Creative Publics Final Report (Dec 2015)

"'Can art-making foster political engagement?'

This was the question behind Creative Publics, a roving, pop-up, voter engagement project that brought together artists, students and community members in Vancouver to make art inspired by political issues leading up to the Canadian federal election in October 2015.

Creative Publics was both a research project into new forms of creative political participation and a voter engagement project. As such, our overarching goals were to both uncover new knowledge around political engagement and to engage young Canadians in the election.

To achieve these goals our objectives were to:

• Address the lack of avenues for creative participation in federal elections by providing a platform for expression and political discussion;
• Contextualize the relationships between formal and non-formal political engagement processes;
• Explore how a collaborative process of producing artefacts, supervised and mediated by artists, can be used as tool to engage voters in reflexive dialogue;
• Decipher whether making art increased participants’ knowledge of election issues, their motivation to vote and the efficacy they feel as a voter;
• Experiment with new forms of voter engagement in order to develop and evaluate opportunities for innovation in democratic participation."

Published By

International Centre of Art for Social Change (ICASC)
http://www.icasc.ca

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