Who gets to theorise? How and when do they do it? What happens to theoretical knowing when it leaves the academy? How does theorizing-in-practice circulate back into the ivory tower? The proposed roundtable brings together cultural workers and researchers-in-practice working with children and young people in a variety of international arts and educational contexts who will speak to these questions and share their experiences of theorizing in dark times. Arguably, times have always been ‘dark’ for those working outside the academy especially where the arts meet community work, where funding is precarious and at the whim of political winds, where operating on a shoestring is the norm and attrition is high. Yet, community arts—whether art, film, photography, theatre, poetry or writing—continue to be practised, to generate new methodologies, and to establish new ways of doing, thinking and feeling about the world, that why not, new theory. Many approaches to generating knowledge valued in the critical social sciences for their emancipatory and transformative potential—liberatory psychology, Theater of the Oppressed, Photovoice, and others—emerge from praxis at the intersections of arts, community, and education. The roundtable challenges the boundaries between theory and practice in the taken-for-granted practices of the academy and explores other forms of collaborative meaning-making in worlds beyond campuses. Members of the roundtable are drawn from an emerging community of practice concerned with connecting often lone cultural workers and researchers-in-practice working with children and young people in community arts internationally. During the roundtable we propose to reflect on what theory means to us in our respective contexts, how it informs our practice, what new insights and stories theory enables and which it constrains, and which other ways of knowing (biographies, intuitions, dreams, hopes, faith) we draw on to keep on keeping on.