Change is, undeniably, the real constant in the existence of both individuals and society. While social change has repeatedly been claimed as omnipresent (see Reicher & Haslam, 2013), we are still in need of theories that can account for the incredibly wide spectrum of societal transformation, from incremental to revolutionary, from local to global. It is not my aim in this chapter to provide such a theory. However, I will attempt to bring a new angle into a growing field of studies closely related to social change—creative activism . My interest in this area doesn’t have to do only with the fact that I am a creativity scholar and a social psychologist by training, but also with the importance of gaining a deeper understanding of activism as one of the key engines of change within community and within society. What distinguishes creative activism is the fact that it engages artistic skills without being reducible to art (Harrebye, 2016). At a more basic level, it designates activism that surprises us, that stands out as different, original, and potent when it comes to redefining the way we see and relate to the social world. Creative activism is thus not a sub-form of social activism but a quality of activist or socially engaged action. Street art, Internet memes, flash mobs, protests , and boycotts, to give just a few examples, can be characterized as more or less creative, more or less novel in their aims and the means employed to achieve them. And these means are, very often, explicitly artistic.
Artistic creative activism (or artivism), in this context, refers to the deliberate use of art within activist action. This is not the ‘high art’ of galleries or museums but a much more participative form of art grounded in everyday life, particularly in our communal living. Even when classic artistic images or techniques are used, they are appropriated and transformed in ways that can question societal norms, values, practices, and, oftentimes, our conceptions of art itself. Street art is an excellent example in this regard, and one I will come back to in this chapter. For the moment let us note, together with Edelman (1995), that politics builds on art just as much as art is guided by political values and discourses. There is no form of artistic expression that doesn’t rely on such values and discourses, even when the artist’s intention is not political in nature. Reversely, social and political life is infused by the images and values embedded in art as a way of seeing or constructing the world. And it is precisely this fundamental function of art that makes it quasi indispensable within creative activism . As Campana (2011) concludes, based on a review of other works:
The arts’ role in activism can include the communication of a movement’s or group’s worldview, opposition, and vision; facilitation of dialogue towards political and social consciousness for both participants and the broader public; creation and expression of collective identity and solidarity ; and working toward ‘cognitive liberation’, a critical transformation from hopeless submission to oppressive conditions to a readiness to change those conditions. (Campana, 2011, p. 281)
In other words, the use of art in activism and, more broadly, in social change, opens up the space of the possible, the space of imagination and creativity for both activists and their audiences. It is a space where reality becomes multiple and malleable, at least as experienced in art. However, such artistic depictions of the social world are not inconsequential. On the contrary, they both show and mobilize, reflect and transform, invite viewers not only to notice, but also to participate. This is because much of today’s artistic creative activism relies on public, socially engaged, participative, performative, and/or interactive art . It is, essentially, art that can ‘“disrupt everyday life and involve and inspire passersby’” (Boros, 2012, p. xi). As Boros (2012) continues, because it addresses everyone, artistic creative activism is “inherently democratic” (p. 5), “intended for the public and social spaces in our lives” (p. 6). Street art that carries social or political messages is, once more, emblematic in this regard. But why exactly is street art, and artistic creative activism more generally, important for social movements and potentially effective in delivering social change? The present chapter answers this question by pointing to creativity and wonder.
My main argument here is that creativity, and principally the experience of wonder situated at its core, can help us bridge art and society and explain the relation between activism and social change. In order to understand why this might be the case we need, first of all, to consider why creativity has been largely absent until now from theories of social change. Undeniably, many manifestations of activism for social change, including street art, can be considered creative. What prevents us from discussing them as such is a long legacy of seeing creativity as an individual, intra-psychological process that has little to do with society and much more with ‘creative domains’ such as the arts and sciences. Countering this approach, I review here a sociocultural model of creativity based on notions of perspective, reflexivity , and wonder. In particular, wonder, as an experience and active exploration of the possible, plays a vital role in creative action. What do these notions have to do with social change? Towards the end of the chapter I discuss and exemplify my claim that c reative activism participates in social change by enabling us to experience collective wonder. The chapter ends with a few considerations regarding the limits of creativity and art and also a possible explanation for why, even when seemingly failing, artistic creative activism still contributes to long-term social change.
