Using Arts to Generate Representations of Resistance to Hegemonic Understandings of ‘Deprived Communities'

This paper will explore how community representations produced through creative arts practices can be used to challenge and disrupt numerically based framings of health policy and practice.  Policies for health improvement in the most deprived localities in the UK tend to focus either on the impact of poverty and deprivation – but with little historical or cultural differentiation of the meaning of deprivation – or, most commonly, on the prevalence of ‘unhealthy behaviours’, with limited attempts to connect these with meaningful ways of life under varying conditions of disadvantage.  Whilst health inequalities continue to be a priority for the UK government, many of the policies designed to address ‘austerity’ have served further to stigmatise, blame and silence those who languish in the bottom population quintiles produced by standard indices of deprivation.  This paper will draw on theoretical development and early data collected from a three year research project, working in five neighbourhoods in Wales, Scotland and England.  In this project, academics from the social sciences and the arts and humanities together with creative artists and community members seek to use the arts to develop new modes of describing and representing who they are and where they live.  This experiment starts from the conviction that the creative arts, along with modes of analysis and critique derived from the humanities, can play a transformative role in a process of improving communication, dialogue and knowledge exchange as well as providing the resources of hope for forms of collective social action and agitation.  The paper will also discuss the implications for sociology of developing an epistemology that is nourished by the literary, visual, and performative arts, and how this might influence processes of knowledge exchange with policy makers.