3 results
Six - Contemporary expressions of arts and culture as protest: consonance, dissonance, paradox and opportunities for community development?
- Edited by Rosie Meade, University College Cork, Mae Shaw, University of Edinburgh
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- Book:
- Arts, Culture and Community Development
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 15 April 2023
- Print publication:
- 15 July 2021, pp 89-110
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Summary
The arts, culture and protest
Much scholarship on the arts and its use in protest has been situated in social movement studies. In his interesting analysis of protest as artistic expression, Reed (2016: 77) observes that ‘[t] o engage in protest is to offer public witness’. That the act of protesting is not only about positioning oneself against something or someone, but – ‘as the prefix “pro” suggests’ – it is also about ‘be[ing] presentational, putting forth a positive alternative or creative vision’ (Reed, 2016: 77). There are various forms of protest which position themselves against particular issues and/ or individuals or which present specific visions driven by different aspirations, commitments, motivations and objectives. Protests also draw on a range of instruments, materials, practices and media – including those typically associated with the arts and cultural spheres. Numerous social movements, both in the past and present, have used the arts and culture to express and to achieve their goals. However, while there exist rich academic analyses of both macro and meso levels of protest, not much focus has been placed on the use of the arts and culture – and associated organisational structures and production contexts – at micro levels (Jasper, 1997; Johnston, 2009; Reed, 2016).
James Jasper (1997: 5) noted that because scholars have generally preferred ‘to examine fully fledged, coordinated movements’, their work ‘renders invisible’ those other actors, groups and organisations engaging in protest in local or community contexts. Similarly, and more recently, Reed (2016: 84) has observed that ‘[f] or the most part, the role of art [and culture] as protest has been subsumed under [a] more general concern to define and analyse movement cultures’. To Hillman (2018: 57), this ‘point[s] to a broader issue, which [has contributed to] the scarcity of detailed analyses of art [and culture] in the service of political activism’ at micro levels outside of social movements and mainstream culture. This chapter acknowledges that protest can and does happen ‘even when it is not part of an organised movement’ (Jasper, 1997: 5).
The chapter discusses and analyses the significance of the forms of arts and culture that Hillman alludes to. Conceptualising them as arts and cultural work as protest, it considers how such work embodies the ‘public witness’, oppositional and ‘presentational’ functions that Reed (2016: 77) identified.
1 - Community Archives and the Creation of Living Knowledge
- Edited by Simon Popple, University of Leeds, Andrew Prescott, University of Glasgow, Daniel Mutibwa, University of Nottingham
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- Book:
- Communities, Archives and New Collaborative Practices
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 03 March 2021
- Print publication:
- 26 February 2020, pp 1-18
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Summary
How do we move from an archival universe dominated by one cultural paradigm to an archival multiverse; from a world constructed in terms of ‘the one’ and ‘the other’ to a world of multiple ways of knowing and practicing, of multiple narratives co-existing in one space?
(AERI and PACG, 2011: 73)an archive needs to be a yarning, a conversation, with all the tacit protocols involved in a conversation between people, the respect in engagement that allows a conversation to continue over time, to be returned to, to grow and deepen, within a shared creative space. Yarning implicitly acknowledges the various contributors, embraces their contributions. It is by nature co-creative.
Allison Boucher Krebs, cited in Faulkhead and Thorpe (2017: 5)The Archival Multiverse
Since the 1980s, a traditional monolithic view of the nature of archives and record-keeping, largely derived from European and American bureaucratic traditions, has given way to a more fluid and pluralistic conception of archives that better reflects the diversity of the societies that create them. The rise of this archival multiverse has transformed the way in which collective memories are curated, recapturing forgotten and suppressed voices, reshaping our view of what archives are and how they function, and challenging old assumptions about the role of professionals in mediating and sharing common heritages (Gilliland, 2017).
The growth of the archival multiverse reflects many intellectual, cultural, technological, social and political currents. This book focuses on one of the most important of these developments, the growth of community archives and the active participation of ordinary citizens in their formation. The boom in community archives over the past 30 years has been important in allowing people to take control of their own histories and share their experiences, knowledge and expertise.
As community archives have become more widespread and influential, the professional archive community has started to radically rethink many of its own assumptions about how archives are created, preserved and made available. The roles of archivists, academic researchers and citizens have begun to coalesce and overlap, and the boundaries between these spaces have become more porous. Projects run by communities, archives and museums in partnership seek to break down the barriers between citizens and archival collections, adding previously excluded voices and memories and developing shared interpretations and understanding.
8 - Rising Beyond Museological Practice and Use: A Model For Community and Museum Partnerships Working Towards Modern Curatorship in This Day and Age
- Edited by Simon Popple, University of Leeds, Andrew Prescott, University of Glasgow, Daniel Mutibwa, University of Nottingham
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- Book:
- Communities, Archives and New Collaborative Practices
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 03 March 2021
- Print publication:
- 26 February 2020, pp 109-122
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Summary
Introduction
This chapter discusses effective ways to develop relationships between communities and museums around shared cultural agendas, practice and knowledge exchange. Through the lens of an eight-month pilot that emerged from the Pararchive project (http://www.pararchive. com) and was partnered by the National Media Museum (NMeM), Bradford, the chapter addresses what it means to access a dormant but invaluable national archive and associative collections from the position of differently situated community groups. The chapter not only highlights how the Pararchive-National Media Museum partnership (PNMeM) promoted opportunities for community groups to select, document and creatively exploit archival resources in ways in which conventional museological practice and use do not allow, but also outlines the key challenges encountered. In doing so, it draws on detailed notes generated through participant observation, on the study of relevant documents and artefacts, and on important insights gained from audio recordings of relevant project meetings and an evaluative end-of-project workshop.
Conventional museological practice and use
Museums have been described as arbiters of history and associated developments that chart the extent of human knowledge, achievement and expression in nearly every field of human endeavour including art, craft, science, agriculture, rural life, childhood, fisheries, antiquities and automobiles among many others (The National Museums, 1988; Vergo, 1989). As such, museums have historically been designated as institutions for education and research and for exhibition of collections to provide the widest public benefit. This understanding of museums as places of study and places of display (also increasingly as places of diversion) has engendered the sustenance of museum collections with the overarching intention to promote learning by informing thinking and by shaping attitudes and views of learners – scholarly and lay alike – as they make sense of their shared heritage (Vergo, 1989). Smith (1989: 8) helpfully outlines four principal features of museology:
the first is that the collections … should in some way contribute to the advancement of knowledge through study of them; the second, which is closely related, is that the collections should not be arbitrarily arranged, but should be organised according to some systematic and recognizable scheme of classification; the third is that they should be owned and administered not by a private individual, but by more than one person on behalf of the public; the fourth is that they should be reasonably accessible to the public, if necessary by special arrangement and on payment of a fee.