Artful Evaluation for Creative Health and Wellbeing (New Directions in Cultural Policy Research)

This open access book presents new methods for evaluating the contribution of participatory arts to health and wellbeing. Responding to shifts in arts and health discourse, it argues for challenging long-standing ideas about how value is theorised, measured, and communicated. This book critiques the dominance of social impact as the primary way of understanding change in arts, health, and wellbeing, proposing instead evaluation approaches grounded in contemporary Indigenous, post-humanist, and postcapitalist theories. Curated as a collaboration between academic scholars and arts practitioners, this book brings together theoretical research frameworks and practical expertise to consider the collective inequities that shape the delivery of community arts projects.