Just heard that the Connected Communities 'pilot demonstrator' bid to AHRC submitted jointly with Tom Wakeford and Kerrie Schaefer has been successful. We'll set up a separate project blog in due course, but here's the summary of the project. Some fantastic partners for this project, including Mission Models Money, Cadispa Trust, NHSGGC, Theatre Modo, Bradford Community Broadcasting, Swingbridge Media, Love Milton and the inestimable Jon Hawkes. All very exciting.
Remaking Society
Realising the potential of cultural activities in contexts of deprivation
Remaking Society will exemplify the central themes of the Connected Communities Programme via three inter-dependent routes:
i) Working with local partners in demonstrating and assessing participatory cultural
activities in four contrasting contexts of deprivation – Bradford, Glasgow,
Fraserburgh and Newcastle.
ii) Using these four pilots to generate new forms of evidence about the lived
experience of poverty and exclusion.
iii) Creating opportunities for marginalised and less visible sections of society to
communicate with wider audiences, including policy-makers.
Research context and rationale
Cultural dimensions of regeneration – making, creating, performing and celebrating – are
often neglected. Yet these aspects can be vital to the sense of shared wellbeing, belonging
and aspiration for community members. Hawkes calls the integration of a cultural
perspective into the planning of change the “fourth pillar” of sustainability, alongside
economic, social and environmental dimensions. He suggests that cultural projects provide
“avenues for the expression of community values…[that can]…directly affect the directions
society takes” (Hawkes 2001).
Recent Government-commissioned research has added to a growing body of evidence
suggesting that participatory arts and media processes can act as portals to wider processes
of social development, by offering for example access to further learning, training or social
networks (Scottish Government 2006). Activities which promote imaginative engagement
through creative practice can offer additional opportunities to conceive and enact
alternatives. Members of a community experience processes allowing them to imagine
different possible futures. Collaborative participatory arts have been shown to make a
significant contribution to both the confidence of individuals, their trust of others
participating in the process and in overall quality of life and wellbeing (Jeffery 2005).
Remaking Society is to collaborate with four experienced partner organisations that work
intensively, through participatory arts and media practices, with communities in four
neighbourhoods – Bradford, West Yorkshire (community radio), Milton, Glasgow (visual
art), Benwell, Newcastle (film) and Fraserburgh, Aberdeenshire (theatre). With much of the
population in each area are currently experiencing high levels of economic and social
deprivation, we will explore the socio-cultural dimensions of ‘living with/in poverty’.
The practice of community and cultural development (CCD) in North American cities, such
as that led in Chicago by John Kretzman and John McKnight from Northwestern University,
exemplifies the model demonstrated in Remaking Society. Traditionally the communities
that were identified as deprived had been provided with services and programmes designed
and delivered by outside experts.
The effect of this now discredited cultural deficit model was to position people as passive
recipients dependent on service providers (including university researchers) to address
their deficiencies and their needs. Yet the model still persists in most deprived areas of the
UK. By contrast, our assets-based approach recognises such communities as resourceful and
gifted (Goldbard 2006). We draw upon and harness the capacities and creativities of local
people to address issues and solve problems.
Outside assistance and resources from government agencies, institutions and other
organisations are still going to be required to address issues of deprivation. But, in our
model, the agenda of such interventions is to be set more by the community of people most
directly affected. Using performance and digital media, the Remaking Society research
collaboration will thus demonstrate ways in which communities conventionally regarded as
excluded can negotiate either their own inclusion in - or their continued exclusion from -
society.
In this project, the concept of community is not restricted to communitarian accounts of 'a
group of people in a given place', or as a site of consensus and constructed oneness based on
social categories such as race, class, gender or location. Ours is a dynamic model in which
community formation is seen as a continual re-negotiation of co-existence and
interdependence, not confined by place, as illustrated by the thirty years of pioneering work
by Southall Black Sisters (Gupta 2003). Questions about how communities conduct these
negotiations become particularly important now, at a time of economic crisis, when
resources are scarce and stress levels among vulnerable individuals are high.
The study will make critical connections between our understanding of community
performance and participatory process across academic fields - including conflict resolution,
cultural geography, public health, social psychology and sociology. It will allow a reexamination
of inter-disciplinary concepts of community through arts and media practices.
Belonging to a community is critical to a sense of wellbeing for individuals and families,
particularly significant for those who live on the breadline. The second element of Remaking
Society is the generation of narrative evidence on the cultural dimensions of poverty and
social exclusion. It will add a unique inter-disciplinary arts and humanities perspective to
the ESRC’s national study, Poverty and Social Exclusion in the UK (PSE). Running until 2013,
it is the UK’s largest ever research project on the impact of poverty.
Wednesday, December 14, 2011
Thursday, October 27, 2011
Academic research and 'creative industries'
Here are the slides from a lecture I gave last week to students on the MA Music: Innovation and Entrepreneurship programme at UWS about the how the relationship between what universities do and the creative industries has developed. Rather long, and very fast and dirty but it's an attempt to introduce the range of debates, theories and discourses that inform our contemporary understanding of what are now called, vaguely but frequently, the 'creative industries" and the forces that shape how universities/researchers and the creative industries interact. Or should we just see the further/higher education sector as a kind of bedrock of a lot of contemporary cultural industry? Of course other people including Justin O'Connor have done this rather better than me on previous occasions but for what it's worth, I thought it might be useful to share.
Friday, June 24, 2011
Reinventing higher education for a networked age
Here is part one of some notes to accompany a talk I gave this afternoon at the UWS learning and teaching conference. All that follows, the presentation and the notes, is 'work in progress' thinking, feeding into a wider project on 'network pedagogies' that I hope will see the light of day as a book within the next 18 months. It may also make a more practical appearance as an interactive project in cyberspace.
