Agency and voice enabled

Full description

This outcome is about how engagement in cultural activity can contribute to an individual’s agency and voice in the community. By agency and voice, we mean the ability and freedom an individual has to express their opinions (about the world)in public and act on those opinions. To do this an individual should be confident that it is safe to express their opinions, their voice will be heard, and their ideas are welcomed. Having agency and voice is important for civic engagement as people are more likely to be involved if they feel they can influence change.

Theory underpinning this outcome

Agency can be described as having the freedom to act deliberately, independently and with choice (Lister, 2004). Having agency and voice is important for civic engagement as believing that your voice and actions can effect community change is a factor in people’s participation in civic action (Watts & Guessous, 2006). Young people are more likely to be politically involved and engaged in the community if they believe that they can influence change (Hope & Jagers, 2014; Leath & Chavous, 2017). This can also have an effect on the individual wellbeing with civic engagement linked to greater self-esteem and social skills (Sherrod, Torney‐Purta, & Flanagan, 2010;) as well as encouraging feelings of belonging (Flanagan & Levine, 2010). Programs designed to promote agency in young girls in sub-Saharan Africa have shown that providing safe spaces for girls to express their opinions, take risks and promote their own interests have resulted in increased well-being (Dettori & Rao Gupta, 2018)

Evidence that this outcome occurs

Young adults who had intensive arts experiences in high school are more likely to show civic-minded behavior than young adults who did not. They take an interest in current affairs, as evidenced by comparatively high levels of volunteering, voting, and engagement with local or school politics. In many cases, this difference appears in both low and high-SES groups (Catterill, 2012).

Respondents who reported both creative and attendance based arts activity were six times as likely to do volunteer or charity work in their community, although this analysis does not explain causality (National Endowment for the Arts, 2008).

Activities

(This item is currently in development. Updates will be posted here as they are completed.)

Processes

Animating Democracy offer the following common factors that characterise successful arts and civic engagement activities:

• understanding of context —understanding the context for the social or civic concern, current other engagement efforts, who has taken leadership, etc. to ensure the integrity of goals, relationships, and the credibility of the project.
• tapping the power of creativity—fully tap the unique qualities of the art, artistic process, and creativity for ways to encourage meaningful engagement. The quality of engagement often goes deeper faster when people are involved in making art together.
• facilitating with skill—In dialogue experiences, those that are most substantive and transformative have deft guides who are able to create a sense of trust, respect, safety, and make perceptive connections between the art and the issue.
• providing a range of opportunities— look for multiple and varied opportunities for engagement in the trajectory of planning and implementing a whole project as well as what might happen after its conclusion. Frequent and varied sustained opportunities for engagement allow different stakeholders and publics to more readily participate, involve people in various ways to accommodate differences, and can provide important sustained attention to a social concern for greater impact (Animating Democracy, n.d, 22).

(This item is currently in development. Updates will be posted here as they are completed.)

Measure

Agency and voice

Animating Democracy (n.d). Planning & Designing of Arts-Based Civic Engagement Projects. Washington: Americans for the Arts.

Dettori, E. & Rao Gupta, G. (2018), Gender Equity and the SDGs: Collective Impact for Change. In Lansford, J. E. & Banati, P (2018) Handbook of Adolescent Development Research and its Impact on Global Policy. Oxford University Press, USA

Flanagan, C., & Levine, P. (2010). Civic engagement and the transition to adulthood. The Future of Children, 20(1), 159-179.

Hope, E. C., & Jagers, R. J. (2014). The role of sociopolitical attitudes and civic education in the civic engagement of black youth. Journal of Research on Adolescence, 24( 3), 460– 470.

“We really protested” : The Influence of Sociopolitical Beliefs, Political Self-efficacy, and Campus Racial Climate on Civic Engagement among Black College Students attending Predominantly White Institutions. (2017). The Journal of Negro Education, 86(3), 220-237.

Moore, S., Hope, E., Eisman, A., & Zimmerman, M. (2016). Predictors of Civic Engagement Among Highly Involved Young Adults: Exploring the relationship between agency systems and worldview. Journal of Community Psychology, 44(7), 888-903.

Sherrod, L. R., Torney-Purta, J., & Flanagan, C. A. (Eds.). (2010). Handbook of research on civic engagement in youth. John Wiley & Sons Inc

Watts, R. J., & Guessous, O. (2006). Beyond resistance: Youth activism and community change. In G. Dimitriadis (Ed.), Sociopolitical development: The missing link in research and policy on adolescents (pp. 59– 80). New York: Routledge.