Conclusions

Ultimately, there is no ‘one size fits all’ evaluation toolkit and due to the culturally complex natures of communities and the elements of emergence and indeterminacy in socially engaged arts, the effectiveness of external evaluators is therefore limited. However, armed with these critical questions and a commitment to social good and aesthetics, socially engaged artists and collaborators can integrate dialogic and participatory methods of evaluation within practice. In this way, evaluation can focus on both process and outcomes, but can also theorise the broader significance and meaning of these co-creative projects.

In this chapter, I have raised a number of questions within the current value debates in socially engaged arts and its evaluation. My aim was, instead of getting trapped in the circular argument of the politics of cultural measurement, to offer ideas for a way forward and to use evaluation as a process to discuss the negotiation of ‘value’ and ‘values’. In both the Coming Back Out Ball and the Indigenous Traditional Dance Project, I was invited to externally evaluate a socially engaged project for which I had very little contextual and cultural understanding of the communities and aesthetics at play. Working together, as a research partnership with key artists, community members and funders, participatory evaluations with a broader research agenda were developed to better understand the significance and meaning of the projects. Artists and participants report a greater sense of agency and ownership in the collaboratively developed, collected, analysed material. These democratised and dialogic processes of evaluation can then become integrated into practice as a form of critical reflection with the aim to empower those whose knowledge and experiences are ultimately at stake.