The debate about the value, purpose and function of higher education is old. It's as old as the idea of a university itself, which has always been contested and politicised. As individual academics and students working in and around these institutions, we are caught in the cross-currents of long historical and philosophical debates. A wonderfully informative In Our Time programme about the formation of the medieval university describes the ways in which approximately ‘self governing’ communities of scholars set about negotiating a role for what was to become ‘higher education’ between church, state, guilds, city authorities and other rich and powerful patrons. Towards the end of the programme Miri Rubin draws attention to the relevance of the 'early modern' synthesis that some Italian universities managed to achieve in curriculum development that balanced ‘classical’ and more contemporary, applied knowledge, informed by a particular set of civic traditions: "The Italians, in the late 14th century, because of this connection between the universities, scholarship, and the utility of the city state, ...[developed]... a more applied and sensible way of getting the teaching to match the needs of the polity."
The debate about the value, purpose and function of higher education is old. It's as old as the idea of a university itself, which has always been contested and politicised. As individual academics and students working in and around these institutions, we are caught in the cross-currents of long historical and philosophical debates. A wonderfully informative In Our Time programme about the formation of the medieval university describes the ways in which approximately ‘self governing’ communities of scholars set about negotiating a role for what was to become ‘higher education’ between church, state, guilds, city authorities and other rich and powerful patrons. Towards the end of the programme Miri Rubin draws attention to the relevance of the 'early modern' synthesis that some Italian universities managed to achieve in curriculum development that balanced ‘classical’ and more contemporary, applied knowledge, informed by a particular set of civic traditions: "The Italians, in the late 14th century, because of this connection between the universities, scholarship, and the utility of the city state, ...[developed]... a more applied and sensible way of getting the teaching to match the needs of the polity."
In this mangled, compressed and partial history of the university (which jumped over the humanist revolutions that led to the Renaissance, glossed over the Enlightenment, and which ignored the world outside western Europe) I particularly tried to emphasise these negotiations between universities and the communities that they live amongst - how they play out and how teaching and research is informed by different discourses of knowledge, of power, policy and economy. It’s also worth thinking about the etymology of the word ‘universitas’ – Latin for 'a whole', a self-governing corporate body that, according to the participants of the In Our Time programme, was originally applied to the craft guilds. The term 'universitas' was then adopted by itinerant and fractious communities of scholars to define the project of creating the early centres of learning that have evolved into today's famous and iconic institutions.
Somewhat perversely, I deliberately didn't make explicit reference in the talk to three key things that are happening in UK higher education right now:
i) The changing relationship between government and higher education, and the differences between the nations of the UK in how this is playing out
ii) The crisis of governance in higher education, the problems of ‘managerialism’ and how the current generation of argumentative academics respond to the advent of the corporate, competitive, globally ambitious university. Are they to be “communities of scholars” or “knowledge entrepreneurs’? (or both/neither?)
iii) The wave of resistance/protest that opposes the assault on public funding for the arts and humanities, in which we are seeing a wholesale privatization of undergraduate programmes in the non-STEM subjects in England, stripping out direct public investment and support for arts and humanities from the fabric of the publicly funded university.
Paradoxically, perhaps, as Francis Mckee recently remarked in a conversation about the arts, the less interest the government takes in the universities, the less the universities are likely to be interested in what the government thinks, particularly as funding is withdrawn. The less money on offer, the less relevant government (and other funders, such as research councils) become. Institutions will be forced to look elsewhere, which is clearly the intent of the English government – a policy that is likely to have bad consequences for democratizing access to higher education and social mobility.
Current policy in England seems to represent the worst of both worlds. We have heavy-handed, restrictive, ideologically driven regulation and a ramping up of the rhetoric of markets/choice/performative league tables. We have strict caps on home student numbers, a squeeze on the availability of public cash to support the work of the sector, and restrictions on how many international students can be recruited to make up losses. Tuition costs are entirely pushed onto the individual student, as a kind of mortgage on their future life prospects, although the state guarantees the debts (which, perversely pushes up the public deficit which the government claims to want to reduce: it would be cheaper just to give the universities the money). The idea of higher education in the arts/humanities as a public good, which has benefits for the wider polity/community/society, as well as the individual, is virtually abandoned.
In a sense this approach just takes market values to their logical conclusion - education is utterly commoditised, offered as a product for sale. The humanities are sent to the province of those who can afford to participate, which has profound consequences for democracy, identity and community. And the false hierarchy of the science/art divide (and to an extent the vocational/academic divide) is enshrined in public policy. This radically differential treatment of science and the arts represents an attack on the independence of universities and their ability to design and deliver a curriculum that is responsive, relevant and accessible. It's an approach which suggests a profound indifference in public policy to the nature of knowledge and innovation, the foundations of critical thinking, and the value and worth of the arts and humanities for all disciplines. The aspiration to become a popular, comprehensive, democratic university is replaced by a dogmatic insistence on strict hierarchies of status, 'mission groups' and 'research excellence', expressed through the separation of the critical from the vocational, the reflective from the practical, research from teaching, etc.
And what scarce public funds that remain are concentrated mainly on centres that are already well resourced, with no thought for the consequences for the sector as a whole, or the wider implications of rationing access to higher learning. Even in narrow 'economic competitiveness' terms this policy will be a disaster.
Current policy in England seems to represent the worst of both worlds. We have heavy-handed, restrictive, ideologically driven regulation and a ramping up of the rhetoric of markets/choice/performative league tables. We have strict caps on home student numbers, a squeeze on the availability of public cash to support the work of the sector, and restrictions on how many international students can be recruited to make up losses. Tuition costs are entirely pushed onto the individual student, as a kind of mortgage on their future life prospects, although the state guarantees the debts (which, perversely pushes up the public deficit which the government claims to want to reduce: it would be cheaper just to give the universities the money). The idea of higher education in the arts/humanities as a public good, which has benefits for the wider polity/community/society, as well as the individual, is virtually abandoned.
In a sense this approach just takes market values to their logical conclusion - education is utterly commoditised, offered as a product for sale. The humanities are sent to the province of those who can afford to participate, which has profound consequences for democracy, identity and community. And the false hierarchy of the science/art divide (and to an extent the vocational/academic divide) is enshrined in public policy. This radically differential treatment of science and the arts represents an attack on the independence of universities and their ability to design and deliver a curriculum that is responsive, relevant and accessible. It's an approach which suggests a profound indifference in public policy to the nature of knowledge and innovation, the foundations of critical thinking, and the value and worth of the arts and humanities for all disciplines. The aspiration to become a popular, comprehensive, democratic university is replaced by a dogmatic insistence on strict hierarchies of status, 'mission groups' and 'research excellence', expressed through the separation of the critical from the vocational, the reflective from the practical, research from teaching, etc.
