Capturing value: researching funded art for reconciliation

ABSTRACT

The undertaking of a long-term study of art for reconciliation (AfR) throws up problematics in terms of instrumentalist evaluation, short-term funding, a lack of archiving and insufficient long-term view/memory of the activity. In researching twenty years of funding and practice we argue that the concepts of reconciliation lack conceptual coherence in approach within an environment that resonates with tensions and conflict. One reason for these tensions is the under-appreciation of the role of the aesthetic given funders rarely develop a proper understanding of arts social peacebuilding roles. The article not only promotes the concepts of AfR and the multi-methodological approaches required to study long-term aspects and outcomes but also highlights the potential of research that brings funders, those funded, artists and participants together to map out more cohered AfR approaches. Reconciliation requires time to develop and embed and within that understanding, its potential to achieve will remain underdeveloped.

KEYWORDS:

• Reconciliation
• value
• peace-building
• evaluation
• intrinsic
• transformation

I had a friend, killed during the conflict that began in Northern Ireland in 1968. A traumatic event, which from time to time has jumped into my consciousness and memory in a manner that has been both intrusive and numbing. Around a decade ago, I attended an exhibition on victims of the British–Irish conflict and there was an image of him. There was no context. Just images of people killed. Each image had the first name of the victim. There was no other information about their background and it was evident that the value of the exhibition was in not categorising victims via groupings, such as Catholic, Protestant, state or paramilitary. In presenting individuals as uncategorised but commemorated collectively, the exhibition challenged forms of remembrance that are purposefully selective. Herein was provocation and challenge to selective memory or what Lederach (2005, p. 2) understood as the power of “ … the inner makeup of creativity as embedded in understanding … ”.

As I left the exhibition a member of staff asked if I was a Protestant, Catholic or “Other”. I enquired why my religion or non-religion was important. The response concerned the funder’s need to measure reconciliation. This I found offensive and inquired how measuring faith/non-faith backgrounds was a measure of reconciliation. Enquiring also why there were no questions regarding if and how the images stimulated reaction, meaning or sense. Evaluation, in this case, is tied to the all-too-common form of capturing demographic characteristics linked to questionable intergroup contact theory.¹

With whom or with what was I reconciled? Why were the categories that framed the targeting of victims being used to measure reconciliation? How did the funder know that viewers did not leave with a desire for retribution? Ultimately, there was a clear disjuncture between the exhibition’s intentions and a form of evaluation that re-established the ethno-sectarian binary the artist had intended to disrupt. Such experience threw up the problematic of value capture divorced from artistic intention and value therein.

In reaction to such experience emerged the “Art of Reconciliation (AfR): Do The Funded Arts Transform Conflict”² research project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and led by a team from the University of Liverpool, Queen's University Belfast and Ulster University. A project that explored funded AfR projects in Northern Ireland and analysed the arena in which it had developed or otherwise. Within the project art was adopted as an umbrella term to describe art forms (e.g. performing arts, theatre, dance, photography), institutions and infrastructure that support the arts (e.g. funders, galleries, museums) as well as other creative activities. Following Crossick and Kaszynska’s (2016, p. 68) concern that no “long-term evaluations of arts and cultural initiatives in post-conflict transformation have rarely if ever been attempted” the project advanced a multi-method approach to research reconciliation-based funding since the Good Friday Agreement signed in 1998.

In introducing this special edition we explore how the AfR³ project uncovered modes of evaluation lacking appreciative capacity and a failure to balance social and aesthetic appraisal (for other examples, see Matarasso, 1997). Projects, for example, claimed reconciliatory intention without explanation of how or why such outcomes had been intended and achieved. In some cases, artists had been funded under reconciliation programmes even though their work produced singular and unbalanced readings of conflict. Funding raised questions about resource distribution, value allocation and conflict between the funder and those seeking funding. Poor record keeping, multiple forms of funding, policy incoherence, a failure to de-contextualise and incongruent meanings of reconciliation were also evident in research findings.

We examine how the landscape of AfR operated within power dynamics, disruptions and conflicts that destabilised understandings of cultural value and the development of reconciliatory concepts. AfR was, at times, directionless and operating without any form of framing, coherence and transparent review. The whole basis of reconciliation as evolving, and shifting was rarely if ever considered in the patchwork of short-term funding policy and practice fragmentation. Initially, there was no firm basis upon which to understand the utility, distinctiveness and values of AfR.⁴

