The Art of Political Hope: Political Art, Counter Cultural Movements and Civic Space

The focus of this Ph.D. proposal is the use of art to expand civic space and inform the politics of hope. The research will take a long view on the production of political art within the counter-cultural movements of the 1970s and contemporary counter-cultural political art movements. My thesis will ask what techniques, forms and processes artists from the counter-cultural and de-colonisation movements of the 1970's have used to expand civic space, and how these can inform contemporary political arts and social movements operating within the politics of hope today.

The art movements I have chosen as case studies - situated in Bangladesh and England - mirror the politics of hope in their intention and structures. Firstly, these are examples of movements that engage with locally situated historical scripts of resistance and resilience, mobilising and re-writing histories to make space for new political imaginations. Secondly, they seek audience with particular categories of people in society, particularly those that have historically enjoyed less civic space or claim on citizenship, and require additional support in order to access civil, political, social and economic rights. Thirdly, by addressing shrinking civic space driven by neoliberal economic models, they emphasise the political economy of shrinking civic space, and experiment with models that model viable development futures or practices.

Given the amount of hope placed in the arts for fuelling contemporary social movements that address shrinking civic space, questioning how the arts expand civic space has the potential to make theoretical, empirical and applied contributions within the field of politics, development and human rights; primarily through an interdisciplinary theoretical and empirical contribution to an emerging field within politics - the politics of hope; secondly, to the continued decolonisation of the western academic canon and Eurocentric narratives about the history of political forms, by employing case studies and theories from the global north and south; thirdly it makes an applied contribution to the search for viable development futures for expanding civic space.