Call for Submissions

Call for Book Submissions

Creating together: Participatory, community-based and collaborative arts practices and scholarship across Canada

(Wilfrid Laurier University Press)

Co-editors:

Diane Conrad (University of Alberta) & Anita Sinner (Concordia University)

This anthology explores arts-based research as an emerging new paradigm approach to arts practice and scholarship across Canada. Arts-based research combines artistic processes and scholarship in creating and disseminating knowledge through any of the myriad of available art forms including theatre, visual arts, music, dance, folk arts/crafts and digital arts and more. Specifically, this collection will focus on a growing trend in arts research and qualitative research generally, that takes participatory, community-based or collaborative approaches which encourage scholars to work together and/or with other professionals and/or community groups to explore questions, create knowledge and express understandings that may not be accessible or re-presentable through other means.

Participatory arts-based research uses artistic processes for engaging participants in all stages of the inquiry aimed at producing practical knowing to benefit of the community. Community-based arts research has community/public space at the heart of practice. Collaborative arts approaches can involve multi-leveled, multi-layered and interdisciplinary collaboration with participation from diverse perspectives and experiences, including university colleagues and students, online participants, prison inmates, street youth, and artist collectives, immigrant communities, persons with disabilities and seniors groups. This book will bring together a variety of examples of arts research that focus on practice as well as some more theoretical/methodological writings, all with specific relevance to the Canadian context and the particularly rich variety of this work being done across disciplines throughout Canada. Attention in this collection will be given to how authors themselves engage in these key terms of participatory, community and collaborative arts in relation to their work, embracing diversity over common definition.

We invite submissions that are new, unpublished exemplary studies – self-reflective and/or examples of practice – that showcase participatory, community-based and collaborative Canadian arts research across art forms and disciplines in the humanities, social sciences and health sciences including education, nursing, sociology and the fine arts. Questions that the text hopes to address can include, but are not limited to: What is distinct about arts research in Canada? How do the arts support research scholarship in our country? In what ways do the arts support participation and collaboration in creating understanding? Why do the arts matter across disciplines and diverse communities of practice? 

Submissions: 12-15 pages (electronic, Word documents only, Chicago Manual of Style). Please double-space your chapter, references and endnotes. Images are welcome (300 dpi, TIFF files only, colour (CMYK format) or B/W) and should be included at the end of your submission. All visual material should include permission letters (if applicable), credit and source lines, and captions.

Please include a biography of 50 words. All submissions will be peer-reviewed before acceptance. Decisions will be based, in part, on representation from a variety of art forms, disciplines and geographic location. If accepted, please be prepared to revise your submission and/or have your submission edited as required. Pending funding, authors of accepted submissions will be invited to attend a conference in Montreal in May to present and discuss submissions.

Send questions and submissions to: dhconrad@ualberta.ca or anita.sinner@concordia.ca

DEADLINE: February 15, 2012

Advertisement