There are two aspects of research undertaken that are of importance. Firstly, reconciliation must have a starting point ⁵ which aims to form acquaintanceship between adversarial groups. Activity should then build and provide for the amelioration of clashing narratives, the stimulation of dialogue and the hoped-for outcome of interdependence around parity of esteem and mutual respect. Secondly, a reconciliation process must be read across time and be persistent, protracted and gradated. To achieve concept, path and outcome AfR can only proceed when stakeholders understand that they either lack knowledge of reconciliation as a process or are not listening to those who possess that understanding. As explained the problematics disclosed within this project led to the research teams leading conversations and practice development within a multi-stakeholder terrain that had been defined by contestation, policy and practice incoherence. Analysing and researching the complex web, in which AfR was operating, advanced a multi-method approach that embedded a better understanding of art’s role in conceiving and delivering reconciliation and how cultural value could be practised and appreciated. In responding to problematics, we discuss how the research project brought together those with varying levels of political, financial and/or managerial power and cultural capital to shift AfR away from disputed meanings and the uneven distribution of influence and capacity. A form of engagement as critical pedagogy, which aided better identification of practice and experience required to deliver a system of “checks and balances” between stakeholders via reflexive fora.

Reconciliation: concepts and value measurement

Reconciliation post-1998 had been assembled around institutional political accord and the realisation that social peace-building was a societal layer required to achieve inter-community exchange. AfR was considered a potential site that could generate thicker spaces of emotional recognition,⁶ empathy, mutual respect and parity of esteem. State, EU and charity-based funding presented AfR as capable of embedding conflict transformation. Funding, it was claimed, would develop critical voices and immerse communities within the agency of peace-building. The majority of that funding was directed at socially deprived communities that bore the brunt of conflict with some sponsored work connecting to struggles over social justice. Other themes included an artistic practice that explored state collusion/violence, religious and gendered discrimination and the capturing of various dimensions of oppression, victimhood and repression (Bouchard, 2008). Funding was not merely an arm of state policy in that it challenged the state’s interpretation as an “honest broker” within the conflict. The more commonly found problematics of funding such as the relevance of funding to artists (Gray, 2002), short-termism, poor conceptual definition (Kollontai, 2010) and insufficient linkage between aims and outcomes (Lossau, 2006) were commonplace (Belfiore, 2012, 2020).

The value of AfR should not be overstated but instead viewed as contributory to wider efforts at the political, state and other scales that deal with legacy, attitudinal change and economic, gendered and other forms of oppression and marginalisation. In Northern Ireland, as elsewhere, there are various strands of peace-building. At the political level formal accords such as the Good Friday Agreement defined broad-based arrangements. Policing reform, disarmament and demobilisation aided the structural changes required to reduce violence. Social peacebuilding, the site at which AfR operates, was understood as delivering relationship-building, exchange, attitudinal change and emotional attachment for and with peace-building. The value of AfR lying in the capacity to explore the root causes of conflict and the shifting of society from negative peace or the thin form of reconciliation, defined by maintaining the absence of violence, to positive peace in which relationships are transformed into growing recognitions of interdependence.

Reconciliation is outcome driven and defined by the capacity to impede the reproduction of conflictual relationships. This presents measuring both the value in and the value of AfR. Value in is centred upon art’s intrinsic means, whereas the value of is understood as the capacity to develop reconciliatory outcomes. Therefore, researching the value of is a study across multiple constituencies that include community, civic leadership, arts practitioners, policy-makers, audience and community that must return to the value in of art-led approaches. Within reconciliation, the value in and of practice is more likely to emerge when intentions bond constituencies that have been embroiled in tension and conflict. Conceptual framing can advance, via reconciliatory intention, when the intrinsic is understood as a means of exploring conflict. Evaluations that under-appreciate value in when prioritising the value of undermine the capacity that art offers to dig into the burdens and hardships of conflict as a means to move beyond each.

At the political scale, peace-building is allied to law, whereas AfR operates within the intimacy of, for example, trauma. Law provides recognition of rights and inclusion, whereas the social peace-building domain examines harm through more forward-oriented contexts that are relational and personal. Where the state enables sustainable democracy then community-civic modes open up exploration, and in effect examine remaining animosities and their consequences. Dave Duggan’s (2008) dramatisation of the Bloody Sunday Inquiry AH6905, is an interesting case in point. Duggan in appreciating the accountability that law can deliver justice also considered how dry legal language subverted the emotional terrain of harm, injustice and the tautness between legal facts and truths. Within such work lay a capacity to tie intention within more creative forms of expression that law cannot achieve.

Critical to AfR is how the aesthetic (value in) stimulates and sustains the opportunity for expression and thereby frames processes that could undermine ethno-sectarian positions and overt ideological commitment (value of). A particular value of AfR is how the aesthetic via the communicative power of image or performance enables forms of communicative capacity that promotes hearing and recognition (Zangwill, 2002). The aesthetic assuming importance through speaking on “ … matters too [freedom and legality, spontaneity and necessity, self-determination, autonomy, particularity and universality,] … ” (Eagleton, 1984, p. 3).

