The shapeshifting and boundary crossings of socially engaged art

Socially-engaged art practices are understood to borrow from several disciplinary territories where they coexist and cross over into contexts that, in the process of engaging in civic work and quotidian actions, occlude their identity as art and aesthetic practices. The article examines the complications arising from these overlapping ontologies through a socially engaged project where the author acts and performs as an artist-scholar-facilitator, adopting, alongside the participants, multiple identities that are dependent on changing perspectives and conditions. Arguing for a different ethical orientation to research, the inquiry into this community practice further interrogates the wrangle between the expectations that symbolic capital is accrued by artists engaged in these practices and the invisible agency of quiet activism that offers potent alternative forms of resistance.Accepted manuscrip