The concept of dialogical aesthetics was adopted by art historian Grant Kesteras a way of 
characterizing socially engaged arts as emerging through direct community action or intervention. 
Kester argues that empathic listening within forms of communicative exchange is where value is 
created as opposed to it being manifest in a tangible artifact or other output. Communication here 
is described as particular and unique, in that these relational processes enable sharing of and 
reflection upon personal biographies in processes that are both specifically situated and yet open to 
change. A dialogical aesthetic then is an approach, a way of working in which practitioners and 
those involved can appreciate the process of engagement, from different centers of value. Kester 
describes this as ‘performative’ in that ‘the identity of the artist and those involved is produced 
through situational encounters’, rather than through forms of performativity associated with 
theatricality or spectacle. 
In a similar vein, theorists such as Claire Bishop identify the value of socially engaged arts 
practices as working with and accounting for the complexity of social relations, the tangled knots 
of ‘engagement, affect, inequality’. Rather than highlighting empathic dialogue, Bishop underlines 
the ‘undecidability’ of aesthetic experience as an important characteristic. She argues that this is not 
just achieved through rational verbal argumentation, but embedded through the affective 
experience of working with uncertainty and contradiction, collaboratively. Bishop’s account 
includes a useful reflection on the multiplicity of people involved in artworks, how the projects are 
conceived, funded, align or contradict with the diverse values of those who participate or facilitate 
their production. Creating such events requires approaches to gathering people and resources 
together. The role of the artist in this sense is therefore decentralized as controlling the action by 
highlighting a meshwork of actors taking on roles ordinarily not associated with creative practice. 
Ethnography has always been collaborative. To varying degrees the anthropologist in the 
field has always relied upon a “cooperative relationship” with those being studied to explain, to 
confirm, and even to proffer their own observations and interpretations. The trouble is that this 
collaborative relationship has habitually been expunged in the ensuing ethnographic text leading to 
the false and misleading impression that the ethnographic subject is passive and anthropological 
knowledge a mere matter of data collection. While much has changed in anthropological practice 
since the late 1960s, from an acute reflexivity and various calls for experimentation to the more 
recent call for engagement, in the last decades there has been a growing consensus that if 
anthropology is to address responsibly the crisis of representation and its myriad of ethical and 
political challenges, one promising route, though not the only one, would be to highlight, 
systematize, and prioritize the collaborative nature of ethnography. Indeed, if one of the key 
challenges facing anthropology lay in exposing and overturning the vexed authority of the 
anthropologist as ethnographer—an authority permitting representations that too often turned 
out to be distorting, if not repressive and dominating—how better to do it than to embolden and 
broaden the collaborative nature of the ethnographic project itself ?  
What value do arts-based ethnographies have as public ethnographies? Arts-based 
ethnographies have the potential of expanding ethnographic research, and of providing new means 
of transmitting ethnographic information, and have the potential to create social change. As a form 
of research, the inclusion of collaborative art unveils the com- plexities and the process of 
knowledge creation giving the researcher a vantage point from which to observe it as well as 
participate in it. The affective qualities of art making provide a venue for creating empathy among 
the participants. If one of the aims of eth- nographic research is an understanding of the other, art 
making has the potential of becoming the means by which the participants, and the artist, and 
researcher can become aware of their views and understanding of each other. 
In their public display, arts-based ethnographies provide a form of transmission of 
knowledge different from the solitary reading of a text. Much of anthropological ethno- graphic 
work in the 20th century has aimed at making the unfamiliar familiar. The encounter with art 
creates an experience that is sensorial, experiential, and bodily, and is one that creates space for 
altering one’s understanding of the world and hence cre- ates social change. This type of 
ethnography opens possibilities for producing a meaningful dialogue with viewers of different 
backgrounds through affect, and the possibilities for creating communities that connect people 
from different communities through shared experiences.