In taking reconciliation as conceptually driven, we must also appreciate that it is not tokenistic nor empty of content as it disrupts narratives of conflict. It should not perpetuate legacy amnesia or silencing of the past but instead takes issues such as harm and trauma and develop each as form of shared memory building or recognition of impact upon “other”. AfR can only evolve via endurance, perseverance, creativity and sustained investment. Short-term and sporadic funding strategies are the complete antithesis of such evolution and a block to developmental capacity.

Research-led approaches cannot simply evolve around the question of funder-led “rationalism” that is designed through normative and instrumentalist policy practices and at the faulty aims within the “audit society” (Belfiore, 2004; Boorsma & Chiaravalloti, 2010; Selwood, 2002). We agree that unimaginative accounting and management techniques linked to monetary and/or limited measurements techniques undermine “ … other forms of value – cultural, social, aesthetic – in policy discussion” … and the “ … prevalent over-simplification by focusing on the mechanisms through which ‘value’ is either allocated or denied to cultural forms and practices by certain groups in particular social contexts” Belfiore (2020, p. 385). Yet, it is also important to evaluate if artists and arts managers comprehend and practice reconciliation in a manner that coheres with reconciliatory intent. In questioning the extent to which stakeholders understand the meaning of reconciliation as it aims for more than the thinness of co-existence (Lederach, 2005) we found few funders or those funded who appreciated that reconciliation was path dependent and requires a starting and, even if hard to reach, end in which outcomes layer up and develop new inter-community capacities and relationships. A process through which AfR, at all levels, delivers the intention of building context and developmental capacities that not only aim to subvert conflict-centred narratives but also build narratives and descriptions of future relationships. The capacity of AfR to deliver is critical given that it operates at various scales which permits, when outcomes are achieved, the sustainability of action (Lederach, 2005). The capacity to develop path and impact can be located in examples such as The Playhouse – Derry/Londonderry⁷ which has sustained work over three decades and developed a long view of the process.

AfR potentially creates value at the personal, community and therefore wider societal scales. In understanding that capacity then stakeholders must seek to get beyond normative “dichotomies … arts for art’s sake and art for social function, intrinsic and instrumental benefits, hedonic and eudemonic benefits, high and popular culture, audience and participants” though seeking, “ … the experience of culture as fundamental to any discussion of cultural value” (Crossick & Kaszynska, 2016, p. 24). In sum, the ability to locate effective approaches that are based on understanding aesthetics affect the capacity for reconciliation.

There is a need to appreciate the value of and in thorough value capture achievable via multiple and less proscriptive means. That means measuring communicative value around artistic intention on an equal footing with impact. Raymond Watson’s “The People’s Process Exhibition” developed around his personal journey⁸ from imprisonment into a growing and conceptual awareness of reconciliation that challenged his commitment to previous ideologies and actions. In this case, the intended value of aesthetic mapping upon a reconciliatory journey influenced an understanding of artistic development as an evolving challenge to “self”. Watson engaged in 3 sessions in which he led attendees through the exhibition. The exhibition did not have to be evaluated which meant the engagements were intrinsic, free-flowing and discursive and as much about artistic technique as intended meaning. During those interactions, it was evident that few had met or engaged with a former conflict-related prisoner and within those discussions; a student approached the author and stated that Republicans had killed her uncle. Her overall impression was one of relief or a sense of feeling unbounded and that the engagement with the art and artist had been cathartic. Her previous experience had been one in which republican legitimisation of violence had added to her grief, but here she found an opposite and through Watson’s art a need to also understand the co-joining of his and her trauma (Watson’s family due to their religion were intimated from their home) and thereby transition away from adversarial opinions and commitments. The free-flowing nature of engagement promoted a recognition of both value in and of.

The play Crows on the Wire,⁹ performed in 2013, centred upon the changeover from the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) to the Police Service of Northern Ireland. The play, written by Johnathan Burgess, focusses upon Jack, a veteran of the RUC and David, a degree-level recruit, as they interact and contest the need for policing reform. Crows on the Wire hitherto presented police officers as both flawed and victims. Such themes would have resonated within a section of the unionist community but here the arts manager took the play to nationalist and republican communities, the places in which hostility to the RUC would have been enduring. After each performance, there were audience-centred discussions around themes and the collection of various attitudes and data. The overwhelming response was that the greater number, who classified themselves as being hostile to the RUC, acknowledged an attitudinal shift by recognising that identifying all RUC members as oppressive, sectarian or unthinking was invalid. The connection between the play as a stimulus for non-binary thinking was noteworthy but stimulated conversations around the value of as opposed to the value in.

