Arts-Centered Community Action: How Public Arts Programming Strengthens Civic Infrastructure and Promotes Civic Innovation

• In Event: "It’s a West Philly Thing": Conversations With Intergenerational Community-Driven Civic Action Research Collectives Pursuing Justice

Abstract

In 2017, a university-community arts program began a multi-media storytelling project, StoryUs (pseudonym), that brings together local high school students, community seniors, and undergraduates to use photography and writing to document the changes affecting their overlapping communities. Throughout the years, participants and alumni alike have drawn upon their shared experiences in the project to pursue life-long endeavors of volunteerism, service, civic engagement and civic participation. This study seeks to understand the potential impact that participating in such a dynamic collective can contribute to civic infrastructure and catalyze civic innovation.

Centering the funds of knowledge within our intergenerational CPAR team (Ozer, 2016), we employ a multi-modal narrative research data collection strategy including photovoice methodologies (Schell et al., 2009) emanating from StoryUs’ photography and artistic artifacts and archives as well as semi-structured interviews and focus groups with participants and program coordinators (Saldaña, 2013). Guided by the research questions, the CPAR team selected artistic artifacts, including poems, short stories, and photos, from StoryUs’ literary anthology which has been published annually between 2014-2023. CPAR members wrote analytic memos (Billups, 2020) for each artifact and then engaged in a thematic coding process (Saldaña, 2013). Previous research shows that arts-based methods can be implemented as a culturally sustaining civic engagement tool (Kuttner, 2016) and are highly effective when situated within the participatory action research model (Leavy, 2020).

In addition to the arts-centered research strategy, a component of this work is to understand and have influence on the built environment for this unique intergenerational group. Working both at the community space scale, and housing scale, the group has undertaken work to positively retrofit spaces for both creative collaboration across generations, and intergenerational cohousing. The collective considers how aging-in-place can be accommodated in these arenas. Our methods include observational study in the intergenerational creative space used for StoryUs, literature review of existing measures to synthesize, and visual analysis of the observational spaces. Both the “film strip” and “snapshot” methods were deployed (Luma Institute, 2012; Bakos et al., 1979; Sanders & Stappers, 2013). The filmstrip method tracks users and their pathways over time, the snapshot method deploys multiple floorplans with individual user placements (Bakos et al., 1979). Our study outcomes include a detailed checklist to better understand the preparedness of intergenerational spaces to serve older adults over time. In the spatial studies the following conditions were discovered through observation: bottlenecking into and out of the space, use of furniture and tables limited by dimensional comfort, detailed needs around entering and exiting the space, flooring needs. This aspect of the study analyzes group practices and uses story-sharing to foster intentional community. This group holds promise to offer a replicable model for other academic institutions interested in modifying the university-community adjacent narrative from displacement of long-term residents to engagement and community building. The next stage is to develop case-study research on how nonprofits focused on creative placemaking and art for social justice can facilitate implementation of age-friendly retrofits to advance the creation of equitable, healthy, and resilient communities.

Author

• Lauren Lowe, Drexel University