How does artistic creation engage? Revisiting the regimes of engagement through institutional ethnography

Abstract

This article examines how artistic creation unfolds in two institutional settings: a psychiatric support center with a painting studio and a prison hosting a contemporary dance project. Drawing on long-term ethnography, it employs the framework of regimes of engagement to analyze the situated coordination of creative action. Although creation emerges from concrete transactions with materials, spaces, bodies, and others, it mobilizes modes of attention, sensitivity, reflexivity, and moral valuation that resist full incorporation into existing regimes. The ethnographic situations show that artistic practices render visible tensions, frictions, and complementarities within the model. The analysis argues that creation exposes underexplored dimensions of engagement, particularly the articulation between bodily sensibility and the moral pursuit of expressiveness, thus reopening the question of how pragmatist sensibilities might more consistently integrate the aesthetic, corporeal, and moral dimensions of situated action.

The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Social Science Information, 2026 · DOI ↗