Introduction

In line with the aims of the Rethinking Community Development series, and in common with the other volumes published to date, this book reflects a commitment to theorising ‘issues and practices in a way that will encourage diverse audiences to rethink the potential of community development’. For us, the editors, this volume extends our longstanding interest in the potentially rich dialectical relationship between the arts, culture and community development (Meade and Shaw, 2007; 2011; Shaw and Meade, 2013; Meade, 2018a). Taking it as axiomatic that community development's theory and practice are continuously reconstituted for different purposes and different contexts, this book draws attention to some of the diverse ways that groups of people collectively make sense of, re-imagine or seek to change the personal, cultural, social, economic, political, or territorial conditions of their lives, while using the arts as their means and spaces of engagement. Across its chapters, the book explores the following broad themes and questions:

• • How can we conceptualise the relationship between community development and arts/ cultural practice? What diverse forms does this relationship take in contemporary contexts? How might democratic strategies and commitments overlap and nurture each other within this relationship?

• • How do communities of people engage with, utilise, make sense of and make sense through particular artforms and media? How can we understand the aesthetic and associated meanings of such engagements?

• • How are the power dynamics related to authorship, resources, public recognition and expectations of impact negotiated within community-based arts processes?

• • How do economistic and neoliberal rationalities shape arts processes and programmes in community contexts? To what extent are dominant rationalities being resisted and challenged through arts practices?

In this introductory chapter, we consider some frameworks, debates and dilemmas that lie at the core of any encounter between community development and the arts. Following some brief reflections on the limits and potential of community development as a democratic praxis, we explore the disputed concepts that are ‘art’ and ‘culture’. This chapter also outlines how the relationship between community development and the arts has been constituted and problematised, and the diverse ways it is constructed in this collection. We consider the concept of cultural democracy, how it is variously engendered and extended through the arts, while also recognising how the arts risk being colonised by instrumental and neoliberal rationalities.