Turning life into art and art into a way of life. A cross-country perspective about art-based research, critical pedagogy, and social intervention

This article is the result of a partnership and disciplinary crossing, directed towards social intervention through the arts. In this sense, we used a multi-sited ethnography (Barbosa et al., 2020), i.e., we focused on the study of two distinct empirical cases, one in Portugal and the other in Italy, in order to understand and emphasize how sociology and critical pedagogy can be complemented with artistic practices, more specifically with the use, application and analysis of art-based research, thus promoting more effective means of intervention and perception of the social reality lived and experienced by different social actors, but also by the researchers. For the Portuguese case the initiative “The Neighbourhood is Ours!” will be presented, and for the Italian context the project “Alice In Wonder Wall”, both targeted at young people from different backgrounds and with different experiences.