Doing it Together Thesis Proposal by Tessa Miller

In Chicago, a patchwork city of neighborhoods each with a distinct identity, arts organizations seek to define and articulate the communities they serve in order to specify their programming and more clearly evaluate outcomes. Community-engaged arts organizations in particular rely on a relationship with their target audience as a central part of their purpose. This study examines how these organizations are building and fostering healthy and effective relationships with the communities they serve. It will survey the existing discourse around “community” as a framework for organizations to understand their target audiences. The study will then seek to describe the anatomy of such relationships including how they are built, expressed, and evolve over time. Finally, the study will apply the framework of coordinated management of meaning (CMM), part of interpersonal communication theory, to understand the relationship between arts organizations and their communities. Specifically, CMM serves as a non-hierarchical, non-directional model that can be used to describe the relationship as a social reality that is collaboratively constructed by both the community and the organization. Using examples from current organizations in Chicago, this study will illustrate how adopting such a model leads to more effective community-engaged arts organizations.

What techniques foster healthier, more effective relationships?

Doing it Together: Co-constructing Relationships Between Arts Organizations and Communities

PREMISES

What is a relationship?

What does "community" mean?

Hypothesis: CMM framework leads to healthier relationships.

It encourages a non-hierarchical structure of power
It encourages curiosity about the cycle of impact between both parties and their relationship.

Co-ordinated Management of Meaning (CMM)

“persons-in-conversation co-construct their own social realities and are simultaneously shaped by the worlds they create”

Goal:

To build a model for better understanding relationships between community-engaged arts organizations and the communities they serve so that these organizations can more effectively foster healthy and effective relationships.

What is a good model for understanding the relationship between community engaged arts organizations and communites?

What is the anatomy of these relationships?

CASE STUDIES

LITERATURE REVIEW

METHOD OVERVIEW

OVERVIEW

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