My name is Aftab Erfan, I am currently a Phd candidate in community planning at UBC, and I have been watching the convergence of community work and the arts in my action research project and other inquiries. Over the past years I have been working on a small First Nations reserve on the northern tip of Vancouver Island. Here, a comprehensive planning exercise brought into the foreground the need for working out of long-standing, inter-generational traumas, reconciling the past with the future, and rebuilding the social fabric of the community to support moving forward. My work, in particular, has been with three generations of parents who are reclaiming traditional knowledges on parenting practices, and making them practicable in light of modern wisdom. I have convened a series of dialogues on these topics, relying primarily on a facilitation approach called Deep Democracy, adding an artistic layer for expression, evaluation, and harvesting of the learnings, including the co-creation of a large community mural as a final piece of the project.

I am primarily a visual artist – and I regularly provide visual facilitation services to a variety of clients under the title of Whole Picture Thinking. But the writing of my dissertation as a creative analytic ethnography, may yet turn me into a poet, or fiction-writer, or screenplay-writer! I have an ongoing and intriguing inquiry with questions around this roundtable: How do we bring in artistic practices to make possible, assist, and enliven the work of community-based social transformation? And perhaps more fundamentally, how do we do our work as social change agent as if we are artists?