Introduction: Trading in Social Good

This text introduces ‘#TransActing: A Market of Values', an event that marked the end of five years of collaborative research on value, values, valorisation and evaluation realised by Critical Practice Research Cluster in association with University of the Arts London. As an event, Transacting took place in central London in July of 2015 and used the distinguishing features of a market (traders/stallholders, stalls and a milling crowd) to evaluate its many and varied benefits as a social form. TransActing is contextualised with reference to several bodies of knowledge. These include education and art fairs as well as the burgeoning field of practice-based/led art research. The publication also considers market cultures in London and beyond as well as critical art and other forms of not-for-profit cultural production. This introduction concludes with briefly summarizing each text in the anthology and the unique contribution they make to our understanding of Transacting.