Knowing Ways:
Critical Learning in Arts Practice
8th, 9th & 10th September 2011
NORTH EDINBURGH ARTS to host INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE on APPLIED ARTS
Leading activists and writers RAJA SHEHADEH and JACK MAPANJE to deliver keynote addresses
Over three days around a hundred artists, activists and academics from around the world will gather at North Edinburgh Arts Centre in Pilton, to explore developments in the ways arts practices can engage critically with society.
In recent decades, in the face of increasing and ever-changing social, political and economic pressures and crises in diverse societies, practitioners in the visual and performing arts have produced a growing range of approaches through which ordinary citizens use the arts to explore and express their situations, challenging the structures and people who limit their development. This conference brings together a wide range of practitioners from the Americas, Europe, Asia and Africa, to share experiences and exchange ideas.
Through a lively mix of formal presentations, workshops, exhibitions, screenings and performances, we will encounter work with Somali refugees in Finland, with Hispanic Americans, with disabled groups in Northern Ireland, with tribal peoples in Orissa, India, with Black and Asian youth in Liverpool and Bradford, and many more projects, from the Shetlands to Croatia, Malaysia to Muirhouse. We will explore issues to do with the design and delivery of work, ethics, funding, pedagogy, political pressures, and so on.
Undoubted highlights of the conference will by keynote addresses from Palestinian lawyer, human rights activist and author Raja Shehadeh, winner of the 2008 Orwell Prize, and Malawian poet and academic Jack Mapanje, winner of the Rotterdam International Poetry Prize and the Pen Freedom to Write Award, who was imprisoned for three years because of his writing.
For further information, please contact Conference Director, Stephanie Knight: stephaniejaneknight@gmail.com
Full conference details available at http://www.northedinburgharts.co.uk/knowing_ways.php
The conference has been organized in association with: Amnesty International, North Edinburgh Arts, The University of Glamorgan & The George Ewart Evans Storytelling Centre, The Institute of International Health & Development, The University of Glasgow Business School, The Learning for Democracy network, Intellect publishers and Creative Scotland.
