Dr Cara Courage, SFIPM, FRSA, is a culture and place consultant and scholar, named in the top 10 of place-thinkers globally and a ‘strategy angel’ for the arts sector. Cara has worked in the cultural and place sectors for over 25 years and in that time, there isn’t an artform that she hasn’t worked with. She has developed expertise in practices that are socially engaged, community-led, and embedded in place, whether that place be a team, a city park, a national museum or a rural town high street. Cara is convenor-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Placemaking (2021); co-editor of Creative Placemaking and Beyond (Routledge, 2018); and author of Arts in Place: The Arts, the Urban and Social Practice (Routledge, 2017). 

Dr Anita McKeown, FRSA, FIPM, is an award-winning artist, curator, educator, and researcher working at the intersection of inclusive design, creative placemaking, technology, and STEAM education. She is the director of SMARTlab Skelligs, a satellite of the global research network SMARTlab Research Institute, and UCD SMARTlab Academy. Anita’s work uses an adaptive change methodology, reverse engineered for 21st-century challenges, incorporating design thinking, circular economic principles, and the SDGs/Earth Charter to build social, environmental, and economic resilience and encourage systemic behavioural change. In addition to a distinguished career in academia and the arts, she is recognised as an author and editor, having co-edited the book Creative Placemaking and Beyond (Routledge, 2018) and as a sub-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Placemaking (2021). Her work has earned her numerous accolades and awards, and her extensive expertise and experience has contributed to her recognition as a thought leader in her field.

Dr Aisling Rusk is an architect and Director of Belfast-based practice Studio idir, with a PhD in liminal spatial praxis. Aisling is the inaugural chair of RSUA Women in Architecture, Northern Ireland and a part-time tutor/consultant in the Streetspace Studio at Queen’s University, Belfast. She contributed the chapter “Trauma and healing in the post-conflict landscape of Belfast” to the forthcoming textbook.

Brian Jay De Lima Ambulo is a PhD candidate in Culture Studies at The Lisbon Consortium and a recipient of the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT) Fellowship under the Ministry for Science, Technology and Higher Education in Portugal. Brian contributed the chapter “The Filipino Spirit is [Not] Waterproof: Creative Placeproofing in Post-Disaster Philippines”.

Jeff Poulin is an American educationalist, cultural administrator, and social entrepreneur whose work takes a justice approach towards uncovering local solutions for global challenges. Jeff contributed the chapter “The Case for Young Creatives at the Center of Placemaking and Place-Healing”.

Professor Karen Till is a cultural geographer, ethnographer and curator who engages in collaborative research about place, memory and creative practice. Working with local experts, she seeks to reconsider, and thereby contribute to, political, feminist and urban theory. Karen is the Director of the MA in Geography at Maynooth University. She also directs the Space&Place Research Collaborative in Ireland. Internationally, she is a founding Co-convener of the Mapping Spectral Traces network of artists, practitioners and scholars. Her book in progress, Wounded City, highlights the significance of place-based memory-work and ethical forms of care at multiple scales that may contribute to creating more socially just futures. Her curatorial work invites artists, practitioners, community leaders, scholars and publics to explore how creative practices might enable more responsible and sustainable approaches to caring for places, shared environments and cities. With Michal Huss, Karen contributed the chapter “Anticolonial placemaking”.

Dr Michal Huss is a Postdoctoral Fellow at The Minerva Center for Human Rights and a facilitator of radical cartography workshops in and around gentrifying spaces and migration detention centres. With Karen Till, Michal Huss co-authored the chapter “Anticolonial placemaking”.