CALL FOR PROPOSALS: Making Revolution Irresistible in Socially Engaged Art (New Book)
Editors: Drs. H. “Herukhuti” Sharif Williams and Otto Muller, Goddard College (Vermont, USA)
Publisher: Routledge
Anticipated publication year: 2025
The world is ablaze with the rise of white supremacist fascism, genocide, and wealth extraction. Communities are working to resist and disrupt the mechanisms of empire and an oppressive world-system. Artists/creatives, educators, activists, and cultural organizers continue to play important and meaningful roles in these efforts. Crucial to the sustainability, development, and distribution of their contributions is sharing the examples and lessons learned across the various affected communities so people can learn from and support each other. It is within that re-imagining of the axiom, think globally and act locally, that the editors share this call for contributors who are thinking globally and creating locally in the socially engaged arts and social practice.
The terms socially engaged art and social practice have brought artworld and scholarly attention, legibility, and consumerism to a set of creative practices that center relational ethics and politics between artists/creatives, audiences, and communities. Much of these conceptual interventions have not, however, been successful in disrupting historical, institutional hierarchies within the artworld itself or fundamentally decentering the hegemony of European/European-American concepts of art, aesthetics, and audience that sustain the ongoing global projects of imperialism, colonialism, and structural racism and white supremacy.
Drawing its title from Toni Cade Bambara’s powerful claim that the task of the artist as cultural worker emerges from their pre-existing accountability to the ethics and politics of their community, this book will offer a framework of socially engaged art in which the work of artists, educators, and activists committed to dismantling settler-colonial, imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist cisheteropatriarchy and creating alternative futures is brought to together and put in conversation with each other. We will do so by recovering, reclaiming, and surfacing the discursive and cultural histories that inform social practice and socially engaged art and their potential to challenge ontological and epistemological assumptions about art, aesthetics, and audience; by providing radical pedagogical approaches to art education; and by explicitly addressing the tactical capacity of socially engaged creative practice to foster decolonization, reindigenization, liberation, reparation, healing, justice, and ecological wellness. In other words, the editors want to create space through this text for artists/creatives who are invested in challenging hegemony, the status quo, and the prevailing social order using art to share their stories, wisdom, and practices of disruption, resistance, and revolutionary change.
Accordingly, we are building the book in three sections and seeking a broad range of submissions from a diverse community of artists, activists, change agents, creatives, cultural organizers, curators, educators, and scholars who can speak to the radical histories, ethics, politics, and possibilities of socially engaged art (including but not limited to any of the performing arts (i.e., theatre, dance, and music), community art, performance art, or even visual arts (e.g., painting, sculpture, assemblage, and film) and literary arts that involve community participation or collaboration). We welcome interviews, research, theoretical interventions, and creative contributions of 5000 – 10000 words and are open to compelling contributions with fewer words. Contributors will receive a complimentary copy of the book from the publisher.
We encourage you to play with form in thinking about your contribution so that the form reflects the creative, critical, anti-oppressive politics of the content. To that end, while this initial version of the book will be published for English-reading audiences, we welcome contributions that include languages other than English and/or variants/disruptions of English language conventions.
Section 1: Whose Socially Engaged? Whose Art?
Contributions that situate socially engaged art in radical politics, oppressed communities, and the indigenous cultural traditions of BIPOC that provide the philosophical, conceptual, or epistemological foundation for these lineages of socially engaged art.
Sample topics could include:
- Highlighting marginalized traditions of socially engaged art
- Contextualizing socially engaged art within liberatory struggle
- Philosophical foundation for socially engaged art as disruption and resistance
Section 2: Teaching and Transgressing in the Arts
Contributions that share examples of the application of critical, liberatory, and decolonial pedagogy and negotiated curriculum in socially engaged art education.
Sample topics could include:
- Roots and fruits of teaching and learning socially engaged art for resistance and revolution
- Modes of learning and cultural transmission outside of hegemonic institutional contexts
- Producing alternative pedagogies as or through socially engaged art
Section 3: Making Revolution Irresistible
Contributions that share examples of socially engaged art that has contributed to dismantling settler-colonial, white supremacist, imperialist cisheteropatriarchy:
Sample topics could include:
- Lessons learned from radical socially engaged art projects
- Critical self-reflection on the liberatory consequences of socially engaged art strategies and tactics
- Ethics and politics in the relationship between process and products in socially engaged art projects
Important Dates:
Proposal Submission: February 14, 2024
Notification of Inclusion: March 14, 2024
Full Draft Submission: August 14, 2024
Abstract (250 words):
In your abstract, please identify (1) the section or sections of the book in which you are seeking to included (2) the topic and context of your proposed contribution, (3) the intended effect of the proposed contribution on the field of socially engaged art, and (4) the relevant information about the modes of inquiry and approach to the form of the proposed contribution.
Brief biography (150 words):
Please include your cultural ancestry, social identities, relationship to a socially engaged art lineage, current place of residence (State/County, Country, Indigenous Territorial Name), professional experience, communities to which you are accountable, and creative and scholarly practice.
Please share proposals as emailed PDF files or shared Google Docs to the email addresses below.
For more information, please email both of the co-editors simultaneously at and include Making Revolution Irresistible in the subject line: herukhuti.williams@goddard.edu and otto.muller@goddard.edu.