The manner in which the play stimulated a reaction to value of more than in is not a criticism as both the play and the exhibition achieved attitudinal change and delivered what Bar-Tal would understand as “ … change in the conflictive ethos, especially with respect to societal beliefs … about the adversary” (2000, p. 354). However, what is illustrated is that the play’s more rigorous evaluation techniques relegated of and how the audience could have explored how their engagement with a creative process was itself a medium of perception shifting. Furthermore, there are questions regarding the utility of such approaches that include focus groups, participant surveys and interviews. In this case, did audience members return to their communities and voice their attitudinal change? If so, was it “corrected” by those who did not engage? Was there a long-term impact and did it stimulate further and other engagements? On the other hand, were these valuable moments given that they had occurred? Critically, if each form of art had failed to achieve AFR would that mean the in of aesthetic and intention was lacking value?

In terms of practice, there are also potentially different outcomes achieved via variant forms of participation. Does an audience member gain in and of in the same way as an actor embedded within community theatre? The latter could be involved in various phases such as co-creation of arts activity and engagement in future work. Both may receive benefits from being involved in engaging with emotive and contentious issues. However, would we consider the embedded form of participation as more value-laden? There are also, potentially intangible benefits, of being within a safe or shared space in which atavistic themes are explored. Value is both subjective and specific to an individual’s experience and emotions which is a reminder that “ … it is necessary to investigate the process whereby … value arises” (Chen, 2020, p. 187) given the “lack of knowledge regarding how value is created” (Chen, 2020, p. 189). In overall terms AfR processes require purposeful de-contextualisation to ensure enhanced outcomes and re-imagination.

Methods for long-term evaluation

Any long-term evaluation as an examination of perspective and intent is bounded by social construction that in turn frames the context and diversity of perspectives regarding the production, meaning and delivery of cultural value. A fundamental problem in undertaking a long-term evaluation concerned an initial confrontation with tensions between the funder, the funded and community. Therefore, it was important to develop a research approach capable of not only developing rudimentary research questions – regarding what has been funded (quantitative) – but connecting that data to more complex themes regarding the reading of intention and outcome within aesthetic imagination (qualitative). This is complicated by AfR reacting to emotive socio-political issues within its own complex environment in which power-holders can assert reductionist assessments of the potential and capacity of delivery while the more entrepreneurial have undoubted prowess in grant capture.

It is evident that there were a wide range of methods, methodologies and approaches required to develop nuanced and useful approaches regarding the measurement of cultural value and long-period funding. The research was within this project arranged and allied to the mining of large datasets such as funding records, examining aesthetic processes that are sensitive to image and emotion, critiquing evaluation methods, undertaking policy intentions and analysis, appraising economic impact and engaging multisensory aspects of the experiential.

The first step was to establish what had been funded, by whom and for what reasons; however, the sheer scale and diversity of funding sources made this a significant research task. We identified a range of government departments including the Northern Ireland Executive and Department for Communities and intermediary and arms-length bodies including the Community Relations Council, Arts Council of Northern Ireland and local authorities. Additionally, charitable funds have been delivered by UK bodies such as the National Lottery Fund, international organisations such as the International Fund for Ireland and Atlantic Philanthropies and local charities such as the Community Foundation for Northern Ireland. Some 14,000 projects fell, at least tangibly, as an activity for reconciliation. For the vast majority there was a mere descriptor of the event funded and the amount of funding supplied with many, if not the majority most likely to have been single identity projects that promoted British or Irish culture. In some cases there were evaluations but these largely failed to explain the aims and outcomes in a coherent manner regarding reconciliation with most capturing audience numbers, a demographic background of participants and some rudimentary commentary of “impact” upon community relations. Examining the funding record as an intervention-led analysis into the intersection of funder, policy and practitioner and artist regarding intention and if each reflected specific and contextual factors critical to developing reconciliation.

Beyond the project’s quantitative analysis of funding records, the methods adopted were rooted in a constructivist ontology and the epistemology of discourse-oriented approaches. Combining multimodal discourse analysis to examine the intent and meaning of art form and processes of representation had to be allied to interviews regarding reconciliatory intentions. Such an approach placed textual analysis and hermeneutic understandings within a wider overview of and capacity for reconciliatory processes in which art is not understood as independent from evolving relational contexts or positions. In effect, pursuing art as part of peace-building strategies linked to wider referential spaces was necessary given that reconciliation is conceptually driven. In effect, researching and locating how aesthetics is interpreted, for example, by the audience in a manner that stimulates the in and of value. This is not an issue of merely locating reconciling themes but how engagement stimulates inter-community healing and if participants (e.g. artists, community participants and audiences) add value as opposed to merely deriving value from participation.

The method deployed opened up how funders understood their engagement in the design, aims and intentions of funding strategies, the suitability of evaluation techniques, the lessons to be garnered from funding AfR, the understanding and interpretation of outcomes, the relationship with funding recipients, evidence of relational change between communities in conflict and examination of the reading and comprehension of reconciliation as concept and practice. Interviews with funding recipients examined the aims and intentions of a grant application, the value of funding with regard to project delivery, if funding streams were aligned to the developmental needs of communities in conflict, evidence of relational change between communities, examples of lessons learnt and the relationship with funders. Related primarily to the theme concerning the distinctive strategies and practices of AfR, this phase of research was grounded in co-produced case study analysis with four retrospective studies, and two prospective, durational projects. The case studies were selected based on the findings identified in initial research and varied by art form, partnership structure, design and method.

