Materialising the Social: Art Practice as a Transversal Methodology

Socially engaged arts practices make new forms of group subjectivity. They are intra-active, diffractive methods through which we can craft new ways of being. Quantum literacies are the modes through which socially engaged arts practices occur: they are at once critical, performative and intra-active. Quantum literacies enable generative intersections between artistic and academic research regarding life and matter, nature and culture. Taking into account the multiple processes of material-discursive production, translation, transformation, and diffraction that constitute such practices, I consider the material-discursive space of my Interfaith Childhoods research project as a way of re-making multicultural urban spaces often fractured by differences in belief. I critically engage with arts practice as a concept and highlight the views of community and children in the process of art production. The transversal line of socially engaged practice with interfaith youth zigzags across, and brings together, a diverse selection of bodies, beliefs, knowledges, skills, and creates a material-discursive documentation of group subjectivity. Through an excavation of my arts research workshops, I demonstrate how aesthetic practices generate, and create material residues of, new group subjectivities. Such a bringing together of nature and culture, of different ethnicities and beliefs in urban environments, is urgently needed to bridge social divides created in relation to, or socially framing, ideas of religion. For example, the British Government spends 40 million pounds on an annual basis on the Prevent[1] scheme. The capacity to understand and empathize with others from very different worlds is imperative if such measures are to be avoided in the future. Such outcomes are already being achieved with a very high level of success through Interfaith Childhoods, proving that a preventative approach to resolving social conflict needs to begin with community engagement.