This course is founded on the idea that all human beings can engage in art practices – music, theater, sculptures, painting, photography, etc. Art practices, which are expressed differently across the globe, can be inspiration, methods, and practices to advance self-healing and social justice. This course will be useful to all students, even those who do not consider themselves to be “artists.” The course will help students to incorporate self-healing and social justice into social work practice. For example, students will authentically connect to global efforts, such as the Campaign Against Racism (23 chapters in 10 countries), to dismantle structural racism by supporting local actions. Students from all pathways and disciplines will learn content on interprofessional (e.g., art therapy), community (e.g., advocacy), and global (e.g., theater of oppressed) practices. Students will learn how to explore artistic creation for self-healing while examining critical theories of race, gender, sexuality, ableism, and cultural identity vis-à-vis social work practices. Students will engage with art practices as a means of self-reflection (self-healing) and to advocate for myriad inequities.
Pathway Elective For
- Global Social Work Practice (Host)
Objectives
- Develop intersectional and critical practices to achieve social justice through art-based practices, specifically through community driven projects through ethical and equitable approaches that are centered in human rights and mobilizing of local and global communities.
- Demonstrate an understanding of the global capitalist project—war, colonization, extraction, democratization—and how art practices have been and can be used to advance social justice movements, to facilitate social change, protest, and resistance.
- Learn art-based techniques that can be used as restorative justice tools to personally heal, practice self-care, and resolve interpersonal—individual, families, communities—conflict.
- Analyze the continued colonization, commodification, and appropriation of art and identify actions to cease unethical practices.
- Analyze “art practices” as culturally constructed categories influenced by social, economic, and environmental factors and to use social justice and human rights as a lens to develop policy, practice, and/or research-related projects.
- Demonstrate understanding of issues related to accessibility of art practices in different global contexts (in other words, who has access to “the arts” and why is accessibility important?).
- Examine how the media influences the distribution and interpretation of art and to understand how the arts are deployed by the state in the disciplining, domination, and oppression of marginalized peoples and populations across the globe.