This approach teased out how art was deployed as a distinctive medium to respond to the emotions, symptoms and experience of harm, transgression and conflict experience. A range of methods brought to light not only the experiential impressions of those involved with AfR, but also what was occurring “on the ground” during, and as a result of, practice. Thereby, enabling admission to knowledge and interpretation that are difficult to explain verbally. This approach explored how reconciliatory intentions were both conceived and understood by practitioners, audiences and community participants. Each research stage located cases in which unsuccessful applicants had more precise reconciliatory intentions and capacity than those funded. Unsurprisingly, among artists and art managers, we found an appeal for funders to understand the value within the intrinsic and to develop reconciliation-based funding strategies that adhered conceptually.

For the prospective case studies, participant observation was undertaken to explore the interactions, modes of an art form, range of experience and the relational dynamics within. Participant observation based on researchers acting as volunteers and assistants was also undertaken. Performance ethnography was utilised for prospective case studies where members of a specific community were directly engaged as performers or in other creative capacities (e.g. writers, photographers or painters), or those who share their experience of conflict which are then embedded into project activity. Case studies’ participants were invited to participate in interactive workshops, working with the researchers to express their response to AfR and activities through stage images, drama presentations, collages and music. In this way, the artistic methods formed an evaluative approach and drew upon techniques which provide a non-verbal medium for participants to create imagistic responses. A means of collectively and collaboratively analysing these images in spatial form and within an embodied visual matrix.

Focus groups conducted with audiences of two durational AfR projects were undertaken in order to investigate experiences of AfR and review any resulting impact. Videographic methods were useful in gathering documentary evidence from the retrospective and prospective projects. Broadly framed by approaches delineated within visual anthropology and documentary practice, these short films recorded interviews with individuals and groups involved in the creative processes as well as audience responses, reflected upon attitudes to the reconciliatory potential and outcomes. In both the prospective and retrospective case studies semi-structured interviews with AfR practitioners and project participants accounted for how each described and interpreted the practice and experience of AfR and centred on how and why art was understood as a mechanism for conflict investigation, post-conflict recovery and creative and expressive processes of understanding/potential understanding. Interviews also examined how the creative and expressive processes engaged in was influenced by previous AfR work and how projects responded through design, method and artistic processes to deliver outcome and strategies.

Research advisory group and exchange fora

Method selection had to be cognisant regarding the issue of power dynamics, the claim of unevenness and if such dynamics were undermining reconciliatory capacity. This understanding raised the role of research that locates such problematics and how the research approach advances the democratisation of funding initiatives in terms of the co-design of future policy between the funder, the funded and participants. An approach that should open up critical questions around more agreed intentions and aims. The overall problematic of moving beyond research description into thicker understandings is that the appreciation of cultural value returns to appropriate methods of measurement.

Initially, the AfR project was placed within an environment in which stakeholders did not partake in collective engagement. Due to a failure of academics and stakeholders to engage the worth of a long-term evaluation was rarely considered and the value of research inquiry was met by suspicion. The research team also encountered limited memory regarding decades of funding and variant understandings of what reconciliation meant, especially regarding stages of delivery and evolution. There was no shared vision for future activity and conflicts over resources including criticism of contact theory-based forms of evaluation emerged. This was to be expected given that “the arts can be considered as an institutional field constituted as a series of markets [with] exchange between various agents” Herd (2013, p. 383). Based upon a reading of notions of power and positioning within the field the research approach supported methodological methods that stretched beyond interpretivist and/or constructivist procedures (Roux et al., 2010).

In terms of tensions, an arts manager noted that when visited by the funders he asked them what their religion was. They had replied that such a question was irrelevant, to which he remarked if this was the case why did they require him to ask participants and audiences that very question. In addition, artists and art managers were critical of a lack of understanding by funders of the value in and the role of the aesthetic and cases in which funders had not attended exhibitions, plays and screenings. Funders argued that in many cases they were agents for funding streams over which they had no influence in terms of intentions, language and evaluative form. These initial findings opened up a base upon which to engage in more reasoned conversation and removed the interpretation that such tensions could not be resolved.

