Shaping Creative Justice Ecosystems: Collective Action Case Studies in Arts and Culture

The book demonstrates how creative justice principles can transform organisational cultures, challenge traditional hierarchies, and foster environments where creativity and justice intersect. What do forests teach us about collective action? How do we decompose toxic systems of dominance and oppression as we nurture healing ecosystems of communal power, joy, and liberation? This short-form book poses and explores these questions from the perspective of arts leaders locally, nationally and internationally. Presenting new findings from three contemporary collective action experiments. These three case studies are a part of collective action toward creative justice in a U.S. nonprofit context: “Shared Leadership in Practice” explores the micro-level scale of one organization’s decentralized leadership model; “Spatial Justice at Work” traverses the meza-level scale of a coalition of justice-oriented organizations; “Collective Action Liberatory Pedagogy” addresses the macro-level scale of influencing culture shift on a sector level. Shaping Creative Justice Ecosystems deepens understanding of why and how collective action is necessary in the arts and culture sector, providing practical examples to inform sector-wide change toward equity and creative justice.