Design and Planning Program · KMUTT · DPL775 – Special Topics · Art as Agency
Theoretical Foundations
An interactive literature review mapping the theoretical territory of Art as Agency. 50 sources across eight territories — filter by theme, click any card to read the full summary and connections to the research. 38 of 50 sources are by female scholars — marked ♀ in celebration of a deliberate curatorial choice. This review centres female voices as both a feminist methodological commitment and a corrective to their historic underrepresentation in the fields it draws from.
Central argument
Wellbeing and sustainability are inseparable — and socially engaged art, through the Three Cs of Critical thinking, Creativity, and Compassion, is the optimal methodology to cultivate both simultaneously in educational settings.
How to read this review
This literature review is organized around eight interlocking theoretical territories. Together they form the scaffold that holds the Art as Agency research together. No single territory is sufficient alone — the argument emerges from their intersection. Use the filters to explore by theme, or scroll through all 50 sources. Click any card to read the full summary, key ideas, and connections to the Three Cs framework.
Wellbeing
Holistic, salutogenic, and positive youth frameworks
Socially Engaged Art
Art as practice, pedagogy, and social infrastructure
Futures Literacy
Imagining and designing preferred futures
Systems Thinking
Emergence, fractals, and interconnection
Pedagogy
Critical, place-based, and transformative education
Student Agency
Transition agents, shaping competence, civic identity
Makerspace
Making, fabrication, and learning through building
All Sources
50 sources — mostly female scholars
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hooks · 1994 · Book
Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom
Education is not the transfer of information but a practice of freedom — the classroom is a site of liberation where care, emotion, and lived experience are the foundation of learning.
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hooks · 2000 · Book
Art on My Mind: Visual Politics
The function of art is not to tell it like it is but to imagine what is possible. Visual art cultivates the empathic imagination necessary for social change.
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brown · 2017 · Book
Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds
How we are at the small scale is how we are at the large scale. Small adaptive local actions are the seeds of systemic transformation — the theoretical foundation for Fractal Logic.
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Woolard and Jahoda · 2019 · Book
Making and Being
Fine arts education uniquely asks students what matters to them and gives them the tools to act on it. Creative problem solving sits at the peak of Bloom’s Taxonomy.
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Boler and Zembylas · 2003 · Article
Discomforting Truths: The Emotional Terrain of Understanding Difference
A pedagogy of discomfort embraces unsettlement as the catalyst for genuine critical inquiry rather than avoiding the emotional labour of transformative learning.
Cormier · 2008 · Article
Rhizomatic Education: Community as Curriculum
The community is the curriculum — not a path toward it. Knowledge is co-created by all participants in a rhizomatic network rather than delivered top-down.
Anguera and Santisteban · 2016 · Article
Images of the Future
Students hold catastrophic views of the global future but optimistic views of their personal futures. This crisis of agency is the direct empirical justification for the Futures Literacy Survey.
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Dannenberg and Grapentin · 2016 · Article
Education for Sustainable Development: Learning for Transformation
Introduces Gestaltungskompetenz — shaping competence — the active ability to think in alternatives, handle complexity, and act under uncertainty.
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Heaton and Crumpler · 2017 · Article
Sharing Mindfulness: A Moral Practice for Artist Teachers
Art education is a moral practice for cultivating changemakers who identify needs in society and address them through progressive, moral, or sustainable actions.
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Hurren · 2017 · Article
Cultivating an Aesthetic Sensibility and Activism
Activism begins with perception — cultivating a deep sensory connection to the immediate environment is a necessary prerequisite for care and action.
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Hetland, Winner, Veenema and Sheridan · 2016 · Framework
Studio Habits of Mind
Eight rigorous cognitive habits including Envision, Observe, Reflect, and Understand Community. Disrupts the myth of art as a soft skill with research-backed evidence.
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Kimmerer · 2013 · Book
Braiding Sweetgrass
Human health and ecological health are inseparable. A shift from ownership and extraction to reciprocity and gratitude — the philosophical foundation of the Circular Ecology model.
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Tsing · 2015 · Book
The Mushroom at the End of the World
Resilience is found in the margins — collaborative survival within the damaged world already created. Disrupts top-down solutions in favour of small-scale adaptive collaboration.