To remove such tensions the research team facilitated stakeholder engagements which ensured that the research process did not privilege knowledge or structures of power. In effect, co-joining those involved in on-going tensions who either “needed” to justify public expenditure and the shift from social fiscal justification (Carnwaith & Brown, 2014) and those who believed that “[d]eclarations of crisis and imminent danger are not just hype and hyperbole” (McDonnell and Tepper (2014, p. 21). To frame such an approach the conceptual basis for engagement included designing a research project that had multiple users, agreeing to and co-planning knowledge exchange, approving project outcomes and ensuring that all stakeholders engaged and added to methodological approaches. In terms of the democratisation of engagement, processes achieved a commitment to equal voice within exchange (Roux et al., 2010; Bracken & Oughton, 2013). This was achieved via a Research Advisory Committee (RAC) in which stakeholders became research participants and included artists, arts managers, funders, policy-makers and community support professionals together with non-artist participants such as conflict transformation NGOs, victims groups, communities engaged in AfR and audience participants. To ensure representation an open call for potential members was undertaken.

The RAC operated as a space of interdisciplinary engagement pertinent to designing, organising and developing interactions for research-led processes. In terms of co-production the aim of the RAC was to capture variant voices and opinions or a better understanding of the socio-political environment that AfR responds to and is engaged within. This clearly opened up risk for RAC participants given the research process raised funder versus funded tensions and funded versus participants concerns about value attainment. Risk is evidenced by the first phases of research, which highlighted a near non-existent long-term approach to AfR, weak evidence based on the capability of upholding claims of value, no archive of good practice and deficits in reconciliatory concepts.

Stakeholder framing as social processes placed participants within an arena of exchange that provoked both dialogues around data and other interpretations. What the delivery and discussion of research findings achieved was a more rigorous discussion of intention and outcome, rather than habitually assuming that positive outcomes emerge. Without evidence to frame a discussion around issues such as uneven power relationships the capacity to correct or improve stakeholder exchange would have been either negligible or lack positive engagement. Therefore, it was critical to ensure that stakeholders were aware that inequity within the socio-political environment, in which AfR, operated would not be replicated within the RAC but that there would be shared ownership concerning knowledge attainment and solution-seeking. The capacity to frame knowledge exchange had to not only account for variant forms of knowledge and divergent forms of conceptualisation, transparency and exchange but also explore the potential and delivery of mutually agreed strategic delivery that aimed to resolve forms of stakeholding that undermined the delivery of AfR. Thereby, creating space for disputed narratives and experiences via co-operative dialogue that aims to “profoundly change decision-making structures on the ground” (Wyborn, 2015, p. 57).

It was also important that such structuring was not under-utilised by a failure to engage with those not in the room. In essence, thinking about how a research process is both understood and influenced by other voices and how they may also frame exchange and research impact was important. The formation of Exchange Fora (EF) was critical given that some could not join the RAC due to time constraints, work and other commitments. As events, they permitted more adaptive and inclusive forms of knowledge exchange. Via the EF, as multi-stakeholder spaces, additional forms of collaboration were undertaken to focus on research questions and research findings. The fora were aligned with the broader coalescing of inter-disciplinarily which aided closure of the usability gap. Further democratisation of the research process located voice more broadly and balanced the framing of research challenges and their relevance to the field. The emergence of these co-produced spaces stimulated more shared senses of engagement, voice and hearing that “improves the use of knowledge in practice” (Wyborn, 2015, p. 58).

The EF did not simply present research findings but each created a platform for stakeholders and audiences to both respond to and also design the nature of dialogue, especially through a small group-based activity. Opening up discussion around AfR practices and sustainability, how to capitalise on best practices and an interactive process in which participants discussed the methodological approach required to frame the next generation of activity: a process in which the researchers presented data that stretched beyond the anecdotal. The first EF focussed on conducting research and the issue of relevance to the field. The second EF approach undertook a conversation around “Returning Knowledge to Practice: Exploring the Specific Methods and Strategies of AfR”.

The presentation of data on what was funded and the reasons why and the challenge to those reasons was not only important because such information regarding 20 years of funding had not been collated but because it stimulated an appreciation of the worth of research mapping. This was then followed by small group work through which participants were encouraged to use terms to explain how they felt funding strategies had altered, emerged or been sustained across 20 years. This highlighted how the decline in funding, experiences of not being funded, that some groups were “privileged” by funders and that new initiatives and policies were unknown framed fault lines within the environment of activity. Subsequent discussions concerned issues of continuity and sustainability and, what had rarely been considered, how best to capitalise on and archive AfR projects.¹⁰

Furthermore, there were appreciative exchanges led by artists who explained how they had to negotiate the pressure of limited or sporadic funding and capacity to maintain creative agency. In one exchange regarding technocratic evaluation techniques, a funder summed that if they had known of more aesthetically critical ways to evaluate then they would have adopted them. In this instance, there was recognition that a funding body was not as unsympathetic as was assumed. What emerged were reasonable understandings of the pressure upon artists and those deemed accountable for funding decisions, which opened up a trust or at least better recognition of issues.

