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The Covid-19 pandemic closed schools, but this hiatus provides an opportunity to rethink the fundamental principles of our education system. This book examines how, before the pandemic, the education system assumed that ability is measurable and innate, and how this myth of meritocracy reinforced educational inequalities. Since the Covid crisis began, educational inequality has become a central issue. Inspired by a project on grouping practices based on ‘ability’, the book analyses how the recent educational developments of datafication and neuroscience have reinvigorated ideas about how we classify and label children, with unequal effects. It sets out a post-pandemic hope that we can rethink the idea of innate and measurable intelligence, and thus disrupt the inequalities that result from this idea.

This edited collection profiles the sites and subjects of arts practices in different geographical contexts, including Hong Kong and mainland China, India and Sri Lanka, Finland, Chile, Brazil, Lebanon, Mexico, the USA, Germany, Canada, the UK, and Ireland. Chapters capture how collective hopes, fears, allegiances, frustrations, and memories, are sung, danced, played, etched on walls, or conveyed through puppets and theatre. Contributors to the volume thus draw attention to some of the diverse ways that groups of people collectively make sense of, re-imagine or seek to change the personal, cultural, social, economic, political, or territorial conditions of their lives, while using the arts as their means and spaces of engagement. Across its chapters, the book explores a number of broad themes and questions. How can we conceptualise the relationship between community development and arts/cultural practice? What diverse forms does this relationship take in contemporary contexts? How do communities of people engage with, utilise, make sense of and through particular artforms and media? How can we understand the aesthetic and associated meanings of such engagements? How are the power dynamics related to authorship, resources, public recognition, and expectations of impact negotiated within community-based arts processes? How do economistic and neoliberal rationalities influence arts processes and programmes in community contexts? Together, the chapters also critically interrogate if, and how, dominant rationalities are being resisted and challenged through arts practices.