And what scarce public funds that remain are concentrated mainly on centres that are already well resourced, with no thought for the consequences for the sector as a whole, or the wider implications of rationing access to higher learning. Even in narrow 'economic competitiveness' terms this policy will be a disaster.
In Scotland the picture is somewhat different. We have little idea what the future funding framework for Scottish higher education will look like, but we do have a commitment from government to the maintenance of public funding for arts, humanities and science/technology, the acceptance of some principles of public value and access to HE regardless of 'ability to pay'. Nonetheless we have plenty of local tussles, demand for student places outstripping supply, and two high profile disputes at Glasgow and Strathclyde over proposals to remodel/reduce/remove aspects of arts and humanities education from institutions which have very particular and distinguished relationships to the traditions of arts and humanities scholarship: programmes which apparently appear arcane and alien to technocrats and businesspeople.
The other issue that I left out of my talk was any serious discussion about the dissolution of ‘knowledge hierarchies’ in education – of which there are at least two dimensions:
Firstly, there has been an explosion in the everyday and ubiquitous availability of learning resources, through search engines, web and pervasive media portals of all kinds – part of what Manuel Castells calls the informational society. So the question for higher education becomes not so much how to teach students to gather information, or even to test ‘what’ they know, but more to develop their ability to select, judge, curate, control, transform – to do things, to act, to make - with information and knowledge. In the convergent multimedia revolution driven by web technologies we can combine image, audio, text on screens and in spaces to generate new ways of communicating in hybrid digital/face-to-face forms.
This is why ‘creativity’ is such a persistent totem for the transformation of the educational environment in these early years of the 21st century, and the turn towards practice-based research is so significant.
Secondly, there has been a ‘performative turn’ in the way in which knowledge is conceptualized and applied and validated. To (lazily) quote (and adapt) an earlier blog: What is ‘performativity’? The phrase originates with Jean-Francois Lyotard’s 1979 report The Postmodern Condition: a report on knowledge. He argued that, with the breakdown of traditional forms of authority, the collapse of 19th century ‘grand narratives’, and the ending of a consensus that a cadre of elite, expert professionals could determine what counts as valid knowledge, (in part driven by the challenge to ‘normative’ knowledge mounted by the new social movements and by radical politics), instead the extent to which knowledge valued depends upon it performs a function. In other words, the Strathclyde test of “useful learning” is brought to bear on all sorts of discourses and practices that sit within the academy. But there remains the question – useful to who? Under what cirumstances? In what ways? There is a tendency for the test for utility to be framed by normalizing assumptions that reflect the desires of powerful interest groups and patrons, which push the idea of critical reflection – the desire to examine and change the status quo ante – out of the picture altogether.
On the other hand, it is perfectly clear that universities have to make strategic choices about what their priorities should be, in terms of curriculum, pedagogy, recruitment, research etc. And the speed with which ideas/initiatives circulate and complex concepts get packaged up as simplistic slogans like 'engagement', 'employability' and 'excellence' makes time for reflection and debate scarce and precious.
So, a number of variants of utilitarianism and functionalism drive many of the prevailing ideologies/discourses in higher education, and the friction seems to be most acute in places where strong ‘liberal arts’ traditions of philosophical/critical enquiry comes into conflict with a more applied, technologic and deterministic approach to educational outcomes. This is also paradoxical, because as Stanley Fish points out in a recent New York Times article, the interdisciplinary space that much serious, cutting edge research now occupies represents a radical synthesis of the arts/sciences in which the humanities play a crucial role. There are hundreds of important (trans)disciplines such as cultural geography, bioethics, acoustic ecology, urban planning and so on. And it is these transdisciplinary conversations that are more likely to generate sustainable solutions to some of the intractable problems that face the world.
I am always amazed at the institutional persistence of static, reified, bounded understandings of knowledge construction, which as Nigel Thrift points out in Afterwords, completely fail to account for the ‘becoming’ and ‘emergent’ state of the world…”the world is a making, it is processual, it is in action, it is ‘all that is present and moving. There is no last word, only infinite becoming and constant reactivation.” Examined from a Foucauldian perspective, institutions exist in order to erect boundaries, to discipline, police and control knowledge and behaviour. But they remain negotiated spaces, particularly in the liquid, slippery, porous spaces of the ‘cloud’.
And there is a powerful countercultural tradition of autonomous protest, dissent, projects, demonstrations and occupations to challenge the hierarchical, static, bureaucratic conception of the world that the university-as-factory metaphor represents. Two well documented examples that I particularly like (but plenty of others could be chosen and represented) are the Hornsey College of Art occupations of 1968 and the Copenhagen Free University (2001 - 2007). Add to this the playful and constructive approach of the 'hacker ethic', the open source movement and (dis)organised, networked sociality and there is a potent mix to push institutions towards a paradigm shift.
The slippery cloud world of porous institutions also generates and constructs new forms of social identity and professional subjectivity. Our main communities of practice don't principally reside within the institutions that we work in - they are broader and wider. The internationalization of the university and the ways in which we can collaborate across time and space (assuming we have time and space…which is often not a given...) offer massive opportunities. But they can also create precarious and unsettling, risky situations in terms of economic survival and integrity. In working across networks of practices – constructing particular kinds of subjectivities in different situations - students are learning about how to manage their public profile and learning intercultural/dialogical skills, which is particularly important in an informational economy. The growth of blogging academic communities offers the chance of putting work out there for scrutiny and feedback (that is, if anyone’s watching/listening/reading/paying attention….) without necessarily engaging in the formality of a 'peer review' process and high-stakes publication. The blogosphere can also give lazy thinking and provisional/unverified knowledge (and shameless self-promotion, and easy plagiarism) more amplification than perhaps it deserves, but that's another story...
