The following activities took place during the 8th quarter of the postdoctoral project:

• In October 3-7, Ieva Zemīte, Leonarda Ķestere and I organised a study week on artistic activism titled “Participative Art in Public Spaces”. Masters students from the Creative industries and growth management programme (Latvian Academy of Culture and Riga Technical University) as well as students from the Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre and ESAM and Sciences Po universities in France. The aim of the study week was to learn and practice artistic methods for engaging local communities in the public life of the city. The students learned about the experiences of organisations such as theatre group Kvadrifrons and Riga Circus and took part in seminars and lectures by Krista Burāne, Olga Žitluhina, Aigars Bikše and others. The participants developed ideas how to engage various local communities in Āgenskalns with the help of artistic methods, with the focus on Āgenskalns market as a public space and a meeting point. The participants presented their ideas in an open exhibition at the Āgenskalns market Youth Room on October 7th. The exhibition was followed by a public discussion “What can art do for the neighbourhood and the neighbourhood for art?”, where I took part together with Mārtiņš Eņģelis, Viesturs Celmiņš and Renāte Lagzdiņa.
• On October 13^th, I took part in an international conference organised by the American scholarly association ASEEES (Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies). I participated in an online discussion “Economic and Social Precarity in Baltic Cinema” where I offered a sociological take on the representation of social problems in the cinema.
• In October 21-28, I went on trips to Ratnieki and Stāmeriena in northern Latvia to take part in two creative laboratories organized by the Riga Circus. The laboratories were part of the project “Circus for Climate” that Riga Circus organizes together with the Norwegian circus group “Acting for Climate”. This project is one of the three case studies that I am focusing on as part of the empirical fieldwork on activist art for my postdoctoral research project. These trips were an opportunity to conduct participant observations, take part in workshops and activities, conduct interviews with the lab organizers and participants and develop contacts with activist artists in Latvia and Norway. I am now working on processing and analysing the data and will draw on these to write two academic publications.
• On November 2nd, I gave a lecture at the annual international conference “Culture Crossroads”, organized by the Latvian Academy of Culture. The title of the lecture was “Art, activism and democracy” and I presented an initial analysis and theoretical interpretation of the empirical data collected as part of the postdoctoral project.
• In November 9-13, I travelled to the University of Lausanne in Switzerland where I took part in the European Sociological Association mid-term conference of the political sociology section. I gave a paper titled “Culture and the arts as a source of social resilience in societal crises: An ethnographic case study of activist art in Latvia”.
• In December I began work on an academic article planned as one of the deliverables of the postdoctoral project. I am planning to submit the article in the first half of 2023 to a Scopus-indexed academic journal. In preparing the article, I am drawing on the aforementioned conference presentations and the feedback I’ve received from colleagues and peers during these events.

• In July, Liene Ozoliņa continued ethnographic fieldwork with two activist art initiatives. In July 21-23, the first Riga Circus laboratory took place in Gārsene Castle as part of the “Circus for Climate” project. The laboratory was attended by youth from the local area, who worked together with Riga Circus and Norway circus company artists on the questions of the climate crisis and art as a tool to address it. In July 24-29, I participated in the annual ISSP activist art summer school in Rucka, Cēsis. L.Ozoliņa gave a lecture on socially engaged art in the era of neoliberalism.
• On August 18^th L.Ozoliņa participated in the 1^st Summer Academy for cultural practitioners, organised in Ogre by the Latvian Academy of Culture. She gave a talk about art and politics and shared insights from my postdoctoral project.
• On August 31^st, L.Ozoliņa travelled to the European Sociological Association cultural sociology section conference in Portsmouth, UK. She took part in a panel on socially engaged art and gave a presentation drawing on the ethnographic data from her postdoctoral project. She also established contacts with researchers in this field who work in the UK and the Netherlands.
• In September 5-30, Liene Ozoliņa was on a mobility exchange visit at the Estonian Art Academy (two weeks face-to-face and two weeks remotely). She participated in an international symposium on Social Design, where she spoke about researching the social and made contacts with interdisciplinary researchers from Estonia, Germany and Italy. She was invited on a visit to two universities in Germany to learn about their social design and socially engaged art projects. Together with colleagues from the Estonian Academy of Arts she worked on publications on art and research synergies and prepared a publication proposal on this topic for a Berlin-based publisher Archive Press. We also discussed opportunities for joint research grant applications for funding competitions in Estonia and Latvia.
• In September 19-23, L.Ozoliņa took part remotely in a conference on cultural policy that took place at Antwerp University. She presented a paper titled “Cultural and arts consumption as a source of social solidarity”.

