Creative Activism

Primary Investigators: Professor Paul Gready (Centre for Applied Human Rights, University of York), Professor Jean Grugel (Politics, University of York)

External Collaborator: ActionAid

Funder: Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF)

Along with the Centre for Applied Human Rights, IGDC is involved in an AHRC-funded project on Creative Activism, which seeks to explore the ways in which art and creative activism can contribute to efforts to understand and enact development alternatives.

Working with ActionAid, the project brings together artists, academics, activists and development practitioners from the UK, Bangladesh and Uganda to critically explore how art and creative activism can articulate and help deliver development alternatives, and the extent to which these alternatives complement or are in tension with the global goals for development set out by the Sustainable Development Goals. In this project, development alternatives is understood to mean alternatives to mainstream development approaches (e.g. neo-liberal, service delivery, aid-centred, hierarchical, entrepreneurial) and to reflect, in particular, diverse voices and approaches from the Global South that are rarely heard in development debates and practice.