“Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits” can be read in article 27 in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This combined arts- and research-project aims to increase the possibility and opportunity for the participants, who are youth in 6th, 7th and 8th grade at an inner-city school in Oakland, California, to express themselves through art. It is also a democracy project as it gives them a way of using their freedom of expression and increases their understanding and, hopefully, feeling that what they think matters and is listened to.

This art-work-process is deeply connected to our experience that the strengthening of a person’s voice is an important way of increasing their resilience. The cloud that will be created represents not just protection from harm but is, hopefully, a source of healing. Violence breaks so much more than our bodies. It is a fundamental rupture in our sense of meaning and to restore this sense of meaning the experience of beauty, of agency and of community/love is paramount. These are the clouds that carry us.

As a research project it aims to explore how a community-made work of art contributes to the subjectification and resilience of the participants. After the project has been completed the youth will be interviewed in focus groups and asked about their experiences, and what, in hindsight, appears to them most meaningful. This will then be analyzed using Biesta's (2020) concept of subjectification, Tyson's (2019) work on Bildung and meaningfulness as well as Antonovsky's (1998, 1993) concept of Sense of coherence which is linked to health and well-being.

Arts-project outline:

We will create a magic and beautiful sculpture that looks like a cloud made on-site together with participants and able to hang from the ceiling or the wall. The cloud is made for a large number of crumpled pieces of paper upon which the participants have inscribed their thoughts. The cloud carries and protects the thoughts of the participants. It is an image of how their thoughts provide shade from the scorching sun, rain to the dry land and act as a source of imagination as we look into the cloud and find all kinds of shapes and forms in it. This connects our thoughts about ourselves and the world to issues of social and environmental sustainable development, equity and freedom where the cloud becomes the source of both inner and outer (spiritual and material) sustenance, protection and community. It is also symbolic that the cloud literally hovers between the earth and the heavens.

Research question:

In what ways can a community-made work of art contribute to the biographical well-being (ie. the sense that life has meaning and coherence) of the participants?

Since the project is exploratory it is difficult to fully outline its outcomes beforehand. The actual arts-project is scheduled for the last week of February and the analysis will follow in the spring.

The method consists mainly of the planned focus group interviews but participant observation will also be included as well as documentation and analysis of the writing of the participants.

As stated previously the expected outcomes remain vague since the study is exploratory but it is expected to contribute to our understanding of how artistic processes engage with the biographical development of youth.

Antonovsky, A. (1998). The sense of coherence: An historical and future perspective. In H. I. McCubbin, E. A. Thompson, A. I. Thompson, & J. E. Fromer (Eds.), Stress, coping, and health in families: Sense of coherence and resiliency (pp. 3–20). Sage Publications, Inc. Antonovsky, A. (1993). The structure and properties of the sense of coherence scale. Social Science & Medicine, 36(6). Biesta, G. (2020). Risking Ourselves in Education: Qualification, Socialization, and Subjectification Revisited. Educational Theory 70(1). Sjöström, J. & Tyson, R. (2022). Didaktik för lärande och bildning [Didactics for learning and Bildung]. Stockholm: Liber. Tyson, R. (2019). Bildning och praktisk klokhet i skola och undervisning [Bildung and practical wisdom in teaching]. Stockholm: Natur & Kultur.