What also appeared was that embedded participants who engaged in art-based practice cannot initially articulate harm caused to or by them. Not only may it take years of engagement for such confidence to emerge but it is unlikely to appear without experimental approaches that are less concerned with short-term value capture and which tend to emerge through trial and error. Learning from complete or partial failure was explained as to be of value, which is difficult when funders expect nothing but immediate success. There are also issues regarding value as determined by gender, race, class, sexuality or age and the form of inter-community engagement. The RAC and EF led an important discussion in which it was agreed that value can neither be normatively designed nor captured instrumentally.

Given the problematics encountered via researching AfR the research approach undertaken had to not only develop a conceptual and methodological mapping of long-term activity but also locate ways to develop innovative and participatory approaches through interdisciplinary and inter-professional partnerships. The aim of such a partnership lies in the exploration of the disjuncture between normative policy and arts-led innovation. The lack of coherence around what reconciliation means required dedicated approaches that embedded process-oriented and more innovative and imaginative methodologies. Given the claim of power dynamics subverting reconciliatory capacity, it is evident that systematic approaches had to examine the claim and counter-claim. To properly understand claims participatory meant that the RAC/EF approach was an essential research practice that achieved a transparent research environment (Bryman, 2012; Bunting & Knell, 2014). As one participant noted, “I have never been in the same room as all the stakeholders.” In simple terms, the EF and RAC meetings were the first time there was a detailed conversation regarding the meaning and interpretation of reconciliation and also forms of best practice sharing. In effect, the project created a new landscape in which stakeholders understood the need to commit to longer-term strategies and a more appreciative understanding of reconciliatory intentions linked to funding strategies. These positive exchanges only occurred when a lack of trust between stakeholders was recognised. This meant the researchers hosted the RAC and EF via a mediating role. In essence, the success of the RAC and EF was that research findings became the basis upon which to plan future AFR activity and how it could be better guided, practised and conceptually progressed.

The future role of AfR

Short-term funding and variant reconciliatory understandings and capacity mean that future AfR must be more inclusive and not delegitimise or repress identity differences but reconnoitre differences into more discursive relationships (Renner & Spencer, 2012). AfR must be more outcome-based but in ways in which knowledge, social energy and the potential to deliver reconciliation are developed, disseminated and sustained. AfR, in whatever, context, has to be understood as reactive to the behaviour of a political elite for whom the past endures through friction over victimhood. Elite political agency is perforated with contradiction and persistently revolves around those contradictions. AfR’s value is tangible when it develops processes of transparency and the unveiling of traumatic experiences through spaces of exploration. The power of AfR is to better articulate intention that destabilises separation of community experience through establishing new spaces of learning and compromise. The sites through which political discourses of truth-denial are replaced by truth discovery (Elizabeth, 2003). The very role of reconciliation is to develop processes that counter the strategies, tactics and approaches of denial of experiences of conflict. Outcome intended as the equalisation of the impact of conflict upon groups that stretches beyond a model of post-violence proxy conflict through coalescing around novel inter-community associations. AfR, in effect, aims to disrupt the very processes of stigmatisation and counter-stigmatisation that are at the centre of aggression between and within communities.

AfR’s aim for communicative capacity or reasonableness has to operate and build on the emotional impact of both physical and symbolic violence. The intention then is to recognise emotions that conflict raises as shared in order to challenge fear and phobia as impediments to peace-building.¹¹ That in turn should evolve encounter with problematic forms of discourse ethics and how rhetoric subordinates conflict amelioration and the capacity to solve the power of atavism that is between “self” and “other” (Habermas, 1990). Forming the ability to agree that the construction of victimhood is not subject to disapproval, contestation and rejection but instead a unity of purpose in which engagement shapes non-binary intentions. AfR should better promote how it transforms damaged and uncommunicative inter-community relationships and narratives through agreeing or sharing emotional and existential traits. Aesthetics or value in located within the inspiration of communication to achieve meaning or the method of attaining symmetrical forms of expression. The merging of in and of is achieved through intentions constitutive of appreciation and respect.

Capacity, from AfR, must be allied to building safety around the expression of difference in a manner that operates at various community, societal and personal scales. Especially, as noted, when voice is articulated beyond “self” and heard by “other” in a manner that stimulates increased trust, improved communication and understanding through senses of togetherness. Herein lies the potential of empathy discovered via commonality, which destabilises frameworks of counter-allegation by shifting beyond unidimensional anecdote and manipulation by certain political and community activists. These more grounded and socially embedded approaches to healing are achieved via the capacity for the intimate to mould mutual recognition of harm, irrespective of the source, as endured.

