Abstract
The past two decades have seen a succession of initiatives aimed at increasing public involvement in the arts. In Britain, as in the United States, such initiatives have been marked by the strategic, and often opportunistic, use of creativity as a key driver of democratisation and change at the micro and macro levels.1 But, in a climate in which change appears to be increasingly an individual matter — of ‘what you put in is what you get out’ — how far can participation in creative practice transform collective and individual experiences in the context of strategic arts-based interventions? This chapter offers a critical perspective in addressing this question, highlighting the everyday difficulties and conflict associated with participation in and by creative publics. It looks beyond taken-for-granted ideas of participation which are based on reasonably comfortable portrayals of arts involvement, and it considers some of the costs involved in participating in community arts contexts.
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© 2014 Yvonne Robinson
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Robinson, Y. (2014). Researching Theatre ‘Doing’ Participation: Creative Publics and Public Sociology. In: Taylor, Y. (eds) The Entrepreneurial University. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137275875_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137275875_9
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