Transensus, Transculturalism, and Participatory Embodied Performing Arts: A Manifesto for Cultural Democracy Amidst Climate Mobility
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McIntosh, Hamish
Rowe, Nicholas
Madjar, Andrew
Mehta, Alesha
Piccolo, Emanuela
Guerinoni, Martina
Lämsä, Tiina
Salmi, Sara
Awi, Jane
Faik-Simet, Naomi
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Commissioned Report
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INTRACOMP
Abstract
Climate change and associated environmental, political, and economic impacts currently threaten democratic attitudes associated with equality, inclusion and diversity, across Europe and the world. Over the next 25 years, the anticipated scale of climate mobility will prompt an unprecedented growth in acculturation across Europe, which presents both opportunities and challenges for sociocultural cohesion. Anticipatory governance approaches therefore urgently seek co-designed policy solutions and strategies that can enable Europe to navigate the polycrises of this era; strategies and solutions that promote preparedness and support the transilience of communities across the continent. To advance such preparedness and transilience, lifelong learning in cultural awareness and expression becomes a highly significant educational endeavour, given the scale of acculturation during this period. Participatory arts are particularly relevant for engaging all children and young people in active, democratic processes of cultural deliberation and collaborative regeneration. Guided by the New European Bauhaus and the Porto Santo Charter for cultural democracy, participatory arts may advance critical and ethical approaches to superdiversity, through processes of collaborative worldbuilding. To explore this opportunity, the INTRACOMP (Intercultural and Transcultural Competence for Collaborative Cultural Expression) project has responded to the Horizon Europe call CL2-2024-Transformations-01-08-Arts and Cultural Awareness and Expression in Education and Training. The INTRACOMP Consortium brings together more than 50 scholars, educators, arts practitioners and administrators from 13 organisations in 12 countries across Europe and the world, in a transdisciplinary, cross-sectoral, multi-institutional, international examination that investigates: How can intercultural and transcultural expression be evidenced and assessed within arts education? As the outcome of the foundational theoretical task in the INTRACOMP project, this document critically examines contemporary academic literature associated with this research question, generating a manifesto for cultural democracy amidst climate mobility. Our manifesto presents several key ideological innovations that can guide INTRACOMP and like-minded initiatives as we address the climate crisis. The first is the conceptualisation of transensus, as a key outcome of deliberative democracy that transcends the determinist binaries of consensus and dissensus. Aligned with the Indigenous philosophy of tā-vā, transensus valorises the collaborative vibration experienced within liminal, imaginative states of possibility-thinking during democratic deliberation, thus enabling cultural democracy. We argue that transensus requires a strong transcultural competence; a disposition that extends beyond intercultural competence and purposefully values temporary and complex manifestations of culture. We further argue that participatory arts can contribute to the development of a transcultural competence, but such arts activities require a clearly rationalised participatory purpose, so as to avoid hegemonic and counter-hegemonic cultural encounters. This leads to our development of Participatory Embodied Performing Arts (PEPA) as a conceptual framework, purposefully designed to enable transcultural competence and experiences of transensus. Access to these encounters and experiences may be further broadened through engagement in virtual worldbuilding and posthuman approaches to collaboration. While these concepts present a speculative proposition, the INTRACOMP project seeks measures that can evidence the development of transcultural competence through PEPA. This requires the development of a complex and nested competence framework that foregrounds group competence amongst individual and ecological competences focused on human flourishing.Description
Keywords
culture, interculturalism, art, climate change, social inclusion, transensus, transculturalism, participatory embodied performing arts, cultural democracy
Source
Horizon Europe project INTRACOMP: Intercultural and Transcultural Competence Through Collaborative Cultural Expression. Project number: 101177351. University of Jyväskylä, Finland & Nord University, Norway. Retrieved from https://intracomp.info/d1-1-literature-review/
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Report Status: Public. Open access.