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Kern, Waters, Adler and White · 2016 · Framework
EPOCH Measure of Adolescent Wellbeing
Purpose-built for adolescents across five dimensions — Engagement, Perseverance, Optimism, Connectedness, and Happiness. The Optimism subscale directly measures future orientation.
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Irwin, Kossoff and Tonkinwise · 2018 · Book
Transition Design
Micro-niches are protected spaces where new practices develop and eventually scale. The MUIDS courtyard is precisely such a micro-niche for prototyping systemic change.
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Keeler · 2018 · Thesis
Coming to Create, Connect, and Exist within Spaces of Community
A YPAR study in which a youth-led photography project transformed an alienating institutional space into a meaningful place of belonging — a direct precedent for the Wellbeing Echo.
OECD · 2022 · Report
OECD Wellbeing Framework and the Wellbeing Economy
Human and environmental health are the necessary prerequisites for sustainable development — providing international institutional credibility for the wellbeing-sustainability link.
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Peppler and Bender · 2013 · Article
Maker Movement Spreads Innovation One Project at a Time
Making is an act of civic participation — it produces not just objects but identities, relationships, and agency. The makerspace is where students become active producers rather than passive consumers of technology.
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Halverson and Sheridan · 2014 · Article
The Maker Movement in Education
The maker movement centres learning as a process of making things that matter. Making changes the relationship between the learner and knowledge — from receiving to producing.
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Calabrese Barton and Tan · 2017 · Article
Designing for Rightful Presence in Makerspace: The Role of Boundary-Negotiating Artifacts
Makerspace learning is most powerful when it allows historically marginalised students to negotiate what counts as knowledge and who counts as a knower.
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Shogren and Raley · 2022 · Book
Self-Determination and Causal Agency Theory
Agency is not a fixed trait — it is a capacity that grows when students experience genuine influence over their environment. Causal agency theory describes how this development happens.
OECD · 2019 · Framework
Learning Compass 2030: Student Agency
Student agency is the capacity to set goals, reflect and act responsibly to effect change. The OECD positions it as the defining educational competency for navigating an uncertain and complex world.
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Mitra · 2008 · Article
Student Voice in School Reform: Building Youth-Adult Partnerships that Strengthen Schools and Empower Youth
When students are treated as partners in school improvement rather than subjects of it, both the school and the students are fundamentally changed.
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Eriksson and Lindstrom · 2008 · Article
A Salutogenic Interpretation of the Ottawa Charter
The Ottawa Charter’s vision of health promotion is fundamentally salutogenic — it asks what generates health, not just what prevents disease. This reframing changes everything about how schools approach student wellbeing.
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Vinje, Langeland and Bull · 2017 · Chapter
Aaron Antonovsky’s Development of Salutogenesis 1979-1994
Antonovsky’s core insight was that stress is universal but breakdown is not inevitable — what makes the difference is whether an environment provides coherence, manageability, and meaning.
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Lindstrom and Eriksson · 2010 · Book
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Salutogenesis
Salutogenesis is an umbrella concept that gathers under it everything we know about how health is created, maintained, and strengthened — not just how disease is prevented.
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Lacy (ed.) · 1994 · Book
Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art
New genre public art engages audiences directly with the compelling issues of our time — it is not art about social issues, it is art that creates social situations.
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Bishop · 2012 · Book
Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship
Participatory art is not automatically emancipatory. What matters is the quality of the social relationships it creates and the critical consciousness it activates.
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Fredrickson · 2001 · Article
The Broaden-and-Build Theory of Positive Emotions
Positive emotions broaden awareness and build lasting personal resources — cognitive, psychological, social, and physical. They are not just outcomes of wellbeing but its primary engine.
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Dweck · 2006 · Book
Mindset: The New Psychology of Success
A growth mindset — the belief that abilities can be developed through dedication and effort — transforms how students approach challenges, setbacks, and the process of learning.
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Brown · 2010 · Book
The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You Should Be and Embrace Who You Are
Belonging is not fitting in. Fitting in asks us to change who we are; true belonging asks us to be exactly who we are. The difference is the foundation of every safe learning space.
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Haraway · 2016 · Book
Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene
We need to stay with the trouble rather than look for exits. The Chthulucene — the epoch of multi-species entanglement — demands not hope or despair but response-ability.
