IMPACT! Agenda Setting in Arts and Culture

Course goals

After completion of this course, students have:

• learned to identify and explain how art can engage and intervene in debates around various societal topics
• learned to critically reflect on public cultural events and forms of outreach in relation to broader societal and academic debates
• developed professional and communicative skills needed for organizing public events or other form of outreach
• learned to use a hands-on practice as research approach by designing and organizing an interventionist project

Content

This course offers a bottom-up perspective on the role of art and creative practices in our culture and society. In this course we ask how artistic and creative practices, grassroots initiatives and cultural collectives participate and intervene in debates around various societal issues. We will explore how art can engage with urgent topics such as climate change, inclusivity, and decolonial activism, and how you, as both a critical citizen and future cultural professional, can help set new agendas from the ground up.

This course deepens skills around acts of meaning making through cultural programming by looking at how these programmes can set agendas and creative impact in society and even take on an activist stance. You will also have the opportunity to put these ideas into practice. Working collaboratively, you will design an interventionist project – for example, creating and distributing a zine, organizing a public debate, presenting a manifesto, or staging a performative action in urban public space.

The activities and assignments for this course will consist of 1) the group-based interventionist project, supported by a research dossier and 2) your individually written project report about the project. The research dossier presents the preparatory data collection for the project that you compiled as a group. This may include literature reviews, field notes, interviews, journal entries, observation notes, draft designs, etc. The research report reflects on the outcomes and experience of, and insights gathered from, using the practice as research approach of addressing a specific societal issue with an interventionist project for public space.

Along the way, you develop professional and communicative skills needed for organizing public events and other forms of outreach, while also learning to critically reflect on how your work connects to broader societal and academic debates. By the end of the course, you will not only understand how art can respond to society – you will have experienced how it can actively shape it.

This course is the last course in the specialisation track Performing Arts and Creative Technologies.
 

Additional information

Priority rules
This course has priority rules and a waiting list. Your enrolment is guaranteed if you
- are a student in the BA Media and Culture and this course is part of your specialisation (verdiepingspakket)
- are a student in the BA Liberal Arts and Sciences or Taal- en Cultuurstudies and this course is part of your specialisation (kernpakket)
- are an exchange student and meet the course’s entry requirements

In all other situations, you will be placed on a waiting list if you enrol in this course. For any remaining slots in the course, lots are drawn among the students on the waiting list.

Schedule
Please note: the time slot shown here is not yet final, and may still be modified until the third Wednesday in September.