Madrid, city of women: a project to empower the social participation of women in the city

Abstract

Milena Dragićević Šešić, head of the UNESCO Chair in interculturalism, defines artivism as a neologism based on the merger of two concepts: art and activism. Dragićević and colleagues (2015) refer to the theatre theorist and sociologist Aldo Milohnić (2005), for whom artivism is a form of social intervention in which techniques featured in cultural expressions, specifically in artistic expressions, are used to constitute or shape action in the political arena either because those techniques are logical and causal for the action or for purely external reasons. This classic definition of artivism points to an organic relationship between art and activism and which has been emphasised by later theorists such as Sandoval and Latorre (2008). It is closely linked with what Ginwright and Cammarota (2002) describe as critical civic praxis from their work with young people living in under-privileged neighbourhoods in the United States. For these researchers, critical civic praxis refers to the organisational processes that promote civic relations and elevate activism for social justice based on a greater critical awareness. This critical awareness is understood as the recognition of the systematic forms of oppression that limit the capacity “for self-determination and thus ability to take action to address the conditions of oppression” (2007, p. 968). Svetlana Hristova (2015) used similar ideas, discussing the concept of Urbactivism. What is interesting about Hristova’s definition is how she broadens the concept of urban activism by relating it to European institutions. She compares it to participatory governance as a two-way process: from the institutional to the collective and from the collective to the institutional.