Accompanying Aboriginal Communities Through Arts and Cultural Practice: Decolonial Enactments of Place-Based Community Research

In this chapter, we explore how community arts practices contribute to the liberation and empowerment of individuals and groups with reference to our research with the Community Arts Network (CAN) and Noongar communities in Western Australia. Specifically, we focus on community arts and cultural development (CACD) and how it was utilised in support of processes of cultural reclamation, renewal and healing, which are understood as central to empowerment and psychosocial wellbeing in settler colonial contexts. CACD has roots in critical and liberation theories and resonates with participatory methodologies. Arts practice is central to CACD and it entails psychosocial processes such as deconstruction, witnessing, and intersubjectivity. The chapter highlights the use of different arts and cultural practices in various projects ranging from screen-printing, photography, soundscapes to portraiture. We contend that CACD can meaningfully expand community psychology’s methodological resources and sites for intervention, necessary for enacting the decolonial imperative.