I could go on (and on…), but that’s (more than) enough for now: in another post I’ll write a bit more about emerging tools, platforms, projects, and communities that respond to some of these issues. And I ought to tackle those questions of power, money, markets and hierarchies a bit more thoroughly too.
Saturday, May 28, 2011
Gil Scott-Heron (1949 - 2011): The Message
No doubt thousands of column inches will be devoted to describing the 'legacy' of Gil Scott-Heron as a prophet, a pioneer, a genius etc. All true enough, but such words hardly do justice to the significance - and eloquence - of his work in expressing, embodying, chronicling the struggle of African-Americans and of all those trying to stand up for human rights, social justice and liberty.
Here he is in Central Park, NYC in 2010, where despite the ravages of 61 years of personal and political struggle, his wit and his ability to mock the hypocrisy of the powerful and the contradictions of the "land of the free" in tightly constructed phrases is as strong as ever...In a perceptive profile in the Observer, written to mark the release of his first album in 16 years, Sean O'Hagan writes about the way in which "most astute musical social commentator of the 70s and 80s had metamorphosed into a character from one of his own sad songs of suffering and struggle." But yet he still had much to communicate.
That voice, those words, and those eyes say more than I ever could in text.
Here he is in Central Park, NYC in 2010, where despite the ravages of 61 years of personal and political struggle, his wit and his ability to mock the hypocrisy of the powerful and the contradictions of the "land of the free" in tightly constructed phrases is as strong as ever...In a perceptive profile in the Observer, written to mark the release of his first album in 16 years, Sean O'Hagan writes about the way in which "most astute musical social commentator of the 70s and 80s had metamorphosed into a character from one of his own sad songs of suffering and struggle." But yet he still had much to communicate.
That voice, those words, and those eyes say more than I ever could in text.
Thursday, February 24, 2011
On Translation (part one...)
A number of conversations have been converging over the last month or two, partly because I've been working with Diarmuid McAuliffe at UWS' MEd Artist Teacher programme. My colleague Katarzyna Kosmala and I contributed a short interactive exercise to a symposium on Pedagogy and Play at Glasgow's Gallery of Modern Art a couple of weekends ago, and I'm writing this back in Chicago where I'll be joining a 'Town Hall' meeting on 'teaching artists' at Columbia College this evening. We'll be conducting a live experiment in synchronised communication with colleagues in Scotland (UWS) and Minneapolis/St Paul (the Perpich Center for Arts Education).
We had a 'warm-up' conversation for tonight's meeting last Friday, which was fruitful: a few key ideas surfaced, one of which was the role of artist-educators in crossing boundaries, translating between institutional and artistic cultures, and enabling a more critical kind of pedagogy through arts processes, and the second which was about the roles and responsibilities of leadership in these kind of experimental arts projects. I've written extensively about these kinds of things before, in The Creative College and also in the Teacher-Artist Partnership resource pack, and there's a blog post from a couple of years ago that summarizes some of the issues here. Giroux's Border Crossings still remains a key text: other more recent works have a tendency to marginalize the cultural politics of this sort of work, although Shakuntala Banaji and Andrew Burn's useful report on Rhetorics of Creativity for the Tory-vandalized Creative Partnerships programme in England foregrounds the cultural politics more than most.
All of this has been making me reflect on my formative educational experiences in developing this kind of partnership-based critical pedagogy at Newham Sixth Form College - there's a nice video here that reflects some of the energy and dynamism of the place. NewVIc has managed to go further and faster than many other schools and colleges in integrating arts education partnership - but in the context of being a comprehensive intake post-16 institution with specialised arts education programmes.
Since leaving there, I've been working on these kinds of issues and questions in a whole range of settings. Most recently, my attention has been very focussed on the University of the West of Scotland, where we are rapidly developing a School of Creative and Cultural Industries that embeds partnerships and collaborations at all levels, and coming up against the same problems of translation, explanation, and boundary crossing that educational innovators struggle with in institutions, large and small. Part of the issue has been to begin to build a coherent educational narrative that a diversity of practitioner-academics, with a deep commitment to university-industry partnerships, can sign up to. Another problem has been to secure the resources to enable the partnerships to work. A third has been the complexity of 'managing change' in a bureaucratic and somewhat opaque institution. Fourthly, there is a need to engage people in more reflective practice, which is very difficult in a pressurized environment where it is a struggle to find the time and space to look after students properly.
All of this is very much a work-in-progress, and not helped by the geopolitical situation: scarcity and anxiety are everywhere. Working in an institution which, broadly, still sees higher education as a publicly-funded service, we are having to cope with cuts to funding and maintain 'quality' of provision in the face of massive resource pressures. This leads to a kind of retrenchment: people may dig themselves in and fight their corner for resources but there's also a need to maintain a 'big picture' vision of hope and optimism in the face of difficulty. Plus 'entrepreneurialism' is needed to continuously seek out and attract cash to support this kind of work.
More later, but all this is making me reflect further on the incredible ethical responsibility that leadership under these circumstances demands. Most of our current crop of political 'leaders' have no concept of this: just look at the spectacle of David Cameron hawking British-made weapons round the Middle East even as protestors circle the citadels of the plutocrats. Everywhere you turn, this is a complex and confusing situation - but anchoring actions in some basic principles of care, of compassion and of critical engagement might be a good start. I'll write some more about this, together with some reflections on urban change, the role of universities, and the corporate land-grab that seems to be happening as the public sector gets kicked around, in the next post.
We had a 'warm-up' conversation for tonight's meeting last Friday, which was fruitful: a few key ideas surfaced, one of which was the role of artist-educators in crossing boundaries, translating between institutional and artistic cultures, and enabling a more critical kind of pedagogy through arts processes, and the second which was about the roles and responsibilities of leadership in these kind of experimental arts projects. I've written extensively about these kinds of things before, in The Creative College and also in the Teacher-Artist Partnership resource pack, and there's a blog post from a couple of years ago that summarizes some of the issues here. Giroux's Border Crossings still remains a key text: other more recent works have a tendency to marginalize the cultural politics of this sort of work, although Shakuntala Banaji and Andrew Burn's useful report on Rhetorics of Creativity for the Tory-vandalized Creative Partnerships programme in England foregrounds the cultural politics more than most.
