Practicing the Social

Practicing the Social: Entanglements of Art and Social Justice brings together artists, activists, and scholars who use creative practice to reimagine how we live and build more just worlds.

This collection centers disability, Deaf, Mad, neurodivergent, Indigenous, Black, Brown, queer, fat, and aging arts and cultures, highlighting creative practices that reconfigure the social from the ground up. Across five sections-Designing, Enacting, Troubling, Analyzing, and Transforming the Social-contributors examine how art cultivates access justice, deepens relationality, unsettles dominant narratives, and seeds alternative futures.

Spanning dance, feasting, storytelling, video art, curatorial and archival activism, youth and community arts, creative pedagogies and digital worldmaking, the chapters demonstrate how creative acts intervene in colonial, white supremacist, ableist, and neoliberal systems, while opening pathways for connection, coalition, and collective flourishing. In dialogue with feminist, decolonial, and disability-led traditions, the project is accompanied by an accessible digital archive that extends these conversations through curated multimedia offerings. Together, contributors ask: What does activist art do? Who is it for? How do access, power, and place expand what becomes possible in artful justice desiring work?

The book demonstrates how creative practices can generate “ripples” of change, small, relational gestures that accumulate into counter-hegemonic possibilities. Working at the intersection of art and justice, Practicing the Social offers artists, educators, organizers, librarians, and researchers vital methods and imaginaries for reconfiguring the social in accessible and life-affirming ways. It invites readers into everyday acts of worldmaking and into artistic interventions as catalysts for ushering in more just, difference-embracing futures.