Cqqc stands for curating th queer and queering the curriculum.
This was an activity of last year in preparation for the lgbtq* history
month, during which we engaged in a number of activities and then wrote them
up.
This post is the editorial of the special issue of information, systems and
social change which explained our intervention logic.
A year later, we are once more planning activities for the lgbtq* history
month, though I am afraid their forms are no so complicated that I can't see
anythere appearing.
CQQC editorial
This collection of notes is presented in the form of volume 12 of
information, systems and social change for three, as usual, reasons.
The first is as a record that lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered history
month happened, for otherwise it might disappear without trace except for a
poisonous article in a national newspaper? This isnıt a record of the
month, simply of some of my actions during the month.
Secondly it is more than thirty years since the setting up of Gay
Switchboard, the founding of the Gay Librariansı Group, Gay Rights at Work,
the construction of the documents which formed volume 10 of this restarted
information, systems and social change, so I want to mark where we have got
to, and account a little for what has happened in the intervening thirty
years.
Thirdly, we must now move on from this month, and some actions will be
necessary to make an indicator for the next ten, if not the next thirty.
Let us develop these in reverse order then explain what is in the volume.
We are entering the UNESCO decade of education for sustainable development.
This seems to me a chance to make the argument about the gay contribution to
history, education, science, and culture, and the need for gay liberation to
have sustainable communities. It is also a chance to engage in the
diversity and the volunteering opportunities for professional and public as
well as private and passionate practices. The Higher Education Funding
Council for England is engaging in consultation on sustainable development
for higher education and that too is a chance for some scene setting. The
Royal Academy for Engineering is taking a position on the research
assessment exercise and that is a chance on the nature of evidence and
scientific method, as well as the relation between science and the arts, on
controlled vocabularies and the organisation of knowledge. I wonder what,
in ten years, any of these chunks will mean? But for the moment they are
chances for project funding, for papers at conferences, for witting
testimony to enter the world of organised documents, controlled metadata,
and to become shards in the archaeology of things.
To account for the intervening thirty years I did in part in the editorial
of volume 10, and wont repeat those sections. Since the formation of the
information for development forum in 1983 and becoming involved in
information systems design, most of my attention was devoted to making sense
of the significance of the emerging technologies and the role of the
internet. A variety of experiments were conducted on the new media but once
I turned fifty, there was a need to rebalance. That lead to the forming of
the Landscape Gallery and green and smart. Two entirely personal things
need to be added, Timıs arrival and Johnıs departure. The latter was
commemorated in volume 10, the former would take a book of its own. This
combination of the public and the private in an editorial is simply to point
to the conventions.
The record of the month forms the first article. This is simply in the form
of some gotttings which formed my thinking when I heard about the idea of
the month, discussed with Bill Eames of the Fort curating an exhibition in
the Fort and an application to Southwark Council for appropriate funding.
None of this developed beyond a very modest exhibition which ran for the
month, consisting of two items. Why this experiment failed is probably to
transgress the conventions? (Is a gotting clear?)
During this time, the idea of finding out how history is organised seemed to
me a useful and interesting activity and the title of this volume, curating
the queer and queering the curriculum, finding out how teaching and
learning, schools, libraries, universities, museums, galleries, bookshops,
journals, organise the concept would be worth doing. That activity took the
month and it is that activity which forms the bulk of this issue.
The dairy of the month is the witting testimony of the activity, printed
here as February diary. I wonder what others did? The web site of the
official organisers of the month, for which I gather they have funding from
the Department for Education and Skills, seems to have been remarkably
inert. I published some intentions there, had one communication in
feedback, and then as the events occurred, or resources emerged, found no
effective way of making a record. I tried a variety of means and had no
feedback whatsoever. In parallel I used the equality list of NATFHE,
Kingston Universityıs lgb society list, the lis-link list on jiscmail, a
leaflet distribution at the Fort, to advertise a small series of events
recorded in the diary, but I think the most that could be said was that one
person accounted for activity in one college and one library accounted for
action. Still, I have been asked for a 750 word article for the CILIP
Diversity newsletter.
Next comes the way the material is organised.
I had intended to publish a series of letters I had written with the
responses.
The responses though have been so thin, that there is no material here,
except for the absence of material. I could publish my letters but instead
have decided to keep them as testimony with the absence of responses (there
were in fact some, but they will bear better witness later) and use that as
matter for a research funding project bid which will throw the whole issue
into a sharper light.
So instead what we have are a series of cases which developed in many ways
by accident, by taking a thought or a term for a wander through the
landscape of organised knowledge, whatever that means, point to the aspects
and prospects of the development of the technology, its use in
organisations, the core concepts of a discipline of information systems
design, which is certainly not computing, which gets me back to the
beginning, what is information, who decides?
The first group are a series of visual essays, photographs of things in
places making connections which might be completely illegitimate? How would
one decide? Who would decide? I have done almost no work with
visualisations until recently, being completely dominated by text, words,
for most of my life. What is the representation of a visualisation? In what
sense is this evidence? Does simply putting these things together construct
something. In the process I established (at least to my own satisfaction)
that knowledge organisation and metadata has a long way to go, but that
there is some emerging technologies which could make a substantial
difference.
These pictures provide a little light relief between large chunks of text.
These cases are still really simply jottings, of days spent in libraries
looking at documents and making connections. Much is accident. The use of
what we ought already to know about matters written in my radical
librarianship of 1977 seem hardly to have moved forward a moment. In others
the change has been fundamental. Google is a case in point. That forms a
case of its own which comes near the end. The work of making sense of these
cases is by no means complete. The evidence is published in order that we
may find a community in practice to work further.
I have begun the work of looking at the role of the internet in the
organisation of knowledge and compared it with the other sources. This has
been published already in information and social change I wont repeat it
here. But this work is ongoing and will give rise to future essays and
perhaps papers.
Then there is a small case based on material from Kingston University, to
show how the story is told. That case has its own introduction.
Somewhere we have to make a connection with erotic writing. I have an
entertaining case which I havenıt included about Kingston University and
publishing on the internet. The role of suburban arcadia, of satyrs in the
suburbs, allows me to make connections in a combination of finction and
functs in which imagination may explore; including some of this also wonders
conventions.
We end with a conclusion, in which I wrap up things and point to the next
few steps.
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