In these studies we explore cultural practice and community arts approaches for understanding, challenging and tackling   various forms oppression based on race, gender, class, ability and its intersections, and its implications for subjectivities, interpersonal relations, and belonging. We draw on critical theory, post colonial/decolonial scholarship, and standpoint theorising to examine how privilege/power and dispossession is reproduced in everyday lives and domains of practice. The studies examine these dynamics in the context of community arts and cultural development in order to extend its capacity as a decolonising and liberatory practice in community and liberation psychologies.

Publications

Quayle, A. F., & Sonn, C. C. (2019). Amplifying the voices of Indigenous elders through community arts and narrative inquiry: Stories of oppression, psychosocial suffering, and survival. American Journal of Community Psychology, 64(1–2), 46–58. https://doi.org/10.1002/ajcp.12367

Special issue of the International Journal of Inclusive Education.

Sonn, C., & Baker, A. (2016). Creating inclusive knowledges: Exploring the transformative potential of arts and cultural practice. International Journal of Inclusive Education, 20(3), 215–228. https://doi.org/10.1080/13603116.2015.1047663

Sonn, C., Smith, K., & Meyer, K. (2015). Challenging Structural Violence Through Community Drama: Exploring Theatre as Transformative Praxis. In D. Bretherton & S. F. Law (Eds.), Methodologies in Peace Psychology: Peace Research by Peaceful Means (pp. 293–308). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-18395-4_15

Quayle, A., Sonn, C., & Kasat, P. (2016). Community arts as public pedagogy: Disruptions into public memory through Aboriginal counter-storytelling. International Journal of Inclusive Education, 20(3), 261–277. https://doi.org/10.1080/13603116.2015.1047662

Past student projects:

Kimberley Davey (2018). Hip hop pedagogy as an anti-racist school community intervention: A case study of the
Sisters and Brothers program.

Christina Maxwell (2019). The Performative is Political: Using Counter-Storytelling through Theatre to
Create Spaces for Implicated Witnessing.

Current Projects:

with cohealth Arts Generator, Colour Between the Lines: Creating Solidarities Across Communities of Difference Through Arts and Activism