Resisting detached abstraction and universality: The politics and practices of artmaking in the racialized suburbs of Scarborough, Toronto

This essay reflects on artistic practices as contextually grounded research inseparable from socio-political action through four temporary, limited and site-specific artistic interventions in Scarborough, Toronto's racialized suburb. Drawing from Flyvbjerg's long advocacy for phronesis in critical social sciences, phronetic approach is a problem-driven theoretical methodology that allows scholars, practitioners and activists rooted in the desire for political transformations and social practice to better participate in contested geographies of settler-colonial capitalist sub/urbanization. I demonstrate how applying phronetic approach to artistic interventions creates situated knowledge that cannot be learned nor taught a priori, but produced out of intimate, grounded practice that builds reciprocally upon each engagement with the specific actors, institutions and structures, instead of abstract concepts and problems transplanted from afar. While contextually specific and attuned to the spatial day-to-day struggles, these reflexive counter-projects realized through technical know-how and practical wisdom can still participate in the broader challenge against the ongoing settler-colonial capitalist project.