Teaching Artistic Activism
Great lessons inspire great projects. Changing culture and policy is a collective effort and there’s no need to work in isolation when sharing artistic activism methods in your community.
This repository includes curricula developed by the Center for Artistic Activism and alumni of our training.
Here’s an example, selected at random:
Steve Lambert | 90 minutes
We begin by overcoming the resistance of many activists to anything with “marketing” in its name, explaining that we can … Read More learn from unlikely sources and we must be able to think systematically and instrumentally about creativity if we are going to use it effectively. Through a slide presentation we explain and demonstrate a basic Cost/Benefit matrix, using it as a heuristic model to clarify our thinking about who we are trying to reach and why they might be resistant to our message. We suggest that people don’t act in ways we don’t politically approve of because they are “brainwashed” or “stupid,” but because there are real or perceived benefits to thinking and doing as they do and costs to changing as we’d like them to change. Participants break into groups and run their own campaigns through a Cost/Benefit analysis. Coming back together, we collectively brainstorm ways to approach the costs and benefits of the political changes we are promoting. We then use a betting exercise to demonstrate _loss aversion_, explaining how and why the benefits we promise always have to exceed the costs that people are afraid they will need to pay. We then introduce another heuristic, the Information Processing Paradigm: a scale devised by social marketers to describe the steps it takes to move from exposure to an idea, through behavioral change, to identity transformation and consolidation. We discuss that there is more to a successful action or campaign than “awareness” and for social change to happen we need to change behaviors.
Keywords – Marketing, Persuasion, Strategy
Feel free to use the lessons on this site – slideshows, text, and activities. We have offerings in French and English. These lessons are free to use and build upon All we ask is be sure to credit the Center for Artistic Activism and the author of the curriculum and re-submit any modifications.