AfR in responding to political acts has to be understood as reacting to the protagonists and entrepreneurs of the conflict who reject dichotomous rationalisations required for transformed relationships (Jelin, 2003). The value of presenting aesthetic surfaces as solutions have to be pronounced as solving tensions that cannot be achieved via institutional fixes (Villalón, 2015). The manner through which the aesthetic challenges forms of violence/exclusion and bolsters new inter-community constituencies that are no longer oppositional, thereby creating value through opposing shaming and conflictual responses between constituencies, as they presently exist (Bourdieu, 1977, 1984). That does not mean violence is not represented or interpreted as needing to be understood but in this instance, the causes of violence are presented as motivational and not as legitimate acts. A challenge for AfR is how it presents violence in a manner that does not reproduce asymmetrical styles of exchange, harmful interpretations of conflict and propaganda-driven forms of representation.

Proxy or negative peace may be an improvement upon violent enactment but it maintains the fracture, sectarian cognition and disruptive characteristics that are supposedly healed in the post-conflict process. A value is how it begins the process of challenging the “ … rhetoric of manipulation” (Downey, 1993, p. 58). The decades of work, for example, by David Boyd aimed to convert public space away from ethno-sectarian parading and related identity forms. Boyd’s promotion of carnival not only created a shared space but co-joined cultural production and display beyond ethno-sectarianism. His more recent work in which loyalist/Protestant band members¹² designed and delivered projects with immigrants and the hosting of Diwali in a Protestant community led to attitudinal change through the achievement of spaces of plurality. In effect, a challenge to identity formations that embed conflict by the delivery of content that is driven by a combination of community engagement, intention and practice. The very processes that are grinding, agentic and evolving.

Conclusion

As the project completed it was evident that are now more imaginative ways to map out the future of AfR in Northern Ireland. Evidently, the failure to catalogue funding decisions, awards and strategies means that without significant research endeavour it is virtually impossible to determine if the process of reconciliation is advancing. Similarly, the loss of a vast body of digital and other material that would have catalogued delivery omits another set of benchmarks with which to not only measure progress but to also share and learn from experience and knowledge. The project does not advance future identikit approaches within AfR but it is clear that there is a need to consider more novel ways of engaging audiences and thereby deepening relationships within and between artists, arts managers and participants. Policymaking and funders are now working with artists, arts managers and the community in a more collaborative manner. A coalition, post-research project, in terms of co-design, co-production and the generation of community voice into the policies and practices of AfR is emerging.

What arose within the RAC and EF¹³ was an appreciation of cultural value as more nuanced than instrumentalist accounts allow. It was also evident that RAC and EF participants did not wish for evaluative criteria driven by an overly constructed form of excellence or a reading of the intrinsic divorced from reconciliatory outcomes. Instead, what appeared was a more embedded understanding of AfR as related social practice in which intention and participation (in multiple forms) must develop a phenomenon that inserts reconciliatory values into personal, community and societal change. The very merging of cultural and social-political phenomena as a value of and for conflict transition.

Overall, the capacity to undertake a long-term evaluation of AfR is only possible with multiple methods and the use of findings to stimulate stakeholder dialogue. The landscape of AfR can only evolve when it not only records and accounts for the reconciliatory process but also places the conceptual basis of conflict transformation at the heart of strategies, intentions and practice. AfR must emerge as the next generation of activity when the field within which it presently operates is disrupted and internal conflicts and struggles are addressed. What the project achieved was a realisation that reconciliation cannot be claimed unless it is based on conceptual rigour and validates reconciliatory intentions and/or outcomes.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council [grant number AH/PO1417811].

Notes

1 For an explanation of how the project engaged with the theme of evaluation, see https://artforreconciliation.org/resources/understanding-the-impact-of-art-on-reconciliation-in-post-conflict-societies-9

2 See https://artforreconciliation.org

3 Additional project material https://artforreconciliation.org/resources/understanding-the-impact-of-art-on-reconciliation-in-post-conflict-societies-10

4 Additional explanation https://artforreconciliation.org/resources/reflections-3

5 Although there is no singular understanding of reconciliation the failure to even understand that it must proceed through stages and achieve a shift from inter-community atavism into sustainable interdependent relationships was a critical failing with the landscape of AfR.

6 See https://artforreconciliation.org/case-studies/projects/project-2 as an intimate journey around harm via the role of art

7 See https://artforreconciliation.org/case-studies/theatre-of-witness

8 See www.liverpool.ac.uk/peoplesprocess

9 See www.theverbal.co/crows-on-the-wire

10 In one EF it was mentioned that a set of books explaining aspects of reconciliation and art in Northern Ireland costing tens of thousands of pounds had simply been binned as they took up ‘too much space’.

11 Hear My Voice is a useful example of inter-community examination of harm caused and endured https://artforreconciliation.org/case-studies/hear-my-voice

12 See https://artforreconciliation.org/case-studies/music-unite

13 Example of activity at an Exchange Fora includes https://artforreconciliation.org/news-blog/blog-item-8