About the Journal

The side profile of a woman with purple skin. She is wearing a colorful flower crown and a hummingbird is coming to drink nectar from a flower on the crown.

Arts, Culture and Development, is a digital, peer reviewed, open access journal, published annually.

The Goals of Arts Culture & Development are twofold: 

One goal is to define artistic/cultural practice and pedagogy with a focus on relationality (with self and others), voices, and impact beyond normative frameworks of understanding. Normative frameworks are typically understood and practiced as standards for what is considered ‘normal’ or ‘acceptable’ behavior– but does not always honor the lived-experiences of people and communities. Authors engaged in community praxis are invited to describe their practice and pedagogy with a focus on relationality, voice, and impact, emphasizing how they build sustainable relationships with/in the communities where they practice through reciprocity, pedagogy, culture, and curriculum.

The other goal is to create a space for dialogue and foster a network of practice to help bring forth and present practices and conversations that are often isolated. This includes the voices of artists’/cultural workers and (when possible) those with whom they engage (those on the receiving end of ‘development’). Authors are invited to share theoretical perspectives, presenting their own, and/or other artists whose work engages, inspires, their perspectives and/or practice related to the journal goals; authors are also invited to share related examples that are inclusive of marginalized histories of these practices.

Open Access Policy

Arts, Culture and Development believes in a greater global exchange of ideas, experiences, and knowledge. As such, the journal provides immediate open access to its content for everyone interested in the role of arts and culture in social transformation.

Authors retain copyright, simultaneously licensing their works under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0). That license allows others to copy and redistribute the work so long as they provide reasonable attribution and do not use the work for a commercial purpose. This license applies to the submitted version of the work (preprint), the accepted version of the work (postprint), and the final published version.  

Ideal attribution for a work published in this journal consists of the work’s title, the title of the journal, the name(s) of the author(s), the DOI (digital object identifier), and a link to the CC BY-NC 4.0 license deed. The journal encourages those relying on the CC BY-NC 4.0 license to consult the Best Practices for Attribution on the Creative Commons wiki.   

As they retain copyright, authors are entitled to distribute any version of the article and to grant other licenses to use the work, subject to the CC BY-NC 4.0 license. The journal encourages authors to include the ideal attribution described above when they distribute their works after acceptance by the journal.   

Authors are encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and after publication, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (see SPARC's "Open Access" article). 

Journal History

This journal is somewhat of an extension of a collaborative book project (2019 – 2022) through Routledge's Rethinking Development series,  Arts and Culture in Global Development Practice: Expression, Identity and Empowerment (Maguire & Holt, 2022) a beautiful reflection of passionate artistic engaged social practice. Parallel to this was the pandemic snatching lives without proper goodbyes and people risking infection as they engaged in their daily work and/or in life threatening protests against police brutality across the United States. Most of the book was put together during a time when social distancing replaced the lovely day to day exchanges in the office that buoyed us amidst all the inequity around us. We hope that this journal will offer others discoveries of powerful global arts based social practices.

Image Credit: Natalia Pilato PhD., detail of community mural A Painted Conversation  See: Pilato, N. (2022). Narratives in community-based mural making processes. In Maguire, C. & Holt, A. (Eds.), Arts and culture in global development practice: Expression, identity, and empowerment (pp. 34-54). Routledge