How can we use creativity, arts and play to make participatory and deliberative democracy (PDD) more inclusive? This question guided a scoping review of the literature we conducted between May and August 2024, which provided us with important insights on how arts-based and creative methods can facilitate participation, particularly from groups who are often marginalised within politics and wider society. Our review also highlighted a set of challenges and ethical issues raised by these approaches, which should be carefully considered to ensure a positive experience for participants.
Arts-based methods are largely used within participatory research, but they feature less often within PDD processes, which tend to rely more on talk-centric participation. They are often used to co-create knowledge, particularly on social policies, with the aim to challenge power structures and strengthen epistemic justice.
Our review revealed three ways in which arts-based and creative methods help engage marginalised groups.
Firstly, these methods open up new ways of expressing experiences that might be difficult to articulate through verbal communication. Visual methods like Photovoice, performance-based approaches like theatre, and narrative techniques like storytelling enable participants to share their perspectives in ways that transcend language barriers and educational differences, potentially strengthening the inclusivity of these participatory spaces.
For instance, in The Women of Northeast Oklahoma City Photovoice Project 26 African American women photographed their neighborhoods to document safety needs, leading to concrete policy changes like the demolition of abandoned buildings. Similarly, a Legislative Theatre project in Manchester showed how creative approaches can transform youth engagement in policymaking - young people created a play called "Mask to Break" about a Global Majority young person's struggles with racist and ableist practices in mental health services. By having policymakers become "spect-actors" during the performance, the project enabled young people to co-create policy recommendations while challenging systemic barriers through creative expression.
Secondly, they use play and creativity to disrupt power dynamics and hierarchies of expertise, by subverting social norms and fostering deeper connections. Play can enable more level-playing field that overcomes barriers of language, status and cultural capital. Structured and purposeful fun fosters co-creation of new relational dynamics, through openness to discovery.
Finally, these methods build collective knowledge in ways that promote epistemic justice. The use of artistic and creative methods can create environments that support co-construction of collective understanding of systemic causes of intersectional oppression. Arts and playfulness can thus be powerful ways of generating new social meanings that challenge the dominant narratives that silence and other marginalised perspectives.
Based on the review we recognise three levels of impact:
On individuals, as participants gain personal growth, self-efficacy and confidence.
On communities, as these methods catalyse collective action, enhance community identity, and foster new networks, as they promote intergenerational and intercultural understanding.
On policy change by amplifying marginalised voices, silenced by structural barriers and inequalities, and their influence on public discourse.
But arts-based and creative methods are not a simple fix for the deep-rooted inequalities of wider society. While they can contribute to making participatory processes more inclusive, they can also raise complexities and potential barriers. These include:
ethical considerations such as issues of ownership of the artefacts and how they problematise participants’ representation in media outputs that long outlive a project;
technical and emotional demands that can amplify power imbalances if not managed well; participants may feel overwhelmed by the open-ended nature of these methods. Emotional labour can lead to burnout and emotional exhaustion.
What is key to addressing these challenges is reflexivity and flexibility to address power imbalances as they emerge. In this respect, training for facilitators is crucial not just on technical skills but to promote awareness of contextual and systemic social issues.
We found that while many studies involved participants facing multiple forms of marginalisation, like young LGBTQ+ people or immigrant women, few explicitly examined how these intersecting identities shaped their participation. This gap matters because it is important to consider how intersecting identities make it harder for marginalised groups to engage fully. It is therefore crucial to examine how different forms of oppression interact within specific socio-political contexts as we design new participatory spaces.
This scoping review aimed to develop insights to guide the planning of a series of PDD process that we are co-designing with diverse groups of participants under the Inspire project. We use arts-based approaches, such as legislative theatre or performance lectures to tackle local policy goals, from youth employment to adequate housing, integration of immigrant communities and access and inclusion for people with disabilities. Going forward, the challenge isn't just about making participation more creative and playful, it's about rethinking how we can embed these approaches within decision-making institutions to achieve substantive change. Through careful attention to power dynamics, intersectionality, and local contexts, creative methods can help us shape more inclusive and transformative democratic spaces with participants.
* The full Scoping Review, authored by Susana Higueras Carrillo, Marta Wojciechowska, Temidayo Eseonu, Sonia Bussu, Dena Arya, João Amorim, Mariana Rosa and Roberto Falanga, will be published shortly.