All of this has been making me reflect on my formative educational experiences in developing this kind of partnership-based critical pedagogy at Newham Sixth Form College - there's a nice video here that reflects some of the energy and dynamism of the place. NewVIc has managed to go further and faster than many other schools and colleges in integrating arts education partnership - but in the context of being a comprehensive intake post-16 institution with specialised arts education programmes.
Since leaving there, I've been working on these kinds of issues and questions in a whole range of settings. Most recently, my attention has been very focussed on the University of the West of Scotland, where we are rapidly developing a School of Creative and Cultural Industries that embeds partnerships and collaborations at all levels, and coming up against the same problems of translation, explanation, and boundary crossing that educational innovators struggle with in institutions, large and small. Part of the issue has been to begin to build a coherent educational narrative that a diversity of practitioner-academics, with a deep commitment to university-industry partnerships, can sign up to. Another problem has been to secure the resources to enable the partnerships to work. A third has been the complexity of 'managing change' in a bureaucratic and somewhat opaque institution. Fourthly, there is a need to engage people in more reflective practice, which is very difficult in a pressurized environment where it is a struggle to find the time and space to look after students properly.
All of this is very much a work-in-progress, and not helped by the geopolitical situation: scarcity and anxiety are everywhere. Working in an institution which, broadly, still sees higher education as a publicly-funded service, we are having to cope with cuts to funding and maintain 'quality' of provision in the face of massive resource pressures. This leads to a kind of retrenchment: people may dig themselves in and fight their corner for resources but there's also a need to maintain a 'big picture' vision of hope and optimism in the face of difficulty. Plus 'entrepreneurialism' is needed to continuously seek out and attract cash to support this kind of work.
More later, but all this is making me reflect further on the incredible ethical responsibility that leadership under these circumstances demands. Most of our current crop of political 'leaders' have no concept of this: just look at the spectacle of David Cameron hawking British-made weapons round the Middle East even as protestors circle the citadels of the plutocrats. Everywhere you turn, this is a complex and confusing situation - but anchoring actions in some basic principles of care, of compassion and of critical engagement might be a good start. I'll write some more about this, together with some reflections on urban change, the role of universities, and the corporate land-grab that seems to be happening as the public sector gets kicked around, in the next post.
Tuesday, October 19, 2010
MashingUp: Art+Labour, 9th November
CCA 5
Tue 9th Nov 2010
12.30-6pm
Tue 9th Nov 2010
12.30-6pm
Art+Labour is a public conversation exploring the conditions and experiences of creative labour in the cultural industries – working conditions, pay, working hours; freedom and autonomy, pleasure and obligation; insecurity and uncertainty; social reproduction, networking and isolation – and artists’ organising within it – unions, artists’ associations, or self-organised studio/exhibition spaces.
What diverse forms of employment do artists undertake? Who are their employees? How secure and how flexible are these forms of employment? What are the conditions of employment and how are these changing? What can we say of artists’ autonomy in relation to contemporary labour practices? How do cultural workers effectively organise around labour issues? What would it mean for artists to withdraw their labour in defence of conditions in one’s primary or secondary employment? With successive governments’ emphasis on arts’ social function, how does communality express itself in competitive Creative Industries? What is industrial about the Creative Industries; where do ‘Cultural’ producers sit within the policy frame of the ‘Creative’ Industries? How do we as cultural producers recognise our own positions and dependency on/within/alongside the public sector? With the entrepreneurial restructuring of the arts in Scotland and in the face of selective public sector cuts throughout the UK, how constructive are artists’ isolated appeals for a state of exception? What is so unique about artists in the social factory?
These are some of the questions to be addressed during this public conversation. The discussion is open to anyone – cultural workers, artists, students, interns, precarious and self-organised labour affiliated to academia – concerned with issues of art, labour and economics. The event will begin with a series of short position statements from invited speakers followed by discussion among panelists and audience.
Panelists include:
Angela McRobbie
Professor of Communications, Dept. of Media & Communications, Goldsmiths
Professor of Communications, Dept. of Media & Communications, Goldsmiths
Scottish Artists Union
The representative voice for artists in Scotland
The representative voice for artists in Scotland
Graham Jeffery
Reader: Music and Performance, The School of Creative and Cultural Industries, UWS
Reader: Music and Performance, The School of Creative and Cultural Industries, UWS
Katarzyna Kosmala
Reader, Centre for Contemporary European Studies, UWS
Reader, Centre for Contemporary European Studies, UWS
Gesa Helms
Researcher & artist
Researcher & artist
Brett Bloom
Member of Chicago-based art collective Temporary Services who recently produced ‘Art Work : A national conversation about art, labour, and economics’
Member of Chicago-based art collective Temporary Services who recently produced ‘Art Work : A national conversation about art, labour, and economics’
Owen Logan
Researcher, School of Divinity, History and Philosophy, University of Aberdeen
Researcher, School of Divinity, History and Philosophy, University of Aberdeen
Facilitated by Gordon Asher
Effective Learning Tutor, UWS Centre for Academic & Professional Development
Effective Learning Tutor, UWS Centre for Academic & Professional Development
Event is free but ticketed, tickets available from CCA Box Office:
CCA, 350 Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow G2 3JD
tel : +44 (0)141 352 4900
CCA, 350 Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow G2 3JD
tel : +44 (0)141 352 4900
http://www.cca-glasgow.com
“MASHING UP” : Art+Labour is organised by Leigh French, co-editor of Variant, and Sophie Hope, member of Making A Living, in co-operation with Graham Jeffery of The School of Creative and Cultural Industries, University of the West of Scotland, and supported by CCA, Glasgow.
“MASHING-UP…”
A Public Lecture Series presented by UWS and CCA
This ongoing lecture series stimulates critical, transdisciplinary research communities to discuss advanced knowledge and to build networks of excellence among producer communities.
