AMASS Narrative Platform

Acting on the margin: Arts as social sculpture

The arts can move people, educate societies and question widely accepted narratives. The arts can also shed new light on the past, hold up a mirror to contemporary life and launch new perspectives for the future. AMASS, an arts-based action research project, aims to create concrete opportunities for people to come together and accompany artists as agents in creative projects and interpretations. This multidisciplinary project will consider a wide field of disciplines and through participatory approaches, it will use practical methods from the field of service design to explore the role of the arts in mitigating societal challenges, aiming at capturing, assessing and harnessing the societal impact of the arts and further generate social impact through policy recommendations. It will also identify, explore, collate, evaluate and analyse existing and new innovative productions, experiments and case studies from the perspective and the physical positioning of European countries ‘on the margins’ in the underserved northern, southern, western and eastern regions.

Aims and results

Aims

Developing multidisciplinary methods for capturing, assessing and harnessing the societal impact of the arts
Reducing isolation amongst women, children and minority groups from peripheral EU regions through various forms of participation in the arts
Educating women and children through various educational models and philosophies of participation that are informed by arts-based approaches
Evaluate and develop new policy frameworks for using arts to overcome societal challenges
Valuing and learning through alternative knowledge systems with the purpose of decolonising institutions, enable communication and implement policies

Expected Results

Culturally marginalised and / or socially underprivileged groups will express their problems and collaborate on finding solutions through innovative arts education practices.
Tackle exclusion and various forms of poverty by formulating, experimenting with and testing innovative art-based practices aimed at mutual understanding, dialogue and civic participation.
Prioritise, recognise and promote the value of creativity within the peripheries of Europe.
Acknowledge creative potentials and act on creative opportunities.
The integration of the arts in the strategic overall and regional goals and policy making processes of the EU that relates to tackling a variety of exclusion issues (e.g. cultural, educational, skills)

AMASS European Testbed

This European-wide learning and mentoring network supported by targeted service solutions such as training offerings for artists, community members and leaders, organisations, and policy makers will provide an opportunity to experience mentored innovation - an educational model successfully employed for facilitating the introduction of computer-supported teaching and learning in Roma schools (Kárpáti & Dorner, 2012).

The model proposes the stages of:

collaborative needs analysis;
development of strategies for educational interventions based on local needs;
mentored adaptation of good practice;
introduction of local strength;
creation of synergy between local resources and innovation requirements;
facilitating the realisation of the project
peer review of results;
collaborative planning of the next iteration.

More information

Partners

University of Lapland (ULAP), Finland

Associacaão de Professores de Expressão e Communicacão Visual (APECV) (Joint applicant), Portugal

Univerzita Karlova (CU) (Joint applicant), Czeh Republic

Universita ta Malta (UOM) (Joint applicant), Malta

Swedish School of Library and Information Science, Högskolan i Borås (HB) (Joint applicant), Sweden

Budapesti Corvinus Egyetem (CUB) (Joint applicant), Hungary

PACO Design Collaborative (PACO) (Joint applicant), Italy

University of Leeds (ULeeds) (Joint applicant), UK

Experts and researchers

Satu Miettinen (Principal Investigator, ULAP Lead)

Melanie Sarantou (Coordinator / Research Fellow, ULAP)

Maria Huhmarniemi (Research Fellow, ULAP)

Mirja Hiltunen (Research Fellow, ULAP)

Sofia Lindström Sol (Research Fellow, HB Lead)

Andrea Kárpáti (Research Fellow, CUB Lead)

Raphael Vella (Research Fellow, UOM Lead)

Ângela Saldanha (Research Fellow, APECV Lead)

Tang Tang (Research Fellow, ULeeds Lead)

Marie Fulkova (Research Fellow, CU Lead)

Silvia Remotti (Research Fellow, PACO Lead)

Duration

01.02.2020 → 31.01.2023

Funding

European Commission: € 2 977 330

Overall Budget € 472,285.00

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 870621