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This panel brings together artists and designers whose research depends on socially engaged practices across disciplines with human and nonhuman collaborators and communities. We use case studies from our own practices to discuss the agency and responsibility of art and design, and of artists and designers. Our discussion of the power relations and ethics of collaboration ranges from within-species to interspecies social engagement. Based on a long term research project at the site of a small scale family farm in southeast Michigan, Ruth K. Burke calls for a new approach to interspecies social engagement that better accounts for artists engaging with animals and other nonhuman life, grounded in reciprocal inquiry and co-laboring. Maria Michails' artworks emerge from the cultivation of friendship and trust through immersion in cross-border communities, engaging in dialogues and critical reflections that is subsequently expressed through the co-creation of art. Her paper articulates uneasy questions that arise from these unsettling entanglements of humans from different backgrounds. Colleen Clark and Jennifer Low discuss their use of design research methods to leverage design activism in the classroom, empowering students, who hold the least power within the school ecosystem to identify, and advocate for, opportunities for change. Jane Prophet describes the collaborative work of a large creative team comprising patient experts, specifically women and youth of color living with chronic pain, artists and clinicians. Their artworks, designed objects and interventions inform and challenge gendered and racialized decisions, strategies, and policy-making around the treatment of chronic pain.