Crafting Communities and Dramaturgies of Care in the Work of Arts & Homelessness International and Museum of Homelessness

Situating homelessness as evidence of a society that fails to care for its most vulnerable citizens, this chapter draws on scholarship on care ethics and the arts to investigate how an ethics, politics, aesthetics, and dramaturgy of care is evident in the multi-faceted activities, projects, and processes undertaken by Arts & Homelessness International (AHI) and the Museum of Homelessness (MoH). The analysis of AHI focuses on its organisational culture, commitment to co-production, and asset-based approaches evidenced in its Associates Leaders Programme and its facilitation of HOME: arts and homelessness festival that took place during Coventry’s tenure as UK City of Culture (CoC) in 2021. Focusing on two performance installations, Secret Museum (2021) and How to Survive the Apocalypse (2024), the chapter examines how care is embodied and enacted through MoH’s collection, curation, and staging of the material culture of homelessness through its ‘object storytelling’ methodology. It argues that AHI and MoH both, in different but interconnected ways, reconfigure what cultural and heritage organisations can be and do in the world through their commitment to establishing caring infrastructures, caring relations, caring processes, and caring heritage, cultural, and creative practices.