Main description:

This open access book offers an overview of the beautiful, powerful, and dynamic array of opportunities to promote health through the arts from theoretical, methodological, pedagogical, and critical perspectives. This is the first-known text to connect the disparate inter-disciplinary literatures into a coherent volume for health promotion practitioners, researchers, and teachers. It provides a one-stop depository for using the arts as tools for health promotion in many settings and as bridges across communities, cultures, and sectors.

The diverse applications of the arts in health promotion transcend the multiple contexts within which health is created, i.e., individual, community, and societal levels, and has a number of potential health, aesthetic, and social outcomes. Topics covered within the chapters include:

Exploring the Potential of the Arts to Promote Health and Social Justice
Drawing as a Salutogenic Therapy Aid for Grieving Adolescents in Botswana
Community Theater for Health Promotion in Japan
From Arts to Action: Project SHINE as a Case Study of Engaging Youth in Efforts to Develop Sustainable Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene Strategies in Rural Tanzania and India
Movimiento Ventana: An Alternative Proposal to Mental Health in Nicaragua
Using Art to Bridge Research and Policy: An Initiative of the United States National Academy of Medicine

Arts and Health Promotion is an innovative and engaging resource for a broad audience including practitioners, researchers, university instructors, and artists. It is an important text for undergraduate- and graduate-level courses, particularly in program planning, research methods (especially qualitative methodology), community health, and applied art classes. The book also is useful for professional development among current health promotion practitioners, community nurses, community psychologists, public health professionals, and social workers.

Contents:

Section 1: Rationale and Theoretical ContextsAuthors of this section: editorial team.
IntroductionIn these first pages we briefly introduce the main purposes of the book. We also share the genesis of the interactive conference sessions that gave rise to our work articulating the potential for the Arts and Health Promotion: the special sessions held at the International Conferences for the Promotion of Health in Mexico (2012) and Brazil (2016). We then give a brief introduction to the opportunities inherent in incorporating the arts in health promotion and provide an overview of the book's layout, explaining to readers what the text contains and how it might be utilized as a reference depending upon areas of interest or topic of the academic course.
Theoretical perspectivesThis chapter contains a review of literature elaborating the main theoretical perspectives that promote the use of the arts in and for health promotion. Utilizing a broad social ecological framework to underpin our review, literature summarized in this section cover a wide variety of contexts, purposes, and populations spanning geographic locations, culture, gender, language, race, age, and other categories of difference. We place particular emphasis on the dialogue within and between those perspectives as articulated from different corners of the planet and connect the content of the book with theory related to health promotion, public health, and social justice. We also connect theory to practice by examining the utility of commonly used practical frameworks, for instance, examining how art might enhance different stages of the Systematization of Experiences, as an exercise for the production of critical knowledge through practice, the PRECEDE-PROCEED approach to program planning, or how art might enhance health promotion collaborations using the Bergen Model of Collaborative Functioning (Corbin & Mittelmark, 2008).

Section 2: Let Practice SpeakAuthors of this section: editors and invited authors from different geographical origins and disciplinary backgrounds. For the selection of the experiences and authors that are included in the different chapters, we seek to guarantee gender balance, geographic representativeness, and the diversity of the themes addressed and the artistic expressions involved.
Broadly, each chapter of this section includes basic information on:

Theoretical frame

Case/project/study

Details surrounding methods/technique

Results/outcomes and implications

This section is organized in 15 to 18 chapters distributed within three subsections (practical applications; research methods; social mobilization, teaching, and pedagogical applications). Below is a preliminary list of topics to be addressed in the different chapters:

Sub-section 1: Practical applications

Poetry (Proposed author: Sara Zarei, Iran)

Music (Proposed author: Alexandra McEwan, Australia)

Art Therapy (Proposed author: Arturo Solari, Mexico)

Map-making (Proposed author: Oliver Mweemba, Zambia)

Literature (Proposed author: Anunciata Sawada, Brazil)

Muralism / Grafitti (Proposed partner in Iraq: https://en.ircs.org.iq/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/The-IRAQI-RED-CRESCENT-SOCIETY-BULLETIN-32.pdf)

Sub-section 2: Research methods

Arts-based methods in health research (Proposed authors: Kimberly Diane Fraser and Fatima al Sayah, Canada)

Photovoice (Proposed author: Ozge Karadag Caman, Turkey)

Art to communicate research findings: Applied theater (Proposed author: Steve Harvey, Latin America and US)

Drawings in research (Proposed author Elizabeth Broadbent, New Zealand; Marilys Guillemin, Australia; Katarzyna Nowicka-Sauer, Poland)

Audiovisual resources in health and social sciences (Proposed author: Serena Brigidi, Spain)

Sub-section 3: Social mobilization, Teaching, and Pedagogical applications

Kaleidoscopic approach to Chagas' disease (confirmed author Mariana Sanmartino, Argentina)

Artivism (Proposed authors: Carlos Caceres, Alfonso Silva Santisteban and Fernando Olivos, Peru)

Critical Photography (Proposed author: Jennifer Mokos, United States)

Cinema as a resource for promoting health (Proposed partner in Spain: www.cineysalud.com)

Thinking about health promotion from the sociology of the image (Proposed author: Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Bolivia)

Using the art in higher education for professional preparation (confirmed author Hope Corbin, United States and Norway)

Section 3: Issues and OpportunitiesAuthors of this section: editorial team.

In this concluding section, we synthesize overarching themes across the chapters and discuss the complications, lessons learned, and opportunities that practitioners might encounter in applying the arts as discussed in the book.