In June 16-18, Liene Ozoliņa took part in an international conference "Old Discipline, New Trajectories: Theories, Methods and Practices in Anthropology", organized by the Society for Anthropological Sciences and the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Vilnius, Lithuania. She participated in the panel "Anthropological exploration of art and performative practices" and presented a paper "Art and activism for beginners: A case study of socially engaged art in post-Soviet neoliberalism", where she reflected on the empirical and conceptual findings from the first ethnographic case study of my postdoctoral project. With this activity, the Work Package 2 was concluded.

One of the main activities during the last quarter of the project was working on a publication together with professor Anda Laķe. The publication, titled “Cultural and arts consumption as a source of social solidarity: The case of the Latvian Centenary programme” was submitted for publication to the International Journal of Arts Management. The task was to develop the conceptual framework, produce a literature review and write the conclusions for the article, drawing on the theoretical research Liene Ozoliņa had conducted on the social impact of the arts as part of the postdoctoral project.

Other project activities during the last quarter included both scholarly and public discussions in relation to societal resilience and the social impact of the arts.

• On May 6th Researcher commented on the lessons from the pandemic from a sociological perspective on the TV programme “Nekā personīga”
• On May 24th she gave a lecture to MA students at the Latvian Academy of Culture, discussing research design aspects in ethnographic studies and sharing my empirical and conceptual findings from the first ethnographic fieldwork of this postdoctoral project
• On June 12th she led a workshop for young people living in the Cēsis region at the poet Eduards Veidenbaums museum “Kalāči”. The workshop topic was “Justice and freedom. What has changed over the course of 100 years?” The Researcher shared her thoughts and sociological findings on the questions of inequality and precarity in Latvia and the role that the arts, specifically literature, can play in highlighting these in the public sphere.

The Researcher now continuing fieldwork on two more case studies in the area of activist art in Latvia, participating in the planning of two projects to take place in July 2022.

During the 5th quarter of the postdoctoral project, the Researcher concluded the activities of the Work Package Nr.2. As part of this Work Package, the Researcher conducted ethnographic fieldwork that consisted of participant observations of an activist art mentoring programme as well as interviews with the programme participants. Drawing on the data, the Researcher prepared a paper titled “Taking Concepts Home”. The paper uses post-colonial theory to analyse how concepts are always rooted in particular contexts, rather than being universal. In this paper, the Researcher works with the ethnographic data to explore the “social life” of concepts such as social justice and solidarity, i.e. their specific understandings and manifestations in Latvia. During the 5th quarter, the Researcher also attended an online training on NVivo qualitative data analysis software, led by experts from the University of Surrey and QDA Services (UK).

Over the course of the fourth quarter of the postdoctoral research project, the Researcher continued her ethnographic fieldwork, conducting both participant observations and in-depth interviews. The fieldwork data are currently being processed to prepare the first publication of this project. In November 9-10th, the Researcher took part in an online training course organised by the University of Southampton, UK. The training was led by a well-known expert and author in the area of qualitative research methods, Helen Kara. The participants discussed the newest trends in research design and ethics, as well as learned about creative research approaches such as arts-based research, embodied research and multi-modal studies. Furthermore, the Researcher continued to share insights from her research publicly, speaking in October to high-school students from all across Latvia as part of an online series organised by the Latvian Ministry of Education and Science.