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Raworth · 2017 · Book
Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st Century Economist
The goal of the 21st century is not to grow GDP but to thrive within planetary boundaries while ensuring a social foundation for all. This reframing is the economic equivalent of the Circular Ecology model.
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Macy and Brown · 2012 · Book
Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We’re in Without Going Crazy
Active hope is not optimism — it is a practice. It is something we do rather than something we have. It is the committed orientation toward the world we want to create.
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Greene · 1995 · Book
Releasing the Imagination: Essays on Education, the Arts, and Social Change
The role of aesthetic education is to awaken — to enable people to notice what they have taken for granted, to question what seems fixed, to imagine what does not yet exist.
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Ladson-Billings · 1994 · Article
Toward a Theory of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy
Culturally relevant pedagogy demands academic excellence, cultural competence, and sociopolitical consciousness simultaneously. Students must see themselves in the curriculum and the curriculum must see them.
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Fine and Torre · 2004 · Article
Re-membering Exclusions: Participatory Action Research in Public Institutions
When the people most affected by unjust institutions become the researchers, the knowledge that is produced is different — more grounded, more honest, and more useful for change.
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Shiva · 1988 · Book
Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development
The destruction of nature and the subjugation of women are not separate crises — they are the same crisis. Development that treats the Earth as a resource treats women and communities the same way.
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Le Guin · 1986/2019 · Essay
The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction
The dominant story of human history is the hero with a spear. But the first human technology was a container — a bag for gathering and carrying. What if we told history from that perspective?
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Anzaldua · 1987 · Book
Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza
The border is a wound — but it is also a creative space. Living in the borderlands between cultures, languages, and identities produces a consciousness uniquely capable of holding contradiction.
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Greene · 2001 · Article
Variations on a Blue Guitar: The Lincoln Center Institute Lectures on Aesthetic Education
Aesthetic education is education in noticing — in attending to the world with the freshness that art demands. It is the antidote to the numbness of routine.
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Maguire · 1987 · Book
Doing Participatory Research: A Feminist Approach
Participatory research is not a method — it is a commitment to making research with people rather than on them. A feminist participatory research insists this commitment include gender and power.
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Butler · 1993 · Book
Parable of the Sower
All that you touch you change. All that you change changes you. The only lasting truth is change — and God is change.
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Delpit · 1995 · Book
Other People’s Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom
The culture of power exists in schools, and pretending it doesn’t is a disservice to the students who most need to understand it. Good pedagogy teaches the codes while questioning them.
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Vossoughi, Hooper and Escudé · 2016 · Article
Making Through the Lens of Culture and Power: Toward Transformative Visions for Educational Equity
The uncritical adoption of maker culture into schools can reproduce educational injustice. Making is never culturally neutral — the tools, the values, and the problems worth solving all encode whose knowledge counts.
Martin · 2015 · Article
The Maker Movement Comes to School
The maker movement brings a do-it-yourself philosophy into the educational sphere, fostering learning experiences based on design, digital fabrication, and collaborative problem-solving — cultivating a maker mindset of curiosity, autonomy, and willingness to learn from error.
Dougherty · 2012 · Article
The Maker Movement
The foundational text of the maker movement — arguing that making is a fundamental human activity and that affordable digital fabrication tools combined with a culture of sharing create unprecedented conditions for democratised production.
Taylor, Hurley and Connolly · 2016 · Article
Making Community: The Wider Role of Makerspaces in Public Life
Makerspaces are not just learning environments — they are social infrastructure. Their most significant contribution is not the objects they produce but the community connections and civic participation they generate.
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Harrington, Erete and Piper · 2019 · Article
Deconstructing Community-Based Collaborative Design: Towards More Equitable Participatory Design Engagements
Community participation in design is not inherently equitable. Genuine co-design requires examining who holds power, who defines the problem, and who benefits — otherwise participation reproduces the same hierarchies it claims to disrupt.
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Bevan, Gutwill, Petrich and Wilkinson · 2015 · Article
Learning through STEM-rich Tinkering: Findings from a Jointly Negotiated Research Project
Tinkering — open-ended, exploratory, low-stakes making — produces deeper STEM learning than structured instruction. Crucially, it also generates positive affect: curiosity, persistence, and a sense of competence that transfers beyond the immediate activity.