Paper short abstract:

Community Arts & Cultural Development (CACD), a valued artform in many countries, prioritises community participation & creative storytelling as pathways towards positive social change. This paper explores some strengths & challenges of working within this framework in contemporary regional WA.

Paper long abstract:

Based on ten years of practitioner anthropology (a version of what Kristina Baines and Victoria Costa (2022) describe as 'Cool Anthropology'), this paper uses Laura Berlant's (2007) concept of 'Cruel Optimism' and Tess Lea's (2020) concept of 'policy ecology' as starting points to explore the current dynamics of sustaining community arts practice - in the sense of arts for social change - in regional WA. This includes the challenges of navigating three tiers of government policy and funding models whilst also maintaining the flexibility to respond to changing individual, social, political, cultural and economic conditions 'on the ground', where, building relationships of trust and respect with participants is the primary project (Lillie et al 2020). The idea of cultural life support is used as a tool to consider the role that participatory arts can play in helping to sustain individuals and communities, but also from an organisational perspective to shine a light on the ways that the small incorporated groups that help to sustain the regional arts sector are supported and not supported in their own quests for life at the peripheries of powerful, external systems of value.