Acknowledgments
We have many people (and institutions) to thank in helping us bring this collection together. Beginning at the beginning, we would like to acknowledge the members of the Artful Inquiry Research Group (AIRG) 2018 Committee for their generosity in planning and convening the Art as an Agent for Social Change symposium which took place in the Faculty of Education, McGill University, October 12–13, 2018: Lori Beavis, Lynn Butler-Kisber, Emmy Côté, Alisan Funk, Lidoloy Chavez Guerra, Maria Ezcurra Lucotti, and Sheryl Smith-Gilman. We also acknowledge the artists from No Bad Sound Studios (NBS) and the support of all the volunteers, presenters and attendees at the conference.
We are particularly grateful to Patricia Leavy, first for her provocative key-note presentation at the Art as an Agent for Social Change symposium, and later for her enthusiastic support for our book proposal as part of her Brill | Sense series Personal/Public Scholarship. We also thank John Bennett and Jolanda Karada at Brill | Sense for their support, and prompt and encouraging responses to all our questions.
Supported by Patricia and John, we issued the call for chapter proposals for this book. We were delighted with the many submissions from across Canada, the US, South Africa, Norway and China. We thank all the contributors for their commitment to the project of art for social change and wish to acknowledge their engagement both as authors and reviewers.
We are also grateful to the artist and art educator Maisa Mreiwed for use of her artwork Journey of Knowledge, Vol. 7 (2017) for our book cover.
We offer a special acknowledgement to Dr. Judith Marcuse for so generously agreeing to write the foreword for this book. Her own work in art for social change leads the way and is an inspiration.
We thank Avril Rios Torres for her assistance with the preparation of the final manuscript.
We are forever indebted to Dr. Ann Smith who, with her exceptional editing skills, so ably kept the process going and ensured a total fairness in relation to maintaining both brevity and ‘to the point’ sharpness of all the chapters.
Finally, we would like to thank our funders, the Artful Inquiry Research Group (AIRG) and the Distinguished James McGill Professor Fund.