This booklet assembles all of the articles that we, the Plurality University Network team, published in 2022 within the ‘Collective Creative Practices for Transformation’ project, part of the Narratopias programme. It gives an overview of the work that we’ve accomplished: identifying and collecting projects from all around the world, meeting with practitioners, creating spaces for experimentations and discussions, identifying problems and questioning biases, and analyzing our own practice in light of the lessons learned. This booklet is a milestone towards the objective of framing a field of practice.
Context
Narratopias is a collaborative and open programme to organize, on a global scale, a collective response to the recurring call for ‘new narratives’. An invitation to embark on a search for alternative, transformative narratives as well as the practices that make them emerge, and turn them into the seeds of concrete changes. Within Narratopias, we created a collaborative library of Transformative Narratives, from all over the world, and open-source tools and games to invent, play with, and continue narratives.
During the first year of Narratopias, we met with groups who concretely used narratives (in the broadest sense) as a base for transformation, and learned that how and by whom narratives are produced, used and discussed, matters as much as their content. We therefore decided in 2022 to focus on collective creative practices.
The ‘Collective Creative Practices for Transformation’ project
We define a collective creative practice as follows:
A project led by individuals or organizations (artists, researchers, activists, public institutions, NGO’s..) who use artistic formats (fictional writing, theater, design fiction, etc.) with groups to open up the paths for transformations, by:
- Raising awareness
- Building capacities
- Creating new spaces for debate
- Exploring new possibilities and paths
The project intends to bring those who develop these practices together, in order to:
- Learn from one another: Agoras (encounters wherein practitioners share their experience and methods), interviews of practitioners and researchers…
- Give more visibility to what they do via a Library of Collective Creative Practices ;
- Define and delineate this field of practice (describe the common grounds, problematize the differences, distinguish them from other practices…) ;
- And in the future, address shared challenges.
- In this booklet, you will find all of our 15 publications since the beginning of the project, structured around three main articles that develop our first lessons learned.