Creativity and Social Change
Social change comes in many shapes and forms, but most of the time it involves social action or mobilization. In such contexts, social change “takes place as a result of human agency and intention to affect a given social environment based on the view that existing social conditions or relations are untenable” (Subašić, Reynolds, Reicher, & Klandermans, 2012, p. 62). For Harrebye (2016), social movements “consist of groups of people who share a collective identity centered on social solidarity (internally and in a certain way often with the surrounding society), a common identifiable cause, and ideas that are maintained and advocated over time” (p. 47). The human agency mentioned above, as well as the capacity to advocate for new ideas, can be discussed in terms of creativity. And yet, creativity is surprisingly absent from theories of social change. In a review of the literature within social and political psychology, Subašić et al. (2012, p. 62) mention traditional concepts in this area of study: social identity, intergroup relations, relatedness, minority influence, perceptions of the social world, group-based emotions, etc. The danger embedded in operating with many of these concepts, even if this is not the intention of the authors proposing them, is that of using reifying, often dichotomic categories: us versus them, minority versus majority, cooperation versus conflict, and so on. While many of these categories are not intrinsically static (see, e.g., studies of re-categorization processes; Gaertner, Mann, Murrell, & Dovidio, 1989), their research use tends to focus us on how things “are” (perceived, felt, or instituted) and less on how they “could be.” What is largely missing is thus a view of how identities, perceptions, and emotions are mobilized within social action to create a space for critical reflection about what is possible; in other words, a space for creativity and imagination in the social arena.
There are many reasons why creativity as a concept is absent from theories of social change. To begin with, creativity research, at least in psychology, has focused largely on individual attributes at the expense of social variables, including the study of how people create together (Glăveanu, 2010). Second, it oftentimes reduced creativity to cognition and different types of thinking (e.g., divergent, combinatorial, lateral), disconnecting idea generation from action (what most refer to nowadays as innovation rather than creativity; Anderson, Potočnik, & Zhou, 2014). Third, society rarely features as a domain of creative action, unlike art and science, design, etc. While notable artistic or scientific creations do concern society as a whole, there is little interest for the creativity involved in living together and solving communal problems (what I refer to as societal creativity; Glăveanu, 2015a). Finally, as Harrebye (2016, p. 114) also states, the idea of creativity has been tainted by its association with capitalism and consumerism, losing its critical edge. To create, according to the most common psychological definition, means to generate novelty and value (Amabile, 1996), and, unfortunately, this value is often considered in economic terms. The importance of creativity for the health of individuals and society, for transforming what is given in new and surprising ways, and, ultimately, for being at the heart of social change, escapes both creativity and social theorists.
What would a sociocultural rather than individual-based view of creativity bring to theories of social change? First and foremost, in sociology and political science, a regained focus on agentic individuals within the collective. Models of society, including social change, need to balance structural constraints and human agency in their depictions of the social world and, often, this is a very difficult task. Understanding creativity as a relational concept, taking place at the interface between self and other, between what exists in the situation and what is “not there” or “not yet there,” offers an exciting theoretical venue for addressing both person and society in their evolving interrelation. Second, psychology studies of social change are hindered primarily by what Reicher and Haslam (2013) rightfully call the “conformity bias,” manifested in rendering people “as puppets, driven by unchanging urges, incapable of addressing, let alone changing, their circumstances” (p. 114). By postulating a universal and static human nature and orienting it towards stability and familiarity, psychologists have little to add to understanding change, and even less fostering it. What including creativity in theories of human and social development offers is basically a correctio...