Introduction: Creativity and resistance in a hostile world

Writing this in the week before and after the UK's exit from the EU (Jan 31st, 2020), we find ourselves at the threshold of a different Britain. When we began work on the Creative Interruptions project in 2014, we couldn’t have imagined that by the time we were writing this book we would have witnessed three UK general elections (2014; 2017; 2019) and two referendums (Scottish independence in 2014; EU referendum in 2016). We didn’t plan or factor in that alongside our work on the project, which incorporates research on anti-racist activism and advocating for the rights of marginalized communities, that some of us would be part of urgent cycles of campaigning or that all of our project meetings would almost invariably begin with commiseration or questioning how to hold hope for the future. Again. This has become a book of its time, the Brexit years, which reflects on the potential of diverse forms of creativity at the margins of society to interrupt the flow of the status quo.