Arts as a Methodology for Connecting between Micro and Macro Knowledge in Social Work: Examples of Impoverished Bedouin Women’s Images in Israel

This paper outlines a set of art mechanisms that can help to co-produce knowledge between service users, social workers and policy makers. The paper will demonstrate how the arts can enable a space to reflect, to give concrete shape and to discuss and explore new meanings of an issue, for both ‘sides’ of the interaction together. Art enables situating subjective experience within social context with the help of the relationship between figure, background and spatial division of recourses (meaning material physical and also abstract recourses available to a specific group). Finally, arts enable negotiating multiple understandings and initiating new perspectives through using shifting symbols and shifting compositional elements. These mechanisms are demonstrated through images of a group of marginalised Bedouin women in Israel. The article discusses implications of conceptualising the relationship between social work and the arts and humanities as a way to enhance social workers’ skills.