Applying a/r/tography as a creative community resilience strategy in response to the climate emergency

This paper connects arts education creative practice and the rise of climate emergency discourse with community resilience policymaking. We apply a creative-relational approach informed by the principles of a/r/tography to position community stories as central to place based transformation. Through our Guattari-inspired conceptual model, we apply the a/r/tographic method to critically explore its suitability for identifying and mapping hidden community stories — traces of a new ecosophy — as a local resilience response. Our research took place in North Lanarkshire, Scotland, as part of a creative programme commissioned to address inequalities through the arts. We entered into artistic dialogue with community creative practices that occurred at two ecological sites, creating reflective textual and visual artworks to produce alternative representations of place that challenge dominant narratives within local resilience policymaking. These mutual creative engagements informed our findings while remaining within their artistic context rather than reduced to categorised themes. This work offers a new local resilience strategy to strengthen community representation of their places.