This ongoing lecture series stimulates critical, transdisciplinary research communities to discuss advanced knowledge and to build networks of excellence among producer communities.
‘Mashing up’ [definition]
“a mashup is a web page or application that combines data or functionality from two or more external sources to create a new service. The term mashup implies easy, fast integration…to produce results that were not the original reason for producing the raw source data” (Wikipedia, 2009).
“a mashup is a web page or application that combines data or functionality from two or more external sources to create a new service. The term mashup implies easy, fast integration…to produce results that were not the original reason for producing the raw source data” (Wikipedia, 2009).
The lecture series
exhibits the values of new media culture to explore synergies between institutions, ideas and disciplines. This aspiration originates with the UWS and CCA partnership, which extends to the specific areas of inquiry that we pursue. It advances the core mission of each organization to initiate applied, international research opportunities through experimental, local dialogue to foster collaborative, bottom-up, sustainable practices of development.
exhibits the values of new media culture to explore synergies between institutions, ideas and disciplines. This aspiration originates with the UWS and CCA partnership, which extends to the specific areas of inquiry that we pursue. It advances the core mission of each organization to initiate applied, international research opportunities through experimental, local dialogue to foster collaborative, bottom-up, sustainable practices of development.
#mashingup
We want attendees to blog, photograph, film, tweet and do all they can to share the content of these talks to democratize access to knowledge.
We want attendees to blog, photograph, film, tweet and do all they can to share the content of these talks to democratize access to knowledge.
LINKS
http://uwspracticeresearch.blogspot.com
http://www.sau.org.uk
http://www.temporaryservices.org
http://www.artandwork.us
Tuesday, September 21, 2010
Talks by Graham given in 2009 - 10
Tuesday, August 17, 2010
Ambient Ayr
I'm delighted to say that I'm going to be performing a new piece of music as part of Ayr Alternative Arts Day at Ayr Old Town Hall on Saturday 25th September. Not completely sure what it will consist of yet, although I have determined that virtually all of the source audio material will come from the walk between the railway station and the UWS campus. More details about the line-up for the day, curated by smart collaborator Chris Dooks, can be found on the Ayrtime website, from where you can also download some lovely podcasts for your listening pleasure.
Wednesday, August 11, 2010
Spaces of encounter: artists, conversations and meaning-making
Presentation from the North East Scotland visual arts research doctoral summer school at RGU in Aberdeen.
Sunday, August 08, 2010
The Cave: Chamber Music
This is an old project, but as the links have now disappeared from the BBC SSO blog, and I quite like this bit of writing and filmmaking, and I'm probably going to talk about it next Tuesday up in Aberdeen, I thought I would post it here.
The Cave
generalpraxis | MySpace Music Videos
There are a few places in the world which lodge themselves so powerfully in the psyche that it is impossible ever to be quite the same again when one has visited them. Durness in Sutherland, on the furthermost tip of the Scottish mainland, is one such place.
In July 2007, members of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra spent a week in residence in Durness. The project had two parts. The first was a public concert of electroacoustic music for trumpet and composed sound which took place in the chamber of Smoo Cave as part of the Highland 2007 festival. The second was a six day residency, a collaborative project between four musicians from the orchestra and three visual artists who live in and around Durness.
The residency was framed in part as 'professional development' for the participants; as a space to reflect and consider what could be achieved through small-scale collaboration between visual artists and musicians. It was intended to enable us to consider how we could extend our ways of thinking and making, through encounters beyond the usual orthodoxies of our artistic practice. Through the six intensive working days that we spent together, the other character that loomed large over is in the rugged and ever-changing landscape of Durness was Smoo Cave. The cave became the crucible for the work that we made, a physical and imaginary theatre which reflected and refracted sounds, images and ideas.
Collaboration is never easy, particularly when a new group of people are meeting for the first time. Each participant was an accomplished artist in their own right. The four musicians, drawn from different sections of the orchestra, accustomed to the constant demands of a precisely arranged touring and performing schedule, had to adjust to the relatively open brief of a project in which the work had to be generated without notated scores or pre-determined outcomes. The work of the three visual artists has a powerful connection with the landscape, their experience forged out of the struggle to survive as an independent practitioner in the beautiful, but at times harsh, cultural ecology of north-west Scotland.
So the material circumstances of the participants, and the places and spaces in which they were accustomed to making their work, was very different, as well as the media through which their creative practice was usually expressed. Entering into dialogue, finding was of communicating with people from outside one's usual community of practice can be stimulating, but also tough and challenging. Musicians who are used to the collective experience of the orchestra, with its precise demarcation of roles and parts, have to draw on slightly different skills when faced with the freedom and responsibility of making work through dialogue with others. Visual artists who are used to an intense and solitary exploration of their own experience may also have to adjust their expectations of a creative process. And for some there can be a nervousness about straying across the boundaries of one's finely honed competence into a territory where 'technique' is less about polished delivery and more rough, raw and experimental. But being a 'musician' or an 'artist' is not a fixed or immutable category. The boundaries between different kinds of artistic practice can be challenged and crossed.
What followed was an extraordinary experience. Five days of intense discussion, occasional conflicts and arguments, walks in the windswept landscape, climbing the hills above Loch Eriboll and tracking along the rocky shoreline; an exploration of the ever-changing terrain in and around Durness which assaulted all the senses. We documented this process through drawing, photography, listening and writing, gathering objects and leaving marks, recording and recalling sound, installing a makeshift exhibition of 'finds' in the Village Hall, and sometimes immersing our bodies in the sea and the burns. We played, sang and made sound with all sorts of instruments - stones, wood and metal found on the shoreline, clay bowls and pipes - and the instruments we had brought with us. Like the weather, the atmosphere of the project changed from hour to hour. We sat up into the midnight blue midsummer night eating and drinking and talking. We visited homes and studios, looking at and listening to each others' work.
