Open Call: Submissions to New Publication on Socially Engaged Arts Practice

Contested Narratives, Places and Futures: Socially Engaged Art Practice in Ireland

Editors: Helen Carey, Fire Station Artists’ Studios| Alan Grossman and Anthony Haughey, Centre for Socially Engaged Practice-Based Research, Technological University Dublin| Ailbhe Murphy, Create

Preface: Gregory Sholette, Social Practice CUNY (City University New York), USA

Publisher: Cork University Press

Publication Date: 2022

Submission Deadline: 6 November

This timely publication will bring together a dynamic mix of established and emergent socially engaged artists/practitioners, collectively reflecting an interdisciplinary range of collaborative, participatory, mediated and curatorial practices in Ireland.

Socially engaged creative practices have globally proliferated since the early 2000s outside the confines of arts institutions, across diverse field sites, communities of interest and place, art forms and utilising varied research methodologies. While there are a burgeoning number of publications capturing the site-specific and transnational trajectory of these interventions, the proposed practitioner-author led book critically frames in a single volume, diverse typologies of socially engaged practice in Ireland.

Contested Narratives, Places and Futures sets out to capture evolving social, cultural and political transformations across the island of Ireland, whose resonance is tangible across diverse national and international contexts. The book seeks to present for the first time a rigorous and wide ranging account of situated socially engaged transdisciplinary practice in Ireland covering topics such as migration; refugee housing and shelter; social justice; youth identity; art activism; archives; neoliberal capitalism; counterpublic spheres; rural landscapes and sustainability; spatial justice; the Anthropocene; conflict/post-conflict terrains; trauma of place; Traveller activism; gender and reproductive rights, amongst other critical areas.

 The practitioners’ narratives presented in this book will establish an immersive, grounded and much needed critical framing of their works for numerous others; for new practitioners and transnational peers, educators, civic/cultural institutions and policy advocates, to name a few, serving to foreground socially engaged practice as an integrating and cross-sectoral driver for social change in Ireland and beyond.

Submission Guidelines

• The editors invite contributions from artists, filmmakers, photographers, curators, musicians, architects and designers, amongst others. We seek original pieces of writing that have not been previously published in book, journal or catalogue format.

• We welcome contributions from self-identified minority and migrant socially engaged practitioners.

• Projects proposed for consideration must have been completed during the past 10 years or be ongoing.

• The book will accommodate a range of textual formats including chapters (6000 words); visual essays; interviews and other suggested formats in discussion with editors. Authors will be limited to the use of 3-5 colour images. Still, moving image and audio will be made accessible to readers by way of author references to relevant content on websites and other platforms.

• We invite abstracts of 300 words (with titles) in which contributors are asked to signal the proposed format of their submissions, alongside identifying the conceptual/theoretical, methodological and where relevant, constituencies and  field-site location(s) addressed in a proposed singular work or work(s).

• We ask contributors to reflect on key thematic questions, allied to fieldwork research methods arising out of the distinctiveness and focus of the socially engaged practice under consideration, encouraging writing that is lucid without compromising intellectual rigour.
• Non-salaried contributors will be paid a writer’s fee.

Please send abstracts by 6th November to both Alan Grossman (alan.grossman[at]tudublin.ie) and Anthony Haughey (anthony.haughey[at]tudublin.ie)