CreaTures

Creative practices are underused in the urgent task of changing cultures towards sustainability. CreaTures promotes action for social and ecological sustainability by identifying those aspects of creative practice that contribute most effectively to socio-cultural transformation and producing an open-access framework to support practitioners and policy-makers in driving positive change. The project draws on pilot research that shows how collaboration, reflection and direct engagement are key to changing the public’s orientation to environment issues. Thus, its process of identifying and evaluating the design of significant aspects (and the impact of different contexts) involves three interrelated components: an Observatory, identifying and mapping existing, fragmented and often hidden transformational creative practices; a Laboratory, supporting new experimentation and direct engagement with diverse stakeholders, including the members of the public, by mounting several different scales and types of arts production, and; an Evaluation phase, testing new and existing creative practices in a systematic and concerted way for their impact. The project will combine insights from these undertakings into a transdisciplinary, evidence-based, and practical framework that highlights the strengths of and opportunities for the arts to contribute to addressing climate change and associated effects. The resulting framework will demonstrate effective paths to achieving sustainability, social cohesion and peaceful co-existence at a time of rapid change, offering a strategic research agenda for key stakeholders, a set of innovations addressing the cultures and conditions for delivering greater sustainability, and policy recommendations to focus and optimise work in mobilizing the arts for transformational futures.

2020

2022