The process was complex and interwoven, with some uncertain and difficult moments - but when else was a process of art-making not like that? The generosity and patience of each person involved in the process ensured that we managed to hold together in spite of the risks and challenges of working through a collectively conceived structure. The process raised some important issues, about the importance of keeping a place for solitude and individual reflection even when one is being asked to 'collaborate creatively'; about the extent to which creativity is ever just simply a matter of developing individual 'talent' or 'expression'; about the roles that artists and musicians perform within institutions, sometimes out of economic necessity; and the ways in which the conventions and cultures of these institutions may enable or inhibit creativity.
Several other themes came to the surface: how sound changes spaces and how spaces change sound - in other words, the acoustic ecology of places. Words, stories and metaphors emerged: powerful archetypal images of the cave as a womb, or a mind, or a giant ear chamber - as a kind of 'underworld' of the mind, an inner world which made a different kind of performative art-making possible. The psychologist Carl Jung describes the archetype of the cave as the primordial 'interior' space - a dark place which might trigger self-reflection and exploration of those dark recesses of the mind that fuel both creativity and uncertainty. In The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, Jung refers to the story of the young men who slept in the cave in the 18th Sura of the Koran: "the cave is a place of rebirth, that secret cavity in which one is shut up in order to be incubated and renewed...Anyone who gets into...the cave which everyone has in himself, or into the darkness that lies behind consciousness, will find himself involved in an - at first - unconscious process of transformation..."
What resulted was not a quest to arrive at a single unified piece, but rather like the ways in which the salt water of the incoming sea meets the freshwater of the burn flowing out of the cave, a dissolving of clear boundaries between different kinds of artistic practice took place.
What transpired in the end was an evening performance for an audience of ourselves, the rocks and the birds. What was produced was akin to some of the life processes of the cave itself - with its overlapping cycles of seasons, of death and birth. Iris Wallace, who usually works with enamels from her studio at the nearby Balnakiel Craft Village, had spent several nights labouring over a text that spoke of the cave as a place of refuge, of fear and of safety, of food, of danger, of battles, of the past and the futures - as somehow 'full of time' and time-less at the same time. Her spoken and sung text provided a narrative backbone for the event and transformed moments into a kind of music theatre. Lotte Glob had made clay bowls and pipes to be blown, hit, filled with water and sung through, and these invented instruments combined improvised composition with the flute, violin, double bass and clarinet.
Sound always changes and mutates in relation to the spaces and places that it occupies and the cave made a kind of 'unrehearsed music' possible, supplying sounds of its own from its non-human inhabitants, and a constantly shifting store of acoustic conditions, as the performers moved around the space. Ishbel Macdonald, a painter and printmaker, had become fascinated with the flow of the burn through the cave from the waterfall at its back, and embarked on an ambitious plan to make prints from the flow of the water over large sheets of heavy paper. The water washed over the pigment and became a form of 'automatic printing', capturing the marks left by the fast-flowing stream leaping over its stony bed.
Simon Butterworth, as well as providing energetic bass clarinet textures, at times reminscent of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, took time away from music to capture specific moments in the performance in still photographs. A series of impromptu duets, trios and quartetes emerged from the movement of players around the space, with Ewan RObertson's flute and Barbara Downie's violin, supplemented by sticks, stones and singing, weaving lines around the bedrock provided by Iain Crawford's double bass. Barbara and Ishbel moved from their instruments inside the cave to make sound with the rusting winch on the shore, and, along with Jennifer Martin, the BBC SSO's Learning Manager, took turns under headphones and behind the microphone to record what was happening.
As the light slowly faded we alternated between filming, singing, playing, recording, mark-making or sometimes just standing still, absorbing what was happening.
At high tide, after what seemed like hours of playing, after the moment when the sun had dropped away out of sight, one by one we lit candles in floating holders made by Lotte and let the stream carry them out of the cave and into the sea. Stone, water, air and fire combined in a ritual ending. And we quietly made our way out of the cave and back up the cliffside.
The film we have made is a distillation of fragments of this process. It is intended to capture something of the quality of experience created by the event - visual and auditory, drawing on sonic and visual elements from the work generated within the residency. At the heart of the process was the cave, which as it did for the hundreds of generations it has outlived before us, became a kind of living laboratory for our experiment. All we did in that single week was to make some briefly audible and visible marks, and as surely as light gives way to the dark, sound to silence, the cave returned to its previous state.
The learning that came from the project is hard to write about, partly because, like music and the visual arts, it was about exploring ideas that are not easily expressed in words, and partly because it was different for everyone. We look forward to hearing what you make of it.
The Cave
generalpraxis | MySpace Music Videos
There are a few places in the world which lodge themselves so powerfully in the psyche that it is impossible ever to be quite the same again when one has visited them. Durness in Sutherland, on the furthermost tip of the Scottish mainland, is one such place.
In July 2007, members of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra spent a week in residence in Durness. The project had two parts. The first was a public concert of electroacoustic music for trumpet and composed sound which took place in the chamber of Smoo Cave as part of the Highland 2007 festival. The second was a six day residency, a collaborative project between four musicians from the orchestra and three visual artists who live in and around Durness.
The residency was framed in part as 'professional development' for the participants; as a space to reflect and consider what could be achieved through small-scale collaboration between visual artists and musicians. It was intended to enable us to consider how we could extend our ways of thinking and making, through encounters beyond the usual orthodoxies of our artistic practice. Through the six intensive working days that we spent together, the other character that loomed large over is in the rugged and ever-changing landscape of Durness was Smoo Cave. The cave became the crucible for the work that we made, a physical and imaginary theatre which reflected and refracted sounds, images and ideas.
Collaboration is never easy, particularly when a new group of people are meeting for the first time. Each participant was an accomplished artist in their own right. The four musicians, drawn from different sections of the orchestra, accustomed to the constant demands of a precisely arranged touring and performing schedule, had to adjust to the relatively open brief of a project in which the work had to be generated without notated scores or pre-determined outcomes. The work of the three visual artists has a powerful connection with the landscape, their experience forged out of the struggle to survive as an independent practitioner in the beautiful, but at times harsh, cultural ecology of north-west Scotland.
