Humanity & Society

This article addresses the use of art in the University of Puerto Rico student movement of 2010 to achieve social movement outcomes, such as mobilization and collective identity. More specifically, this paper addresses two major research questions. One, what forms of art were present in the UPR student movement? Two, what impact do artistic objects and performances have on the movement, from the perspective of student activists and artists? Drawing upon 25 hours of observational data and 19 interviews with student activists, faculty, and artists, this paper demonstrates how activists incorporate multiple art forms, not only traditional forms like protest songs, but also innovative forms like street theatre. Incorporating a broad repertoire of art, the movement appealed to a broad population, as well as created a dynamic movement. These questions are critical for understanding recent global movements that rely upon creative and artistic tactics for resistance. However, despite the “cultural turn” among social movement scholars, few have taken seriously the use of art in activism, particularly the ways in which multiple forms of art may be used within one single movement. The case of the student movement of the UPR provides an opportunity to explore up-close the various ways that art may be present within a movement, as well as to uncover how these forms of art operate within the movement and impact on the overall movement.

African American spoken word art offers a window through which to explore how a cultural site of creative and artistic inquiry can simultaneously serve as a site of social analysis and change. Specifically, moving beyond the realm of pure aesthetics, the author explores the ways African American verbal art has functioned as a site of public knowledge and everyday politics—important though commonly overlooked features of social change projects. To make this case, the author conceptualizes culture, knowledge, and politics as a tightly connected trinity of social phenomena, thereby opening the door for an analysis of how a cultural object such as spoken word can simultaneously operate as a site of knowledge production and political practice. Next, using a genealogical approach, the author identifies patterns that appear across different black American verbal art forms in order to develop a typology of features characteristic of African American spoken word traditions. This typology highlights a constellation of themes that, collectively, shed light on how public knowledge and everyday politics can contribute to social change. Throughout this analysis, the author considers how this typology provides a broader framework for understanding the specialized political practices and public knowledge projects employed by present-day young adult spoken word performance poets, drawing upon her ethnographic fieldwork for support. Such a framework can encourage us to rethink existing models of social activism and invite us to consider the unique role of art in the pursuit of social justice and change.

This research note presents an overview of how and why social researchers influenced by critical perspectives are using fiction as a means of producing and disseminating research. Over the past two decades fiction has increasingly been used by social researchers as a means of building critical consciousness, unsettling stereotypes, accessing hard-to-get-at dimensions of human experience and extending public scholarship. This research note reviews how fiction has grown as a research practice within the context of the growing interdisciplinary field of arts-based research practices. The piece ends with examples of academic novels and a play written from queer, feminist, and critical race theoretical perspectives.

In order to better understand connections between music, healing from trauma, and feminism, in the summer of 2009 I began interviewing and observing women who were fans of the musician Tori Amos. One outcome of this research was the large percentage of women who identified as a feminist and acknowledged that their feminism was influenced by Amos’ displays of feminism in her music and artistic expression. Further, many of the women found themselves motivated to action because they were inspired by Amos’ lyrics, live shows (which are as many parts feminist activism as they are rock shows), and Amos’ work with the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network (RAINN). Because most fan-based scholarship presents women as the “fanatical” fan, studies which examine female fans and the links between activism, music, and art are rare. A result of this is limited portrayal of women in popular culture. This article serves attempts to challenge this portrait and serves as a call for further research in order to present a more clear definition of a female fan.