By C4AA Co-Founder Stephen Duncombe My proselytizing here is of a political rather than religious nature. It isn’t the divine figure of Christ I am interested in but the purely historical Jesus, a radical Mediterranean Jewish peasant building a revolutionary movement two millennia ago. Jesus of Nazareth was an activist, and, judging by the two-thousand …
Continue reading “What Would Jesus Do? (as a Creative Activist)”
With a savvy entertainer in the White House, we need to really understand how entertainment works, and wield that knowledge like a flaming sword on a windy but beautiful hilltop. With a savvy entertainer in the White House, we need to really understand how entertainment works, and wield that knowledge like a flaming sword on a windy but beautiful hilltop. What …
As part of our Arts Action Academy in December 2016 in Dublin, sex workers, artists and activists created and performed this creative action to raise awareness about, and fight against, laws that criminalize sex workers. All of this was conceived and implemented by the Academy participants in 24 hours as the last day of our intensive AAA training. …
Continue reading “Artistic Action: Sex Worker Rights in Dublin”
Here are 5 things you can do if you want to make change in the world: 1. Steal from the Past Borrow from successful creative movements (video). Make time to be inspired by others (check out Actipedia). 2. Know How to Manipulate Change Minds Use cognitive and behavioral science to understand how to make change starting …
While having an autocratic, erratic and narcissistic madman as a president might be new to artistic activists in the US, this is standard operating procedure for activists in other parts of the world. In this webinar we talked with veteran South African activists Ishtar Lakhani and Marlise Richter to learn how to navigate, and effectively operate in, …
This is one in a series of webinars. You can see all of them here. You don’t need to watch all of them, or watch them in order, and they’re open to everyone – please share! See the list of all of our webinars. Feel free to share with friends. Donate to keep these webinars free.
Why Recalibrate Reality? Should artistic activists use our work to hold a mirror up to reality to make the invisible visible? Or should we use our talents to imagine new possibilities of what reality could be? Or can we do both? Steve and Steve give a brief course on the latest aesthetic and cultural theory, and …
Continue reading “How to Win Webinar #11: Recalibrate Reality”
Why a Webinar about Meetings? We’ve all been in a lot of action planning meetings lately, and some of them… are less than productive. This training is on how to lead Action Planning Meetings that don’t suck and are super creative and effective. Steve Lambert and Steve Duncombe give you tricks from their years of artistic …
Continue reading “How To Win Webinar #10: Make Your Meetings Inventive”
It’s a long wave. I think of everything as being interdependent or part of an ecosystem, philosophically and biologically. There are urgent moments of crisis where the waves are crashing on the land, which are the moments that activists quickly rise to. But then there’s the long waves, behind them, that are holding a space. …
Are you an artist or creative practitioner interested in challenging public perceptions about sex work in South Africa? If so, please apply to attend our Art Action Academy in May! In collaboration with SWEAT – Sex Workers Education & Advocacy Taskforce and Sonke Gender Justice, we invite artists (and creative practitioners of all kinds) interested …
Continue reading “Apply for the Johannesburg Art Action Academy”
Leading up to the Women’s March(es) on January 21, 2017, C4AA Co-Director Stephen Duncombe was asked to write about a “political object” for the web journal HiLoBrow. He chose to write about a protest sign he had made and carried at an earlier march.
In November of 2016, C4AA Co-Director Stephen Duncombe and School for Creative Activism alumnus Silas Harrebye were invited to Oslo Norway to do a presentation (with local actors!) at the National Theatre as part of the Public Calling conference. They later wrote up a version of this performance, sans actors, for Public Seminar, the web …
Continue reading “Can Art Save Us from Bullshit? The Practice of Making Political Art that Works”
As part of a collection of essays on The Democratic Public Sphere (edited by Henrik Kaare Nielsen, et al.) C4AA Co-Director Stephen Duncombe writes about the history of a protest as a performance, what this looks like in an age of global information flows, and the problems of protocols and interface between spectacular protests and …
Continue reading “Affect and Effect: Artful Activism and Political Impact”
In this article, published in Social Research in 2016, C4AA Co-Director Stephen Duncombe muses on the different ways in which activist art can “work,” In the process, presenting the patented C4AA mathematical formula for success. No kidding, well kinda kidding.
C4AA Co-Director Stephen Duncombe considers protest as a performance piece in this short 2013 article in Performance Research, using case studies from the Civil Rights campaign to desegregate Birmingham, Alabama to Occupy Wall Street.
How can progressives borrow and steal from pop culture to make real change? Pop culture can be read as a map to popular desire. In this video of our live webinar, Co-founder Steve Duncombe and Chair of our Board Pat Jerido of Leadership Matters Consulting show how to read the map and exploit the phantasmagoric …
Our founders (The Artist! The Historian!) got deep into the Slap Chop, the Snuggie, and the Ginsu 2000! They shared what they’ve learned from infomercials (and some heavy communications theory) and revealed some simple tools to better understand audiences and communicate persuasively to people who don’t already agree. Notes from the webinar Lambert will be …
In the Star Trek universe, Vulcans like Dr. Spock always think objectively and rationally. We’re not Vulcans. Human beings have a tendency toward self-deception – a trait that was a valuable part of human evolution and helped us survive over centuries. But fight or flight responses aren’t as needed or useful in everyday 2017. Steve …
Continue reading “C4AA Fundamentals #7: Stay Hopeful & Avoid Burnout”
This is one of the favorite brief exercises in our artistic activism trainings, and a great place to start. Step 1 Imagine that you are a superhero. Yes, a superhero. Like all superheroes you have special powers – we’ll get to that soon. You also have an outfit. You are very strong and powerful. The …
Steve and Steve were at the United Nations this week, where they gave a presentation to the Arts and Culture Exchange of the UN Development Program. Ostensibly about “new communications strategies to sell old ideas, like the UN”, the Steve’s presentation introduced the audience of largely UN communications staff to artistic activism, and led them …