So the material circumstances of the participants, and the places and spaces in which they were accustomed to making their work, was very different, as well as the media through which their creative practice was usually expressed. Entering into dialogue, finding was of communicating with people from outside one's usual community of practice can be stimulating, but also tough and challenging. Musicians who are used to the collective experience of the orchestra, with its precise demarcation of roles and parts, have to draw on slightly different skills when faced with the freedom and responsibility of making work through dialogue with others. Visual artists who are used to an intense and solitary exploration of their own experience may also have to adjust their expectations of a creative process. And for some there can be a nervousness about straying across the boundaries of one's finely honed competence into a territory where 'technique' is less about polished delivery and more rough, raw and experimental. But being a 'musician' or an 'artist' is not a fixed or immutable category. The boundaries between different kinds of artistic practice can be challenged and crossed.
What followed was an extraordinary experience. Five days of intense discussion, occasional conflicts and arguments, walks in the windswept landscape, climbing the hills above Loch Eriboll and tracking along the rocky shoreline; an exploration of the ever-changing terrain in and around Durness which assaulted all the senses. We documented this process through drawing, photography, listening and writing, gathering objects and leaving marks, recording and recalling sound, installing a makeshift exhibition of 'finds' in the Village Hall, and sometimes immersing our bodies in the sea and the burns. We played, sang and made sound with all sorts of instruments - stones, wood and metal found on the shoreline, clay bowls and pipes - and the instruments we had brought with us. Like the weather, the atmosphere of the project changed from hour to hour. We sat up into the midnight blue midsummer night eating and drinking and talking. We visited homes and studios, looking at and listening to each others' work.
The process was complex and interwoven, with some uncertain and difficult moments - but when else was a process of art-making not like that? The generosity and patience of each person involved in the process ensured that we managed to hold together in spite of the risks and challenges of working through a collectively conceived structure. The process raised some important issues, about the importance of keeping a place for solitude and individual reflection even when one is being asked to 'collaborate creatively'; about the extent to which creativity is ever just simply a matter of developing individual 'talent' or 'expression'; about the roles that artists and musicians perform within institutions, sometimes out of economic necessity; and the ways in which the conventions and cultures of these institutions may enable or inhibit creativity.
Several other themes came to the surface: how sound changes spaces and how spaces change sound - in other words, the acoustic ecology of places. Words, stories and metaphors emerged: powerful archetypal images of the cave as a womb, or a mind, or a giant ear chamber - as a kind of 'underworld' of the mind, an inner world which made a different kind of performative art-making possible. The psychologist Carl Jung describes the archetype of the cave as the primordial 'interior' space - a dark place which might trigger self-reflection and exploration of those dark recesses of the mind that fuel both creativity and uncertainty. In The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, Jung refers to the story of the young men who slept in the cave in the 18th Sura of the Koran: "the cave is a place of rebirth, that secret cavity in which one is shut up in order to be incubated and renewed...Anyone who gets into...the cave which everyone has in himself, or into the darkness that lies behind consciousness, will find himself involved in an - at first - unconscious process of transformation..."
What resulted was not a quest to arrive at a single unified piece, but rather like the ways in which the salt water of the incoming sea meets the freshwater of the burn flowing out of the cave, a dissolving of clear boundaries between different kinds of artistic practice took place.
What transpired in the end was an evening performance for an audience of ourselves, the rocks and the birds. What was produced was akin to some of the life processes of the cave itself - with its overlapping cycles of seasons, of death and birth. Iris Wallace, who usually works with enamels from her studio at the nearby Balnakiel Craft Village, had spent several nights labouring over a text that spoke of the cave as a place of refuge, of fear and of safety, of food, of danger, of battles, of the past and the futures - as somehow 'full of time' and time-less at the same time. Her spoken and sung text provided a narrative backbone for the event and transformed moments into a kind of music theatre. Lotte Glob had made clay bowls and pipes to be blown, hit, filled with water and sung through, and these invented instruments combined improvised composition with the flute, violin, double bass and clarinet.
Sound always changes and mutates in relation to the spaces and places that it occupies and the cave made a kind of 'unrehearsed music' possible, supplying sounds of its own from its non-human inhabitants, and a constantly shifting store of acoustic conditions, as the performers moved around the space. Ishbel Macdonald, a painter and printmaker, had become fascinated with the flow of the burn through the cave from the waterfall at its back, and embarked on an ambitious plan to make prints from the flow of the water over large sheets of heavy paper. The water washed over the pigment and became a form of 'automatic printing', capturing the marks left by the fast-flowing stream leaping over its stony bed.
Simon Butterworth, as well as providing energetic bass clarinet textures, at times reminscent of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, took time away from music to capture specific moments in the performance in still photographs. A series of impromptu duets, trios and quartetes emerged from the movement of players around the space, with Ewan RObertson's flute and Barbara Downie's violin, supplemented by sticks, stones and singing, weaving lines around the bedrock provided by Iain Crawford's double bass. Barbara and Ishbel moved from their instruments inside the cave to make sound with the rusting winch on the shore, and, along with Jennifer Martin, the BBC SSO's Learning Manager, took turns under headphones and behind the microphone to record what was happening.
As the light slowly faded we alternated between filming, singing, playing, recording, mark-making or sometimes just standing still, absorbing what was happening.
At high tide, after what seemed like hours of playing, after the moment when the sun had dropped away out of sight, one by one we lit candles in floating holders made by Lotte and let the stream carry them out of the cave and into the sea. Stone, water, air and fire combined in a ritual ending. And we quietly made our way out of the cave and back up the cliffside.
The film we have made is a distillation of fragments of this process. It is intended to capture something of the quality of experience created by the event - visual and auditory, drawing on sonic and visual elements from the work generated within the residency. At the heart of the process was the cave, which as it did for the hundreds of generations it has outlived before us, became a kind of living laboratory for our experiment. All we did in that single week was to make some briefly audible and visible marks, and as surely as light gives way to the dark, sound to silence, the cave returned to its previous state.
The learning that came from the project is hard to write about, partly because, like music and the visual arts, it was about exploring ideas that are not easily expressed in words, and partly because it was different for everyone. We look forward to hearing what you make of it.
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