Visual ways of knowing : beyond art therapy and towards social change

Social workers have been engaged with the arts for a considerable time in their professional lives, although a great deal of that work has centred on the therapies. In this article I want to bring out an important feature of the use of the arts in Social Work, and that is, to make things public and their potential for creating social change. I will use a visual arts projects in which a Social Work academic and her students were involved in the UK. This is the Survivor Arts Project (University of Birmingham online n.d.), on permanent display in the corridors of the University of Birmingham.