In a chapter entitled Water Power: Creativity and the unlocking of community knowledge Loraine explores the role of art in this process, its role in making meaning and bringing together the ideas, people and concepts that enable innovation. She also looks at those processes of creative facilitation that draw out ideas and generate the inspiration whereby the hands-on experience of communities can be brought to bear on issues that affect all our lives.

25^th June 2018 saw publication of Loraine’s article Our land: creative approaches to the redevelopment of London’s Docklands in a special editon of the International Journal of Heritage Studies edited by Katazyna Kosmala: Intangible heritage and post-industrial waterfront zones: Ways of seeing.

ABSTRACT

Large-scale re-development of post-industrial sites can easily railroad over the needs or wishes of its existing inhabitants, or at best involve them in peripheral consultation. However, when a community is highly organised and also collaborates with others to gather expertise and develop effective means of communication, it has the ability to re-envision a future that can meet the needs of all concerned. In the 1980s The Docklands Community Poster Project engaged with a cluster of waterfront communities, which embraced the arts in influencing the regeneration of the London Docklands. Close collaboration between local people, activists and artists led to a range of interventions implemented over a ten year period that included a series of large-scale photo-murals, travelling exhibitions, initiatives and events such as the People’s Armadas to Parliament and the People’s Plan for the Royal Docks. The article makes an argument for how and why art can be an effective tool in social transformation and highlights its role in documenting and making visible the intangible cultural heritage of the communities it serves.

In May 2018 Art as Social Action: An Introduction to the Principles and Practices of Teaching Social Practice Art was published by Allworth Press, New York. It contains a chapter by Loraine Leeson and Alberto Duman on Experience as Art: Fine Art Social Practice at Middlesex University, which draws on their experience of teaching the MA Art and Social Practice and BA Fine Art Practice at Middlesex University.

The book is edited by Greg Sholette and Chloe Bass who teach one of the few masters courses on this topic at Social Practice Queens, City University of New York with an aim of gathering together knowledge available to support teaching in this area.

With content arranged thematically around such topics as direct action, alternative organizing, urban imaginaries, anti-bias work, and collective learning, among others, Art as Social Action has created a comprehensive manual for teachers about how to teach art as social practice. Along with a series of introductions by leading social practice artists in the field, valuable lesson plans offer examples of pedagogical projects for instructors at both college and high school levels with contributions written by prominent socially engaged artists, teachers, and thinkers.