The Social Sculpture Research Unit (SSRU)

Here is a link some of you may be interested in:

http://www.social-sculpture.org/

Here are a few quotes from the site:

“Although the research network related to the SSRU represents many different interests, emphases and approaches, we are connected by certain key commitments, understandings and motivations.

These include:

• an expanded view of ‘capital’ and of art
• an emphasis on joined up thinking and practice
• an understanding of the connection between inner and outer work, between imagination and transformation, and the need to explore how we can become ‘agents of change’
• a perception of crises as opportunities for consciousness
• an exploration of different forms of ‘knowing’
• a view that the ecological crisis is not just about the environment out there
• a recognition of the connection between aesthetics and ethics: between imagination, the experiential and our ability-to-respond
• the connection between freedom and responsibility
• the relationship between the individual and new forms of viable community
• the poetics of imagination and connective aesthetics
• creative strategies of engagement and practice-based research
• historical and philosophical studies related to Joseph Beuys, Rudolf Steiner, Goethean methodology and other phenomenological thinkers and approaches
• ‘internal mobilisation’ and approaches to overcoming denial
• reflections on activism, new social movements and radical change
• a focus on experiential knowing and related phenomenological practices
• social sculpture as an enquiry into the philosophy and practice of freedom
• a commitment to shaping a humane and ecologically viable world”

“Its core impulses, commitments and concerns link it to the ideas and insights of Joseph Beuys, Rudolf Steiner, Goethe and Schiller as well as to Gandhi, Tagore, Ivan Illich, Joanna Macy, James Hillman, John Dewey, Hannah Arendt, Arne Naess, Vandana Shiva and Arthur Zajonc. It sits within the liberatory stream of ‘free university’ and ‘free school’ initiatives across the world.”