Adopting Diasporic Artists Approaches to Social Relationships Within Critical Co-Design

Paper Abstract: This presentation addresses the critical absence of research on the role of social relationships for diasporic artists in South Yorkshire, UK.

Diasporic artists are underrepresented within creative industries in the UK with less than five percent across the industry (Brook, O’Brien, and Taylor, 2018). Within majority diasporic neighbourhoods, arts and cultural initiatives are underfunded or not funded compared to more affluent areas (Local Insight, 2024).

These funds are generally held by arms-length government institutions bound to reaching government set agendas which often further perpetuate harmful policies and Western-normalising systems.

Artists from the diaspora in the UK are using their collective power to resist institutionalisation and artwork for the Western aesthetic pleasure, claiming agency within these colonial conditions (Industria, 2023). We cannot rely on arts institutions to decolonise the arts (Desai, 2019).

Artmaking ‘nomads’ (Holden, 2015) who may be making art but due to precarity, resistance or other reasons (Bank, 2021 and Industria, 2023) may not pursue commercial arts. These individuals participate in collaborative art making and often display their work within community contexts.

I will share approaches to critical co-design when researching in partnership with diasporic artists, presenting how artists of South Asian heritage and Black artists living in South Yorkshire embody alternative approaches to creative pursuits through cross-cultural collaboration.

Taking a strengths-based approach, I will examine how Western researchers can disrupt structures of research and policy design based on coloniality (Hernandez Ibinarriaga, 2021) by privileging and adopting diasporic ways of collaborating and sharing resources for a generative arts ecology.