Critical Artistic Research and Arts Practices as Forms of (Radical) Care

Cluster for Critical Artistic Research (CCARe) was born out of an urgent need to form a community for critical artistic and arts-based researchers with transnational experiences. At the time when the cluster was founded in 2019, many of the members—mostly non-Finns in Finland—expressed feelings of outsiderness, lack of collectivity as a cohort, limited radical and critical institutional conversations on decolonial, feminist, and racialized discourses, and in general, a plethora of systemic issues that continue to perpetuate matters of marginaliza-tion amongst various communities. And so, CCARe discussions took place outside the univer-sity—in our kitchens, where through gathering, cooking, and sharing a meal, we started to think about strategies to work together in order to create opportunities for diverse discourses, and to the potentiality of change. functions and experience

ucation then became an opportunity for us to further explore our common research interests, in particular to investigate, unpack, and invite more conversations on what care might mean as a radical form of community building, collective thinking, and healing. In this thematic issue, we wanted to focus on critical artistic research and arts practices as forms of (radical) care. By critical artistic research, we mean artistic research that engages critical theory and questions on social justice; it is our belief that such research practices can also be read as practices of care.
In other words, when inviting authors to submit manuscripts in this issue, we were interested in care as it relates to intellectual critique, knowledge production, and forms of activism through and in the arts.
Understanding critical research approaches and societal activism in the arts as a practice of care expands the idea of care as an everyday experience. We agree with María Puig de la Bellacasa (2017), that although care is such a common and evident experience in everyday life that it seems not to require any particular expertise or knowledge, "care remains ambivalent in significance and ontology" (p. 1). This ambivalence asks to recognize care as an affection, as a form of connection, as well as a form of labour, and sometimes as a form of oppression, in addition to practice of critical activism and potentiality of societal healing.
The thematic scope of this journal includes the questions of art and design practices and production, criticism, activism, pedagogy, curriculum and instructions. The articles of this issue include notions on care, such as, care as resistance, care as critique, care as communitymaking, care as solidarity and care as necessity. The contributions testify, for instance, moments when care becomes intensified due to neglect or pressure; moments of coming together and organising; to attempts of doing the work joyfully-and figuring out strategies and tactics that resist exhaustion.
Demonstrating the collective and collaborative nature of CCARe, the first paper of this issue is a co-authored visual essay by members of the CCARe research group, Touching/Transforming: ii Research in Arts and Education | 4 / 2021 Notes towards collective critical artistic research practices and processes. Taking a poetic approach, these fragments -drawings and writings -are recounting personal impressions and experiences from the seminar Touching/Transforming, organized by the group in June 2021.
Touching/Transforming was a two-day seminar that took place as a hybrid event in Suomen- Angela Marsh's article, It's really just a love story (the paper) centres around her art project entitled It's really just a love story. Not unlike Diaz and Fleischmann, Marsh proposes to reassess, through her art project, the kinships with nature, and reclaim it as "an act of care, both on the intimate and societal level, addressing human as well as ecological restauration needs." In her article, Marsh advocates for new and decolonized interspecies relationships.
Marika Tervahartiala endeavours to create a caring and collaborative relation between herself -a human researcher-drawer -and Drawing, which she describes as a non-human entity. In praxis, and the everyday, in a real concern for care.
In Person-centred music-making as a cultural change agent for compassionate healthcare: through the lens of experiential workplace learning, Krista de Wit addresses rapidly aging patient populations and the urgency to develop compassionate patient-centred healthcare culture and discourse. Through a participatory music practice in Dutch hospitals, de Wit suggests a particular potentiality for music-making for social change, and proposes cultural exchange and significant impact between healthcare professionals and patients.
All contributions of this collection offer a unique and important approach to critical artistic research and arts practices as forms of (radical) care. The articles provide excellent examples of effort of care during the trying times, such as the global pandemic. They also reflect significant local societal and artistic issues in different historical and geopolitical environments. We hope the readers will find the articles relevant to respond to the diversified and complex current global vi Research in Arts and Education | 4 / 2021 demands for care within artistic practices and research.