Here's a special call for papers from CAN writer John Sullivan, who's editing an issue of "New Solutions," a quarterly report from The Community Solution (http://www.communitysolution.org).

"Popular Arts & Education in Community-Based Participatory Research"

Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR) is a methodology based ideally on flexible power relationships and the unobstructed flow of expert and local knowledge among project partners. The potential of success in CBPR depends on authentic dialogue among partners, free flow of information, and trust. But accurate, unmediated and timely channels of communications, while key to successful CBPR, are difficult to create and maintain. As participatory methodologies evolve, the arts have increasingly taken center stage as culturally fluent modalities for information, communication, advocacy and organizing. Methods such as Theater of the Oppressed (TO), Photovoice, video, spoken word, hip-hop, visual arts, and more give community values and needs a strong, authentic voice and ensure that methods and messages are rooted in local cultures and delivered clearly, directly, and respectfully.

New Solutions is eager to receive articles discussing how community-based arts (in its various modalities) and popular education have anchored outreach, education, and organizing in Community-Based Participatory Research with an environmental / occupational health and safety justice focus.

This special issue will be co-edited by Eduardo Siqueira and John Sullivan. Submissions could include any one or any combination of the following questions and can be written for the following New Solutions departments: Features (research papers); Movement Solutions (descriptions of practice); Voices (interviews); Comment and Controversy (opinion pieces); and, Observatory of the Americas (articles related to movement building throughout the Americas).

• Communicating scientific concepts to communities with varying levels of scientific literacy is a major challenge in community research. This communication may involve mapping interactions of genes and the environment, explaining frameworks of risk assessment, outlining the pathogenesis of asthma or the neurotoxicity of lead. Have arts-based interventions facilitated this communication without distorting the science?

• What influence have popular education theorists such as Paulo Freire, Henry Giroux, Bell Hooks, Miles Horton, et al. had on the design of arts-based research interventions?

• Terms such cultural competency, cultural sensitivity, and cultural fluency seek to describe a perfect match of semiotic variables, local context, perceived needs and necessary information. Have arts-based interventions fulfilled their promise in promoting this match?

• Does an infusion of arts-based actions into the research mix actually encourage sharing and perhaps changing points-of-view? Or at least actively encourage greater empathy among community-arts participants, researchers, advocates and activists?

• In terms of “authenticating dialogue” among community members and the culture of research, how have arts-based interventions provided bi-directional channels of communication in community research?

• Participants in community research expect timely “play-backs” of findings as the project unfolds. Do the arts get this information back to the public with less lag-time and less ambiguity?

• How has arts-based communication channels served as a “translational bridge” providing communities access to good science and researchers’ access to important local knowledge?

• How do we evaluate popular arts based project efficacy and outcomes: qualitative vs. quantitative, measurement of outcomes, mapping the dissemination of information, or…?

• Do projects using the arts persist in some form after initial funding cycles? Do the arts encourage sustainability? How have arts-based components morphed or merged with other groups and organizations?

• Does the use of arts contribute to the formulation and organizing of communities for political action to change exposures, building environments, power relations that improve the health and safety of communities? How does this process work?

We also invite shorter field reports on projects such as: teatro popular, theater of the oppressed, sociodrama, representational and or musical theater, photovoice, video voice, poetry, fiction, digital storytelling, spoken-word, visual arts (murals, multi-media installations, painting & drawing), corridos, folk songs, hip-hop, broadcast media, podcasts, and web-based media. These projects may be formally concluded or ongoing.

Please provide website addresses to audio-visual materials in the body of the text. Articles should follow the instructions to authors available here.

We would like to receive papers through end of October 2008.

   

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