In this chapter, I discuss how the protests of April 2019 initiated by the Kazakh Spring activists led to growing feelings of injustice and the necessity for more protest. This chapter is devoted to the contextualization and explanation of why and how the protest movement of Oyan, Qazaqstan emerged in the corridors of the courthouses on the days of the activists’ trials. The paradox of the authoritarian regime is revealed in these contexts. Still unable to adapt to the new conditions or see how the socio-political landscape had changed since Nazarbayev’s resignation, his authoritarian regime machine continued to operate in the same repressive manner by arresting and harassing dissidents and protestors. Unlike previous periods, protestors’ arrests fuelled even more unrest and led to the organization of the protest movement Oyan, Qazaqstan, which publicly launched their programme to democratise Kazakhstan in June 2019.

The court trials of the Scottsboro Nine, young African Americans falsely accused of raping two young white women, galvanized a generation and helped precipitate Hughes’s leftward shift. In 1931, he published Scottsboro Limited: Four Poems and a Play in Verse, collecting an eponymous play and the poems “The Town of Scottsboro,” “Justice,” “Scottsboro,” and “Christ in Alabama” alongside images by Prentiss Taylor. Its themes – the lethal policing of a racially and economically vulnerable group – no less than the conflicts among different factions surrounding the trial, seem tailor-made to contemporary concerns. This chapter reads Hughes and Taylor together to shift the focus from the prospect of death to imprisonment itself as unjust. Then it asks what it means that its poems circulate as memes, absent their original context, to protest the seemingly endless instances of judicial and extrajudicial, state-sanctioned murder. If the question of a grievable death has taken on renewed urgency since 2014, Hughes’s Scottsboro writing urges readers to reconsider what we collectively recognize as death.

In this chapter we revisit both art and economics as defined categories. The art world itself operates as a system of institutional and commercial value and of complicated interplays of altruism, strategy, financial motivation, and artistic import. This system exists within a larger system. That is, the art world is part of the larger world. We explore the definition of art – the narrowness of the definition of "high art" and the breadth of creative and visual activity. We consider the process by which visual culture is legitimated into the category of art, and then ask whether broad access to art is economic – a chance to buy something – or civic – a chance to participate. In fact, economics itself is a creative discipline. George Akerlof, the Nobel laureate, recently wrote about economics’ "sins of omission" as a discipline. These omissions are in overlooking soft skills and lacking the ability to tackle complex interdisciplinary problems. Thus, we leave the book with an idea of economics as a set of tools to create sustainability in the arts and economics as a creative discipline to build the world as an art project.