Artfully thinking the prosocial

This chapter explores how arts-based activities form part of an experimental approach for social research that fuses sociological insights with creative practice. As an ethos, people conceive the prosocial as seeking to promote collective human flourishing, while a prosocial practice is inclusive and imaginative. The potential to flourish is supported by involvement in diverse social relations that connect people as families, friends, communities, neighbourhoods, and nations. Experiences of social collectivity, however, are being shredded through the expanding dominance, and cascading impacts, of market-oriented ideologies. The chapter shows how the status of the social as a nonmarket domain has little value or sense when seen from within these dominant ideological framings.