Grassroots Creativity Research Articles

Grassroots creativity in arts and culture: a comparative analysis of case studies from the Balkans

This article examines self-organised grassroots initiatives in the creative and cultural sector of the Balkans, a region that has experienced significant socio-political shifts over the past three decades. The study focuses on three distinct case studies: Embros Theatre in Athens, Greece; Lumbardhi Cinema in Prizren, Kosovo; and Uzina Cultural Centre in Tirana, Albania. Theoretically, it draws on theory of agonistic practices (Mouffe 2005, 2013) and theories of care and repair (Graziano and Trogal 2017; Puig de la Bellacasa 2017; The Care Collective 2020) to analyse the formation, operation, and collective activities of these initiatives. The paper posits that grassroots initiatives emerge as counter-spaces in response to inadequate cultural infrastructure, limited funding and investment and scarce resources. At the same time, they exemplify more inclusive and “care-full” work models, carrying also the potential to spark change in their local communities by developing support networks.

Communicating urgency through humor: School Strike 4 Climate protest placards

Protest placards are an important part of School Strike 4 Climate (SS4C) protest culture and illustrate how protesters view, understand and share their environmental concerns. Many of the placards use humor to convey the messages of their creators. Bringing together science communication and humor studies, this paper examines the communicative functions of humor in Australian SS4C posters by asking to what extent protest signs can be understood as a vehicle of science communication. The paper reveals how humorous protest placards become the means of grassroots creativity, exploring bottom-up science communication in an ambiguous, but accessible and enjoyable form.

Experimental co-production of knowledge to adapt to environmental change in northern India

Poor farmers are particularly vulnerable to environmental stressors and often rely on traditional knowledge and grassroots creativity to help them to adapt. Such adaptation can be enhanced using other knowledge sources, but this requires greater understanding of the processes of knowledge co-production among scientists, local communities and state actors. In this study we undertook knowledge co-production on an experimental basis with two contrasting communities: smallholder farmers in Jind (Haryana) and Adi women in East Siang district (Arunachal Pradesh). We found that the Jind farmers displayed grassroots creativity in coping with salinity induced stresses to rice-wheat cropping systems, while Adi women applied their traditional knowledge of food based on namdung (Perilla ocymoides, a local plant species) to cope with climate variability that affected fermentation. Jind farmers perceived the process of knowledge co-production as moderately credible and salient, but the legitimacy of the exercise was compromised by the relatively low level of participation by state actors. The farmers rated the practical outcomes of the co-produced zero-till wheat as low to moderate for combating salinity-induce risks but as high for a community rice nursery. The knowledge co-production process was considered more credible and salient among younger Adi women than older women, and the utility of the Adi women’s co-produced adaptive practices were rated as moderate to high for reducing the impacts of climate variability on namdung based foods. In both cases, an emergent property of the knowledge co-production exercise was creation of a knowledge network that has the potential to lead to ongoing enhanced adaptation to environmental change. Insights from the study could help improve knowledge co-production in similar social-ecological systems, and can be integrated with environmental change policies.

When protest humor is not all fun: The ambiguity of humor in the 2017 Romanian anti-corruption grassroots mobilization

This article focuses on the ambiguous ideological work of citizen-produced humor in protest. Using the case of the 2017 Romanian anti-corruption protests as empirical data, the article shows how humor can simultaneously signal grassroots creativity and resistance to power structures, and reproduce conservative gender and class hierarchies. Unlike other types of texts, humor presents itself as an innocent and light message, absolved of the need for critical scrutiny. However, protest studies need to engage in a more nuanced way with the ideological articulation of democratic politics via protest humor by asking not only how humor helps protest communication, but also how it achieves shared enjoyment, for whom, and to what consequences for the ideological articulation of democratic politics. The article concludes by proposing that researcher reflexivity can afford a new sensitivity to the ambiguousness of protest humor.

Can a Park Save the City?: Hopes and Pitfalls of the London National Park City

This article enquires into the transformative potential of the London National Park City. In doing so it situates the vision for, the becoming, and the Charter of an urban national park in relational thinking about metropolitan nature and sustainable urbanisation. It looks at hopes and pitfalls of the London National Park City in the face of growing socio-environmental injustice and the climate crisis. First, the article explores the National Park City as a form of ecological reflexivity and social practice in the context of relational concepts of nature and the city. Second, it examines opportunities offered by the Park City with respect to urban environmental sustainability, health and wellbeing, connected diversity, socio-economic inclusion and political agency. Third, it looks at pitfalls of the National Park City relating to environmental gentrification, as well as to trade-offs between grassroots creativity and capability to bring about material change. Last but not least, the article advocates for negotiation of synergies between ‘green’ and ‘grey’ urban natures as a strategy to address the climate crisis.

