Exploring links between empowerment and community-based arts and cultural practices: perspectives from Barcelona practitioners

In this paper, we reflect on the development of community-based arts and cultural (CBAC) practices to promote psychosocial, group/organisational and community changes from the perspective of empowerment. We draw on findings from an initial exploratory phase of an ongoing action-research project in Spain about creative tools that empower artists and communities. The study sought to explore community-based art practitioners’ and academic/researches’ understandings and perceptions about empowerment in order to shed light on how people make sense of the benefits of the practice through the empowerment lens. Data were gathered through 20 semi-structured interviews with artists, social educators, cultural workers and researchers/academics. Thematic analysis of the data with reference to the empowerment theory suggests parallels between the discourses used in the theory of empowerment and the CBAC practices described by the interviewees. Three key themes reflect that multilevel empowerment is promoted when site-specific capacities to gain control over resources and the direction of one's life are achieved. Empowerment is promoted when actions to influence the public sphere come from group, organisational or community settings, and when CBAC practices are articulated with broader efforts aimed at social change, thus becoming a vehicle through which other community development and organising can occur.