of art in daily life and the living environment in Finnish Lapland

This article will introduce the Love Talks and Neighbourhood (later Love Talks) project, part of the AMASS, Acting on the Margin: Arts as Social Sculpture project. Love Talks was realised in Finnish Lapland in 2020, as part of an effort by local artists and art education students to explore how arts initiatives can build tolerant, community-focused neighbourhoods, while reflecting on how such activities can be scaled up to larger initiatives. The artists and art educators involved in the project took on the roles of teachers, developers, enablers, curators, facilitators, producers and creators of a new dialogic operational culture. The project asked whether socially engaged art can provide new tools for social interaction and increased collaboration. Can it lead to a new dialogue, critical discussions and new forums for participation? This paper highlights the importance of paying attention to how activities are organised and realised in the diverse and often challenging environments characteristic of socially engaged art and community-based art education. It explores how to promote encounters, tolerance and well-being through the use of art, and the role of culture and art in promoting social inclusion, capacity building, networking and participation in daily life and living environments.
31 min read
Volume 15-Issue on socially engaged art and global challenges december 2021

Generating Stakeholder Workshops for Policymaking in Digital Environments through Participatory Service Design

This article presents the design and research process of a design team of four designer-researchers, who are also the authors of this article and collaborated to develop training guidelines and a toolset for stakeholder workshops. The intention was to use the series of stakeholder workshops as a key method for developing policy recommendations about the role of arts in mitigating societal challenges. The stakeholder workshops were implemented across Europe by the partners of the European Commission H2020-funded project, Acting on the Margins: Arts as Social Sculpture (AMASS). Due to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the designer- researchers had to transfer all activities, such as face-to-face workshops and their own work processes, to a digital environment and online participation. The digital toolset and user guidelines were aimed at training the project partners to conduct stakeholder workshops and collect data for creating cultural policy roadmaps that would be context- specific for the European region where they were located. The design process for creating the digital artefacts, such as the digital toolset, user guidelines and online workshop environment, is discussed in this article, in addition to this study’s opportunities and limitations.