Dear Janine, Jude and all Crumbsters,
Thanks for inviting me to participate in this discussion. I completely
agree with Jude that social engagement takes time, and a lot of time. I
actually think this is true of anyone, or any community, marginalised or
not. Sometimes we have short-cuts to trust such as friends, family, or
co-workers, but to truly commit to a relationship we have to reach our own
conclusions. Online or offline, and usually both.

My conclusions about participation in my Nuclear Culture
<https://nuclear.artscatalyst.org/> Research project and the Embroidered
Digital <https://www.embroidereddigitalcommons.net/>Commons
<https://www.embroidereddigitalcommons.net/>, are actually the same as my
thesis. That people/we participate because they/we are invited on the basis
of our/their ability to bring something to share and want to find something
out. And that this thing can best be described as an 'interest' which
becomes part of a 'community of interest'. This is the same principle for
inviting someone for dinner, getting married, forming a research
collaboration, or working with another discipline or community group. We
might bring knowledge, or experience, a cake, or a skill to the group, and
we hope to learn more about those ideas and practices from the group. I am
never convinced by generalisations such as 'the public' or the 'community'.
And I think this is where Claire Bishops's criticisms unravel because there
isn't enough attention to the actual interests or actual communities of
interest at stake. These interconnecting webs of interest are what makes up
our culture, so there's no point in distancing yourself from social
processes in order to identify them as 'other'.  Although I have been
shrunked into silence, sitting on my hands, listening to the joyful
fascination of a scientist describing his designs for how to detonate a
nuclear warhead. So there are times that 'we' isn't going to work.


Working with people across the nuclear sector (artists, activists,
engineers, military, scientists, academics etc) follows the same patterns.
It takes a long time to know your subject and build up networks of trust
and recommendation. The intensity of nuclear technologies and politics
means that there is always something very crucial at stake, whatever your
political position. This is really helpful because the nuclear subject is
very clear albeit contested.  What is really important in my work, and the
emerging nuclear cultural heritage work, is that all the different
perspectives on historical and contemporary nuclear conditions need to be
told, and they all need to come to the table to be able to understand
problems and make better decisions. ICAN has been brilliant in this, and we
are seeing the same pattern with COP26 where activists are pushing the
agenda. I'd like to think that this is Chantal Mouffe's agonistic politics
coming into action.


Switch to Sweden, where I am now Professor of Interdisciplinary Art and
Culture and Director of the UmArts Research Centre <http://www.umarts.se/>,
at Umeå University. The sun sets at 3pm and the temperature is a steady -1
to -5 at the moment. My job is to bring together different departments to
develop joint research initiatives, and I can tell you it's harder than any
of my experiences of detached youth work, running art workshops in homeless
centres, or bringing together coders and stitchers! Partly because the
privatised model of state infrastructure has been so eagerly adopted by
Swedish universities. There doesn't seem to be much resistance to
the marketisation of the infrastructure here, which is very odd for me
coming from Goldsmiths. But everything is going to be okay because we've
set up an embroidery group ;)  http://www.umarts.se/

On a tangent, there are people I've been working with remotely for 8 months
before we've ever met. And when I do meet them in physical space I often
don't recognise them, and can't connect. I get the tempo of the interaction
all wrong. We are the wrong height, the syntax is jilted, the rhythm out of
sync. It takes several bumps in the corridor, cups of coffee, lost keys and
laughter before the ice is rebroken.

It takes years to build trust, make friends, and share ideas online and in
physical space, and now always both.
Fortunately we carry our old networks and shortcuts with us, and Crumb is
one of those shortcuts.
Warm wishes
Ele



On Sat, 13 Nov 2021 at 01:03, NEW-MEDIA-CURATING automatic digest system <
[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> There is 1 message totaling 57 lines in this issue.
>
> Topics of the day:
>
>   1. November's Theme - curating participation & question:
>
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> Date:    Fri, 12 Nov 2021 12:16:53 +0000
> From:    Jude Woods <[log in to unmask]>
> Subject: November's Theme - curating participation & question:
>
> Responding to Janine's comments about 'access', 'time' and 'opportunities
> to participate':
>
> I agree allowing long time-scales for things to develop is key, online
> sometimes things can gain momentum if they are there for a while, but in
> groupwork with marginalised communities it is crucial. This is a point of
> frustration for me because I see so much poor planning which does not take
> account of the build-up time needed to build relationships with
> marginalised communities, especially if you want to engage
> intersectionally. PoMoGaze was a project where I had an opportunity to
> start my outreach over a year before the exhibition, this turned out to be
> very important for the success of the project. Unfortunately this is rare,
> as I find in most cases it has already been built into the funding
> application and the project plan - that a very short period of time has
> been allowed for this. I have also noticed that consistently the time
> needed to recruit the staff takes longer than anticipated and the enormous
> amount of work involved in what's commonly called 'induction' further
> reduces the time available for the staff who will be delivering the project
> to be able to build their connections in the community. This of course
> connects to a much bigger critique of the funding biases, short-termism and
> corporatisation of the sector that I see here in the UK.
>
> On access at this point no-one has an excuse any more as time spent online
> will generate all the information you need about how to make your activity
> fully accessible, just do it! Of course you need the time to do the
> learning and resources to be able to follow through, and it needs to be in
> the plan from the start not added as an afterthought. In the example of the
> PoMoGaze project I had the budget to hire BSL interpreters and I advertised
> this widely and with Deaf organisations. I also did some research and found
> out which pub deaf people use, went along with flyers and chatted to people
> (in my very basic BSL). Consequently , we had Deaf people come along to the
> Queer Eye Group. The weekly group became a magical space where people came
> together across many differences and shared artful ideas and a desire for
> collaborative learning between equals.
>
> I'm interested in hearing from others about their experience of groupwork
> and successful engagement with marginalised communities, particularly
> working in groups with people who face intersectional discrimination, any
> thoughts?
>
> Jude
>
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