Place Matters: Rooting Conservation in Community

Abstract City Lore’s Place Matters program fosters places that nurture and support grassroots creativity and community engagement in an urban environment. This essay explores the diverse strategies that the program has utilized, beginning with its roots in the Endangered Spaces program of the late 1980s to its full realization as the Place Matters program.

Rethinking urban entrepreneurialism: Bristol Green Capital – in it for good?

ABSTRACTUrban entrepreneurialism is generally characterized by a series of spectacular events, organized and orchestrated by powerful actors. Recently, this has given rise to a series of urban policy agendas that have become ubiquitous across the world. This paper draws attention to an emergent form of urban entrepreneurialism that privileges environmentalism, social inclusion and grassroots creativity. Based on the 2015 European Green Capital process taking place in Bristol in the United Kingdom, this paper shows how the European Green Capital Award is being used to engage a large and diverse range of organizations in the name of the Bristol Green Capital Partnership. We argue that rather than reiterating narratives of urban entrepreneurialism as dominated by narrow economic agendas and being socially exclusionary, this form of urban entrepreneurialism encourages us to look at cities as places that can be coproduced in context-sensitive ways by multiple entities. The paper is informed by primary data gathered through fieldwork conducted over 2014 and 2015, including primary documents, key informant interviews and participant observation.

Rural cultural resourcefulness: How community music enterprises sustain cultural vitality

This paper explores how musical performance and expression catalyse rural cultural resourcefulness amidst uncertainty and change. We describe and then challenge conceptions of rural vulnerability and resilience amidst substantial social, environmental and economic change. Rural populations are increasingly constituted as vulnerable subjects within state-expert modelling of economic and environmental resilience. Yet, cultural resources and capacities are seldom acknowledged. Community music provides an often invisible and overlooked example. In rural locations music may struggle to be a commercially viable industry, but takes different forms in diverse community music enterprises, including non-profit clubs, orchestras, ensembles, choirs and festivals. Such enterprises sustain engaged music participation despite challenges of isolation and lack of critical mass, and enable people to adjust to change and develop social networks. In so doing, community music contributes to an evolving, prosaic sense of rural cultural resourcefulness. We document how rural Australian musicians negotiate isolation, distance, and new circumstances, and foster alternative spaces for creativity. Geographic and socio-economic limitations triggered those with an insatiable desire to make and perform music to create their own opportunities through grassroots creativity. From this quotidian example we challenge state/expert conceptions of rural resilience. Resourceful creativities – focused on cultural vitality, process and everyday rewards rather than commercial successes – illustrate how rural people sustain cultural life amidst hardship, isolation and change.

Constructing solidarity as resistive and creative agency in austerity Greece

Recent scholarship on the global financial crisis and its geographical underpinnings has highlighted its macro-economic causes and variegated effects in Europe and beyond. Drawing on the case of Greece, this paper contends that these discussions fall short in uncovering the social impact of the European crisis and austerity politics introduced since 2010. In adding to debates that call for nuanced approached to crises, through the very forms and means people and communities contest and subvert these ‘from below’, the paper discusses solidarity, its meaning and practices, in constructing resistance to austerity and grassroots creativity. In particular, it shows how solidarity initiatives and networks have acted as survival means in the face of a social reproduction crisis for vulnerable social groups and, at the same time, opened up spaces for political struggle against austerity to unfold. Furthermore, it interrogates the formation of a social/solidarity economy as an alternative platform for re-instituting socio-economic relations in an era of austerity. Finally, through reflecting upon the role of the solidarity movement, the paper critically assesses their potential in foregrounding a political project of social transformation, in-the-making and still at stake. The article draws on engaged ethnographic research, conducted in Athens, Greece, between 2012 and 2013.

