Cross-sectoral working as a foundation for the arts mediating change in precarious lives

This paper addresses the conditions for cross-sectoral collaborative working as a foundation for embedding the arts into the public sector. The integration of the arts into the public sector creates opportunities to creatively change how welfare, healthcare and social care are conceived, practiced and experienced. This paper will present approaches to cross-sectoral and collaborative working between arts, health and social work practitioners. Drawing on research from Scotland, innovative social care practice will be introduced and the spaces where artists are working collaboratively with people with disabilities and practitioners.
The paper will present approaches to using the experimental and experiential dimensions of the arts to give voice to the marginalised and silenced, to temporal re-imagining, the slowing down and stretching of time -
of being in the moment - as a method to enter the world of people with disabilities and respond to individual differences. This work engages in alternative ways of doing and experiencing social care and challenges privileged normative, ableist time and space which has been a barrier for people with disabilities and social work/health practitioners to fully engage with each other. Understanding the conditions for cross-sectoral collaborative working are crucial for the successful integration of the arts into the everyday within the context of people whose precarious lives are mediated through social work and health
practitioners.