Hi all,
Although not focused on museums and heritage – the issues we'll be discussing apply big time. Be fab to see some museum and heritage people there,
Helen
Ways of Knowing in Collaborative and Participatory Research:
How can we know together? How might knowing together and acting together be socially and politically useful?
Arts@Trinity, Holy Trinity Church, Boar Lane, Leeds
10am-4pm, 15th January 2014
Participatory Action Research projects gather up social critique and outrage,
ambivalence and desire, as forms of knowledge. Inquiry is valued as oxygen for democratic
sustenance. Collaborations are forged as necessary for sustaining global
movements of resistance. Participatory action research is a strategic tool
anchored in some very untraditional formulations of some very traditional
notions of objectivity, validity, and generalizability. With innovation and a
proud legacy of activist social researchers, participatory research collectives
can interrupt the drip feed, engage critical questions, produce new knowledge,
provoke expanded audiences, and allow us to ask as scholars, in the
language of the poet Marge Piercy (1982), how can we “be of use?”
Michelle Fine (2008) ‘An Epilogue…of sorts’, in Julia Cammarota and Michelle Fine (2008) Youth Participatory Research in Motion. London and New York: Routledge, p. 231.
Collaborative and participatory action research has long focused on the link between collective development of knowledge and liberatory social and political change. Yet exactly how researching and knowing together might be ‘of use’ remains an open question.
Over the past twelve months a group of us have come together to work on a project called ‘Ways of Knowing’ because we wanted to experiment with what it means to know things through collaborative and participatory research. We experimented with methods drawn towards higher-order analysis, articulation and consensus, where the implication is that change comes through new understandings that might underpin collective action. We also experimented with methods which focus on embodied and emergent knowing, where the change is imagined as coming within the individual and in the spaces for ‘being with’ each other in new ways. There’s been multi-coloured knitting, wire animals, key words, post it notes on sticky walls and the slightly painful application of reason through a neo-Socratic Dialogue.
Rather than see these approaches as opposed, in this workshop we will explore how they might nourish each other. How they might help us ‘untraditionally’ imagine and practice validity, generalizability and usefulness? What might this mean for more nuanced imaginaries of how knowing together might relate to action which addresses inequalities and injustices?
We’d like to invite you to join us to explore these issues. In working through these questions, we are delighted to be joined by Michelle Fine, Distinguished Professor, CUNY Graduate Centre (New York) who has very clearly articulated and so carefully evoked the relationships between knowing together and political transformation.
Together we will have new experimental experiences which will open up the questions of how we know together and what this might mean. We will ask you to bring your stories of collaborative knowing, unknowing or not knowing. And by the end of the day, we’ll have – in the proud DIY and feminist tradition of the city of Leeds – made a ‘zine-in-a-day to evoke and/or articulate our insights.
If you’d like to hear more or to take part in the workshop then drop us a line with the 100 word story of collaboration you’d like to bring to the workshop by 9th December 2013 (places at the workshop will be limited to 30):
How have you known something together and how was this useful?
We have three travel bursaries available for those travelling from overseas.
Contact:
Helen Graham [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>
School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies
University of Leeds
The workshop will be followed by an open public meeting led by Professor Michelle Fine:
Evidence in Revolting Times: How can participatory research challenge inequality?
Arts@Trinity, Holy Trinity Church, Boar Lane, Leeds
5.00-6.30pm, 15th January 2014
Free tickets from: http://bit.ly/1ehCUvn
We are living in a time of growing and revolting inequalities; a time when measurement, audit and surveillance threaten to constrain what counts as knowledge about us, our cities and our communities. We are also living in a time of resistance and revolt; where new modes of collaboration between researchers, practitioners, artists and activists are opening up new possibilities for knowing and acting. Drawing on insights which have developed through the New York-based Public Science Project, Michelle Fine, Distinguished Professor, City University New York Graduate Centre will open up for further discussion the role of evidence and knowledge in perpetuating and challenging these inequalities. We ask you bring with you your thoughts on the following questions:
· Which inequalities are you seeking to challenge?
· In challenging inequalities, what counts as ‘evidence’?
· How has/might collaboration create new possibilities for knowing and acting?
http://publicscienceproject.org/mission/
The Ways of Knowing team is: Sarah Banks (Durham University), Michelle Bastian (Edinburgh College of Art), Andy Deaden (Sheffield Hallam University), Catherine Durose (University of Birmingham), Helen Graham (University of Leeds), Katie Hill (Sheffield Hallam University), Tessa Holland (West End Co-Op), Ann McNulty (HAREF), Niamh Moore (University of Manchester), Kate Pahl (University of Sheffield), Steve Pool (The Poly-Technic), Johan Siebers (University of Centre Lancashire).
‘Ways of Knowing’ is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s Connected Communities programme.
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