«SMART CITIES» OF THE DEBT CRISIS: GRASSROOTS CREATIVITY IN MEDITERRANEAN EUROPE

Αυτό το άρθρο κριτικάρει τις τρέχουσες, νεοφιλελεύθερες εννοιολογήσεις για την «Έξυπνη Πόλη» και την Υπόθεση της Θερμοκοιτίδας, εισάγοντας τη λαϊκή δημιουργικότητα και την αλληλεγγύη στη λογική τους. Επιχειρηματολογούμε ότι η κρίση στη Νότια Ευρώπη ανοίγει δρόμους για μια λαϊκή εκδοχή της Έξυπνης πόλης, μιας πόλης με υβριδικούς δημόσιους και κοινούς χώρους, όπου το εικονικό και το υλικό συγχωνεύονται και η λαϊκή δημιουργικότητα συνδυάζει τεχνολογία και γνώση, καθώς βασίζεται κυρίως στη μαζική χρήση ψηφιακών τεχνολογιών και σε ένα υψηλά καταρτισμένο νεαρό πληθυσμό. Κατασκευάζονται τυπολογίες για πολλούς τύπους διαφοροποιημένων συλλογικοτήτων, οικονομιών και παραγωγικών πρωτοβουλιών. Κριτικάρονται εκ θεμελίων οι σημερινές εκ των άνω στρατηγικές Οριενταλισμού, στιγματισμού και καταστολής κάθε κινητοποίησης, εναλλακτικού πολιτικού λόγου, φαντασίας και δημιουργικότητας, ως υπεύθυνες για την ίδια την κρίση. Τίθενται ερωτήματα πολιτικής και διερευνάται σχεδιασμός με στόχο την ενδυνάμωση της λαϊκής δημιουργικότητας στο πλαίσιο της ψηφιακής κοινωνίας.

The micro-movie wave in a globalising China: Adaptation, formalisation and commercialisation

While user-generated short online videos have existed since the emergence of video sharing sites in China, they have undergone a process of formalisation and commercialisation, culminating in the wave of micro-movies in recent years. By addressing the wider context of globalisation alongside relevant state policies and shifting viewing habits, this article analyses the local and global causes of this wave. It offers evidence that illustrates how online video service providers in China have adapted in a changing industry landscape as they negotiate state policies, advertiser interests and user preference. It then examines the production and distribution dynamics, where professional producers draw on social media, grassroots creativity and creative talents in regional markets. Finally, it discusses the cultural implications of this process in terms of both the nature and flow of creativity. Based on these analyses, the article also sheds light on the interplay between the state and the market in the context of globalisation and marketisation of media sectors, which becomes more complicated when the state-owned or controlled media enter the emerging market sectors.

Re-imagining America: Jeff Smith, Herman Melville, and national dreamscapes

A recurring gag in Jeff Smith's acclaimed graphic novel series Bone (1991–2004) is that Moby-Dick (1851) is a snoozer. But, as we argue, Herman Melville's masterpiece puts other characters to sleep not because it is dull but because its most ardent advocate – protagonist Fone Bone himself – is a New Critic bent on divorcing the novel from the context in which it was created or might be read. By contrast, Bone's frequent invocations of Moby-Dick (Smith's favourite novel) recontextualize Melville, transforming the book from aesthetic artefact into a critical imagining of contemporary America. To borrow Henry Jenkins's assessment of Ricardo Pitts-Wiley's theatrical adaptation of Meville's novel, Smith sees Melville ‘as part of a larger process of sampling and remixing stories and themes already in broader cultural circulation gives us a way to think about the poetics and politics of contemporary grassroots creativity’. The most successful example of the 1990s’ comics artists’ self-publishing movement, Bone samples and remixes high culture and low, the epic and the comic, allegory and adventure in order to transform both the nineteenth-century novel and the twentieth-century comic into a complex, contradictory meditation on power, nation, and citizenship in America at the millennium.

Grassroots creativity and community in new media environments: Yarn Harlot and the 4000 knitting Olympians

This paper draws out the links between creativity, textuality and social relations in an online environment. It argues that the textual and social are often mutually constitutive. To ignore the textual aspects of online community or the social aspects to online texts is to erase at least some of their cultural significance. Using the blog of knitting writer 'Yarn Harlot' as a case study, the paper looks at the way the aesthetic and social aspects of the community formed around this blog are entwined.

A River Without Tributaries—Liberating the Mind Through Harnessing Grassroots Creativity

A River Without Tributaries—Liberating the Mind Through Harnessing Grassroots Creativity