Monograph in IJABER

Community Development Through the Arts: Poetics and Politics of the Territory.

Reception of articles in now open until 2026 april 30th

Guest editors:
Dr. Ángeles Ruíz de Velasco Gálvez. Autonomous University of Madrid.
Dr. Javier Abad Molina. Complutense University of Madrid.

Keywords: socio-educational research with the arts, community, visual narratives.

Community development is commonly understood as the diagnosis and strategic planning of resources, infrastructure, and material goods. However, a new proposal is emerging that contemplates territory not as a physical space to be intervened upon, but as a symbolic, emotional, and poetic place. In other words, a living organism in a continuous process of growth, which feels, thinks, and remembers. This conscious view of the arts does not deny the political dimension of the territory, but rather expands it to recognize that bonds, shared imaginaries, and affectivity are also political and poetic forms that rename and redefine it through actions that transform and liberate.

In this same sense, territory is not a geographical space, but rather a physicality that is constructed in the life of relationships and sustained by the richness of diversity. The metaphor of mycelium is therefore proposed, a rhizomatic structure that connects the invisible underground and sustains the collaborative and interdependent life of plants and trees in the natural environment, to express how communities grow, connect, and develop with the arts in a multiplicity of directions and relationships. This collaborative development is sustainable and transformative thanks to the participation of the people involved in the project, as they share ways of doing poetry and politics at the local and universal levels.

Ecological awareness and the ethics of mycelium thus represent community life that expands organically through nodes and networks of the social fabric to regenerate and activate the exchange and conversation between expectations, knowledge, and desires that nourish symbolic creation with plurality and singularity. Thus, to create is also to care. Based on this proposal, the “micellar metaphor” explains that the essential nutrient of cultural and artistic processes is revealed in the subtlety and manifestation of the invisible (but real), proposing a paradigm of horizontality and circularity of ideas. In this web of narratives, which arise from life stories and propose coincidences, a collective consciousness is created that reinvents other ways of living together in common.

The arts offer visibility and are the common thread that connects the different imaginaries of social practice based on simple acts of poetic exploration such as naming, sowing, walking, breathing, listening, leaving landmarks and footprints, speaking, appeasing, and waiting. Therefore, the geopoetics and geopolitics of the territory are not only established, but also felt and signified through collective rituals of attachment to the land and links to the place that has memory and resonances that must be heard through its voices in order to narrate it. Community development through the arts is, therefore, a relational event in the form of a text that is collectively rewritten, opening up new possibilities for rethinking poetic and political practices that are not always addressed within institutional frameworks.

So, how can we integrate and manifest community development from these poetics and politics in the territory? How can we recognize that the arts and metaphorical experience are also forms of socio-educational transformation? How can we rebuild links to redefine territorial narratives through intercultural artistic projects that generate a critical sense of belonging, otherness, and possibility? Or how can we rediscover territories as rooted (not radicalized) ways of constructing poetics and politics?

This monograph invites individuals representing academic, artistic, socio-educational, and foundational communities to share their autobiographical, visual, and textual accounts, highlighting the intersection between poetics and politics in community development through the arts via testimonials based on experiences and hopes.

Thematic axes of the monographic:

- The autobiographical testimony as a shared narrative for an artistic project.
- Community development as an area of regeneration, care, and transformation.
- The arts as mediation and poetic-political reinterpretation in socio-educational environments.
- The sense of territory as a symbolic body for growing and sustaining relational life.
- Social practice and poetic exploration as a speaker for ‘mycelial communities’.