Visual Participatory Arts Based Research in the City: Ontology, Aesthetics and Ethics

Visual Participatory Arts Based Research in the Cities maps ontological, aesthetic and ethic differences between humanist and posthumanist arts-based research, while providing insight on methodological orientations to develop arts-based research with frameworks based on process-philosophies.

It is the first book on arts-based research which focuses on the city, adopting a posthumanist approach to the assembled nature of urban environments, where agency is distributed across infrastructures, technologies, spaces, things, and bodies. Chapters one to seven feature a series of studies, situated in different cities in Europe and the Americas, which outline experiences of movement, inhabitancy, interdependence, collaboration, infrastructuring and sensorial re-calibration informed by art practices in film, photography, digital projection, installation, performance and art as social practice. At the core of this book is the idea that aesthetic ecologies of cities do not depend solely on human activity, relying instead on non-logocentric modalities of collective life.

The book is an indispensable tool to researchers, instructors and graduate students in education, the social sciences and the arts aiming to conceive, design and develop projects in arts-based research.

Laura Trafí-Prats is a Senior Lecturer of Childhood Studies and Research Methodologies at Manchester Metropolitan University. Laura’s research engages with and responds to children and young people’s sensory and material experiences in a variety of contexts including urban spaces, the natural environment and schooling.

Aurelio Castro-Varela is an Assistant Professor of Cultural Pedagogies at the University of Barcelona. His research focuses on learning environments and urban arts-based practices through a new materialist perspective. He is also a member of the research group Esbrina and postdoctoral researcher in the European project Pleasurescapes. Port Cities’ Transnational Forces of Integration