PRME Working Group on Arts for Impact

History

This Working Group emerged from the years of ongoing conversations and joint projects among educators and researchers exploring the role of arts in responsible management education. As the world navigates a polycrisis of interconnected challenges across climate, inequality, conflict, societal polarization, the Working Group recognizes that conventional pedagogies often struggle to cultivate empathy, reflection, and systems thinking. Arts-based approaches offer powerful pathways to widen perspectives, present complex issues in more intuitive expressions and engage learners in a holistic way, cognitively, affectively and behaviorally.

Purpose

Over the past four decades foundational work has been undertaken by individual educators and researchers establishing the field of organizational aesthetics, art firms and sensuous learning (e.g. Pierre Guillet de Monthoux, Steven S. Taylor, Nancy J. Adler, Paul Shrivastava, Elena P. Antonacopoulou) but there is a lack of sufficient institutional visibility, structured frameworks and a need for more research at the intersection of RME and arts. This Working Group attempts to respond to this gap by addressing the need to recognize art as a pedagogical tool and to build awareness among educators starting from the PRME community.

By foregrounding empathy, creativity, and inclusivity, the Working Group aims to strengthen the human core of PRME-aligned learning and reimagine how responsible leadership is cultivated in management classrooms worldwide. The Working Group seeks to position art and arts-based pedagogies as powerful enablers of responsible management education also by enabling learners to disrupt taken-for-granted assumptions and to imagine alternative futures.

Goals

The Working Group serves as a vital bridge between creative expression of educators as artists and academics and responsible management education. The Working Group’s primary goal is to harness the power of art and creativity to raise awareness of urgent sustainability issues, transforming complex data into evocative narratives that inspire immediate action among students, educators and other stakeholders.

Recognizing that sustainability is inherently cultural, we leverage artistic inquiry to reflect diverse societal attitudes and foster equity. The goals of the Working Group are:

1. Raise awareness among educators about the pedagogical value of art in fostering empathy, reflection, and responsible leadership;

2. Research and disseminate classroom and outside of classroom practices, case experiences, and innovative experiential learning and arts-based pedagogical methods through publications, creative outputs and outreach events;

3. Develop practical toolkits, frameworks, and teaching resources that enable adoption of arts-based pedagogies across institutions and other capacity building initiatives.

4. Empower students and youth through inclusive platforms that celebrate creative problem-solving enabled by arts for impact.

Research

The Working Group will advance collaborative research on how arts, creativity and arts-based pedagogies transform mindsets for responsible management learning. Even prior to its formal establishment, a key outcome in 2026 has been the publication of a Routledge volume in the PRME Series on arts-based pedagogies and mindset transformation, demonstrating both scholarly interest and practical relevance in this space. This collaborative effort was recognized as the best professional development workshop (PDW) by the MED Division of the Academy of Management at the annual meeting held in Copenhagen in 2025. The call for book chapters, edited by the co-chairs of the Working Group, in the new release of the book in the PRME series is planned by the end of 2026.

Building on this momentum, members will document classroom and outside of the classroom innovations, develop case studies and teaching notes, and co-author articles, immersive events, social media posts, and roundtable reflections that make these practices visible to the wider RME community. The group will encourage joint submissions to the leading academic journals in management education, sustainability, and ethics, and curate thematic tracks, special issues, panels, and workshops at leading international conferences, such as Academy of Management (AOM), Responsible Management Education Research (RMER) Conference, etc. Cross-institutional research collaborations and cross PRME Chapters (e.g. PRME Chapter Eurasia, DACH, North America, India) cooperation will be fostered to build evidence on the impact of arts-based approaches in advancing PRME outcomes.

Engagement Opportunities

The Working Group will create regular opportunities for educators, students, researchers, artists, and art institutions to connect through quarterly online meetings, experience-sharing forums, social media and practice showcases. Workshops and training sessions will enable members to learn how to apply arts-based methods in classrooms and institutional initiatives.

Two tangible platforms for 2026 include:

E-Art Exhibition: The Inconvenient Truth about Sustainable Business

Hosted by the College of Management, Mahidol University, in April 2026, this global exhibition invites students and artists from around the world to explore sustainable business through artistic expression..

Sustainable Fashion Show

osted by Faculty of Business,Leeds University Business School, in May 2026, this initiative will host a creative take for the Faculty’s annual Sustainability Day, engaging staff, students, alumni and global communities to reflect on their consumption habits. We invite colleagues from Business Schools around the world committed to arts-based approaches to come on board and support this project. For more information regarding this event, please write to Dr Sally Chan (LUBS PRME Lead) at s.s.y.chan@leeds.ac.uk

The Working Group will also organize joint webinars and dialogue series with partners such as the Network for Business Sustainability and the Global Business School Network, along with other interested institutions.

Resource Development

The Working Group will create practical resources that enable educators to adopt arts-based approaches in responsible management education. These will include books, case studies, and best-practice compendiums and other creative output etc. contributed by members across institutions. Recognizing the importance of social media in knowledge dissemination, the group will actively use a dedicated LinkedIn page from its day of inception to share resources, experiences, and curated examples of arts-based learning. This will strengthen the community and help extend the reach of the Working Group beyond formal academic channels and create an ongoing, visible stream of ideas, practices, and inspiration for responsible management educators and practitioners worldwide.

Stay tuned for additional resources to be uploaded in the resources tab!

Other Activities

Collaborative Initiatives

Additional activities may include arts-based student competitions in collaboration with PRME Students. Additionally, collaborations with PRME Working Groups, such as Sustainability Mindset, and PRME Chapters, such as Eurasia, DACH, North America, India will be expanded through joint events, collaborative research, cross-chapter dialogues to advance art-based pedagogies in responsible management education.

Where relevant, the Working Group will facilitate collaborations with artists to co-create learning experiences, exhibitions, and reflective engagements that bring societal and environmental issues into management classrooms through creative expression.

Podcast

Through the Stakeholder Podcast by Prof. Ed Freeman and Mahidol University’s sustainability Podcast, the Working Group will co-produce a series of episodes that examine this stakeholder group and explore the potential impact of art on responsible business education and experiential learning. Pending audience engagement, this initiative has the potential to develop into a regular podcast series with sustained outreach and educational value.

Co-chairs:

Divya Singhal, Goa Institute of Management, India

divyasinghal@gim.ac.in

Ekaterina Ivanova, Graduate School of Business HSE, University, Russia

ekaterina.ivanova@hse.ru

Steering Committee Members:

Sally Chan, Faculty of Business, University of Leeds, UK

Nattavud Pimpa, College of Management, Mahidol University, Thailand

Valli Batchelor, School of Business, Monash University, Australia

Fernanda Carreira, FGV, Brazil

Stephan Sonnenburg, ICN Berlin Business School, Germany

Please fill out the form here to join the Working Group.

Please join our dedicated LinkedIn page to access and share resources, experiences, and curated examples of arts-based learning.