Making with Place Research Project Reflection

This report is a reflection on the Making with Place Research Project (MWP) conducted in 2020 by Phyllis Novak and SKETCH Working Arts in partnership with York University, and PhD candidate Charlotte Lombardo, with partial funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, SSHRC. This project engaged young people who have lived experience navigating marginalization, in mixed methods researchcreation and community-based participatory action research. During the global pandemic, COVID-19, these artists/researchers explored with us, arts practice and production in critical place inquiry to surface and generate knowledge invigorating new relationships with place, community and culture. We explored arts practice and production as affirmed tools for creative resistance and collective liberation particularly when positioning young people on the margins as leaders of culture and social change. In favour of co-creating with human and more-thanhuman collaborators, our creative activations in Toronto public spaces offered new spatiality disrupting settler colonial logics through communities of care, creativity, and regenerative reciprocity. Ultimately this project created community-based activist scholarship, through arts practice and production in collaboration with place, that revealed young people’s desires and intentions for community, culture and place. MWP artist/researchers propose these very relevant desires and intentions to manifest through: making art, particularly public art, that pertains to one’s life in the world; intentional regenerative reciprocity in creative and healing relationships with the earth to chart pathways beyond capitalism; mutual growth and care in community based on Dean Spade’s ethic of “solidarity not charity”; responsibility, accountability and advocacy to change oppressive language and practice used in the charitable sector, academic institutions and in social systems; collaborative research with communities to create lasting change; and anti-individualism in favour of developing and sustaining, communities of collective care.