The first work package of the postdoctoral project “Culture and the arts as a source of social resilience in societal crises” has now been concluded. Firstly, the Researcher studied the most recent scientific literature on arts-based research, art and political activism, and social resilience. Secondly, the plan for the first ethnographic field work was produced and field research began, focusing on art as a form of political activism in Latvia. The Researcher is currently working on the first academic publication on this topic. At the end of the first work package, the project advisory board meeting was held where the Researcher discussed the conceptual framework of the project and the progress so far with colleagues from the LAC Research Centre.

In the third quarter of the project, the Researcher took part in three conferences (the Memory Studies Association’s conference, the European Sociological Association Conference, and in the conference “Emptiness: Ways of Seeing” at the Riga Stradiņš University) and discussed her research also at a number of other public and academic events.

In the second quarter of the research project “Culture and the arts as a source of social resilience in societal crises”, Liene continued developing the conceptual framework for the study and started ethnographic fieldwork for the first case study. The focus of the investigation in this stage has been specifically on the connections between art and politics and the conceptual resources and the apposite methodological approaches to explore these. On May 28th, Liene spoke at an international symposium “Communist Hauntings”, hosted by the Birkbeck College, University of London. The event brought together social and cultural theorists and artists to reflect on the ways in which artistic practices and artefacts can serve to study post-communist social reality. In a paper entitled “Taking Concepts Home”, Liene explored the possibilities and the limits of the conceptual resources provided by Western social theory to understand East European past and present. The papers presented at the conference are planned to be published in an edited volume. Liene will contribute both as an editor and an author.

In the second quarter of the project, a number of public engagement and training activities took place. Liene took part in a discussion organized by the IR Domuzīme magazine on the causes and consequences of the gap between the state and society in Latvia. The discussion was published in the May issue of IR Domuzīme magazine as well as on the magazine’s online platform. On June 3rd, Liene gave a lecture on ethnographic methodology at the Latvian Academy of Culture, attended by undergraduate and graduate students. Liene also attended a number of seminars and training events (all online due to the ongoing restrictions), including a workshop on Interdisciplinary Public Engagement on April 14th, organized by the British National Co-Ordinating Centre for Public Engagement, a seminar on Mnemonic Solidarity, organized by the Memory Studies Association on April 23rd, and a British Council Estonia seminar on Arts for Social Inclusion on June 8th. Liene also benefited from two workshops organized by VIAA - on scientific publishing and bibliometrics (May 6th) and on transferable skills for researchers (May 13th).

The core tasks of the first three months of the project were to study relevant scientific literature and to start elaborating the research design. Researcher read studies and recent publications on the social impact of art, the relationship between the arts and politics, as well as social resilience. The literature review included the following publications:

• Michelle Lamont and Peter Hall (eds) (2013) Social Resilience in the Neoliberal Era
• Adriana Dancus, Mats Hyvonen, Maria Karlsson (eds) (2020) Vulnerability in Scandinavian Arts and Culture
• Chantal Mouffe (2019) Artistic Strategies in Politics and Political Strategies in Art
• Lisa Baraitser (2017) Enduring Time
• Victor Seidler (forthcoming) Living and Dying with Covid
• Veena Das (2020) The Textures of the Ordinary: Doing Anthropology after Wittgenstein
• Veena Das, Michael Jackson, Arthur Kleinman, Brighupathi Singh (eds) 2014) The Ground Between: Anthropologists Engage Philosophy
• Sara Ahmed (2014) The Cultural Politics of Emotion
• Martha Nussbaum (2013) Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice
• Richard Sennett (2012) Together: The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation
• Helen Holmes and Sarah Hall (eds) (2020) Mundane Methods: Innovative Methods to Research the Everyday

In March, Researcher attended training on online research methods as well as on the role of the arts in narrating collective memory and identity (both organized by the School of Advanced Study, University of London). Networking activities included online seminars with colleagues from Birkbeck College (University of London) and University of Tallinn in order to exchange knowledge on arts-based research methods.