How do we create a world where difference is not only tolerated but anticipated and welcomed as basic to life and as critical to the story of humanity itself?
Practicing the Social surfaces the potential of creative processes to remake the everyday and demonstrate how art can create and make possible new kinds of accessible world building and pathways for justice.
COVID-19 has increased our awareness of the potential of hybrid spaces to engage audiences in the worlds of art and education. At the same time, anyone wanting to speak to audiences beyond their local geographies must, at least to some degree, enact crip cultural practices (such as live streaming) whether or not they are aware that these are access practices innovated by crip communities.
We aim to make crip cultural practices transparent to presence non-normativity and thicken audience understandings of the possibilities of critical access for engagement and exchange. Our audience is thus any scholar, practitioner, or artist invested in advancing social justice as an intentional practice that pays close attention to critical access as a set of iterative, evolving, creative practices and the intersections of Indigeneity, disability, race, gender, and embodiedness.
Community-oriented social practice positions itself as a counter to conventional ways of feeling, knowing, and doing things by returning to the everyday and recognising how inequities continue to mark the critical or counter-hegemonic; however, as we move with consciousness and critique, we open and expand to emergent ways of thinking, feeling, and knowing the everyday. Hence, these interventions contribute to a bigger understanding of social practice.
Practicing the Social: Entanglements of Art and Justice was an online arts-based gathering that merged an artistic and scholarly program in engaging and accessible ways.
We recast the artful activist practices presented and enacted during our event as digital worldmaking, centering the contributions to rethinking power and possibility in the everyday that have been made by feminist, Indigenous, Black, disabled, Deaf, Mad, fat, old, racialized, poor, queer and trans activists, artists, and thinkers. By locating politics in the everyday, members of these communities have transformed our collective understanding of politics itself.
What are the possibilities, pleasures, and dangers of entangling art and social justice? What does the digital realm afford creatively, pedagogically, politically, and theoretically, and what are its limitations and opacities? How might organizing, creating, and community building in the virtual realm give glimpses of accessible social justice worldmaking as praxis?
Here, we produce and engage with several different and overlapping “worlds” situated in and between different social movements. We argue that art affords space for centering previously marginalized perspectives, for scaffolding intersectional and inter-sectorial alliances, and for imagining and moving us towards more just futures (Rice & Mündel, 2018; 2019).
Much of the featured work and our framings corresponds to what Natalie Loveless (2019) describes as the “educational turn” in art, which takes “teaching and learning as not only [its] subject matter but also as the basis of [its] artistic form.”
Through our engagement with arts-based/creative research, we feature socially, politically, and relationally oriented art. We move with Loveless in emphasizing thinking/feeling—or the “heartmind”—in art making; we challenge disciplinary boundaries to, in Donna Haraway’s words, “stay with the trouble” or the nuances of the major problems of our times that the featured works respond to (2016); and we design this site as a generative intervention into the neoliberalized world, to make knowledge production more politically, emotionally, and spiritually sustainable.
The conversations with high-profile and practising artists, performers, and scholars started through the Practicing the Social gathering offer a range of new methods/modes for arts-based social engagement and community-based creative research partnerships that broaden public dialogue about issues facing marginalized communities.
This dialogue across justice-seeking communities enriches public discourse in both academic and community networks and enhances, expands, and even explodes practice paradigms with respect to social justice issues.
Situating digital worldmaking in relationship to social movements, Zhao & Silberstein (2022) noting limitations with the wave narrative used to describe feminist movements, start instead with small intimate and intergenerational stories.
Since the wave narrative centres white western women’s experiences and describes feminist worlding as occurring in three or four big waves, they argue that feminist worldmaking might “work with the metaphor of ripples rather than ocean waves, as each of the ordinary women’s [and all marginalized people’s] lives is like a ripple in the sea. At first sight, they may seem trivial and discrete, yet…[when the sociopolitical is kept in view] they are significant and far-reaching.”
Approaching feminist worlding as rippling allows us to
recount, describe, and envision a heterogeneous and multi-voiced social movement (or movements), one(s) that are grounded and localized in different cultural and sociopolitical contexts.
