Reconfiguring Systemic Power Relations: A Collaborative Practice-Based Exploration of Inequality with Young People and Adults in Dublin

Abstract

This collaborative art practice-based thesis mobilises the concept of power as an analytical lens to examine a decade-long collaboration (2007-16) between its author/artist and a Dublin-based youth organisation, Rialto Youth Project. In opposition to the depoliticisation of inequality and associated insidious ethics of social inclusion, a collaborative methodological framework is foregrounded, producing dialogical encounters in which multiple power relations are visualised, challenged and reconfigured and where freedom is recognised as a lived contingent practice. Working across disciplines and in response to lived experiences of systemic inequalities, a series of transgenerational projects were developed to critically examine and respond to power relations at a personal, community and societal level, contributing new transdisciplinary knowledge across the fields of socially engaged art practice, youth work and education. The thesis comprises an introduction, two chapters and a conclusion. By considering the historical ontology of the practice and the formation of subject positions of those working in collaboration, chapter one outlines the construction and conceptualisation of power over time among a diverse group exercising political imagination. In articulating lived experiences of complex and interconnected systemic power relations, the second chapter examines the complex relationship of voice and listening in the public manifestations of the collaborative practice, in which truth speaks to power and politics is staged publicly through dialogical and transformative actions.