ABSTRACT
This chapter develops a series of concepts and methods designed to inform critical, new approaches to community arts education. Working with the concepts of ‘symbolic form’, ‘semblance’, and ‘virtual space’ drawn from the philosopher of art Susanne Langer (1895–1985), we theorise alternative possibilities for community arts-based research as a mode of collective, critical and political expression that relies on a speculative methodology. In order to translate this conceptual development into pedagogical strategies, we draw on processes of making artworks that were created as data during two empirical projects with children. Both projects have explored children’s changing values, experiences, and future imaginings of their local environments through community arts research in Manchester, UK and in Adelaide, Australia. In our analysis of fieldwork events from these projects, we examine artworks created by environmental-human enmeshment as a way of re-thinking values, beliefs, and futures which are embodied and embedded in place and carried into community arts practices. We examine the intersections of matter, meaning and form in community spaces for co-creation, as physical and conceptual spaces through which symbolic forms of expression are generated. We argue that such creative practices forge ‘little publics’ (Hickey-Moody 2013; 2016) through which children craft, express, and inhabit alternative modes of critical and creative citizenship.