(Zhao & Silberstein, 2022, p. 11)
Ripple 1
We reframe the largely white, Eurocentric, masculinist genealogy of social practice by bringing diverse critical threads together to acknowledge the existence of multiple vantage points theorizing art as social practice. The work of centring marginalized perspectives and practices as the basis of (re)building otherwise possible worlds comes from a much longer lineage connected to decolonizing, abolitionist, feminist, people’s, environmental, and disability movements among many others. Liberatory movements have long mobilized art and performance in the work of making transformational change.
Each of these thinkers-makers explores how power reproduces itself through taken-for-granted practices of living; and all of them, in different ways, argue for disrupting present-day, for recuperating old, and for creating new practices as the bases for transformational change.
Click to view videos and art pieces
Ripple 2
Historically, feminist, crip, Indigenous, and other justice-committed scholarship and activism have offered ways of creating spaces and processes where people interrogate their everyday lives and generate knowledge from power-infused practices of living. Similarly, we explore here unregistered, unacknowledged, and unpresenced crip cultural practices to raise the profile of disabled and non-normative artists as creative culture producers who are engaging in our world in creatively and politically transformative ways.
These artists and scholars offer innovative understandings of and interventions into access practices that reach beyond the logistical or performative toward “access justice.” Led by difference, access justice seeks to build access into everything we do in anticipation of and with a desire for disability/non-normativity that recognises and works creatively and critically to remove the social, cultural, material, and other intersecting obstacles and oppressions (e.g., histories of colonialism, white and male supremacy of spaces) that write multiply marked disabled people out of cultural life.
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Ripple 3
Another ripple moves with everyday worlding practices that are expressed and represented by Indigenous artist-activist-scholar contributors to digital world building. We curate the work of Indigenous artists along the lines articulated by thinker-maker Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (Mississauga Nishnaabeg) who turns to Anishinaabe Elders and territories to engage in re/learning material practices of living and surviving as it is within everyday praxis that Indigenous knowledge resides (2017).
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Ripple 4
A fourth ripple moves with Black and other racialized scholar-makers to expose the afterlives of enslavement, colonialism, indenture and forced migration and to dream accessible, abolitionist, difference-centric futures.
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In bringing together, presenting, and making meaning of a diversity of artistic interventions from leading and emerging artists, programmers, and scholars, we ask: who gets the energy, time, space to imagine a future? Different interventions into normative social practices that make up our collective social life, positioned as a counter to or different from hegemonic ways, re-animate the everyday, moving with the now well-rehearsed critiques of art as social practice (as white, as male, as non-disabled, as privileged, [see D’Souza, 2018]) into new directions and dimensions.
The interventions of these communities engage each other. As Black, Indigenous, crip, feminist, queer, fat, and other vital perspectives destabilize the normative and taken-for-granted, we cannot sit outside of the spaces or practices created or move to institutionalize (standardize, absorb, possess, or delimit) them. Instead, we offer and take up social practices with humility and generosity – moving social justice, art, and access towards just creative practice.
D’Souza, A. (2018). Whitewalling: Art, race & protest in 3 acts. Badlands Unlimited.
Haraway, D. J. (2016). Staying with the trouble. Duke University Press.
Loveless, N. (2019). How to Make Art at the End of the World. Duke University Press.
Rice, C., & Mündel, I. (2018). Storymaking as methodology: Disrupting dominant stories through multimedia storytelling. Canadian Review of Sociology, 55(2), 211-231. https://doi.org/10.1111/cars.12190 Open access
Rice, C., & Mündel, I. (2019). Multimedia storytelling methodology: Notes on access and inclusion in neoliberal times. Canadian Journal of Disability Studies, 8(1), 118-148. https://doi.org/10.15353/cjds.v8i1.473
Simpson, L. Betasamosake (2017). As we have always done: Indigenous freedom through radical resistance. University of Minnesota Press.
Zhao, P., & Silberstein, S. (2022). Not waves but ripples: re-worlding and counter-worlding of intergenerational feminism. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 1-15.
