Conjunctions. Transdisciplinary Journal of Cultural Participation

Editorial: Participation’s Norms and Storms

Aylwyn Walsh, Alice Borchi — Thu, 27 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0200

In this special issue, our “Norms and Storms” framing enables us to attend both to the (explicit or implied) rules that govern how taking part plays out and the unintended consequences of participation. This special issue emerges in a context of the proliferation and popularity of participatory approaches. “Co-production” and “public engagement,” for instance, are two institutionalized initiatives that have gained prominence in the UK and across Europe in recent years. Though prevalent in development discourses for decades (Leal, 2010), participation has been taken up with vigor post-2009 financial crisis, under austerity, with nation-states shoring up inadequate resources by “consulting,” engaging, and fostering imaginaries of outsourced citizenship. Where states fail to acknowledge the implications of cuts, a gap appears, into which step all manner of institutions. Schools run feeding programs; artists pitch for activities to service plummeting mental health; city managers invite playful public participation in planning sessions about urban regeneration; and patients are invited to participate in their general practice to give the impression of better healthcare. These kinds of initiatives are certainly better than nothing, but there’s not always a full sense of how arts and culture are replicating the projects of neoliberalism and furthering forms of liberal subjecthood.

The tensions evident in our contributions emerge at the particular conjuncture of neoliberalism in its desire to co-opt agency to ultimately achieve assimilation and control (Bala, 2018; Gamso, 2022; Harvie, 2013; Leal, 2010; Miessen, 2011). This tension is visible at several levels – in cities, in institutions, and in artistic practice. Each of these contexts presents different “cultures of participation” (Eriksson et al., 2020), invited, but seemingly pre-imagined.

The Violent Beauty of a Banlieue Wasteland Garden

Sarah Harper — Thu, 27 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0200

Participatory arts can invite stormy and violent forms of participation when they are commissioned for sites where frustration, territorial control and pre-emptive self-defense involve practices of accepted street codes by those living within racialized, febrile territories. Through the case study of Aroma Home, a participatory art gardening project, in Paris’s northern peripheries, I analyze instances of affective, symbolic, performative and territorial violence as non-normative political acts of participation. Examining the underlying contexts and logics that led to these incidents, I argue that the most insidious act of violence in the project was the creation of our invasive, extractive garden on a hitherto unclaimed and unidentified patch of ‘free’ public ground. In creating a new identity for this wasteland and defining its use, we effectively limited, and implicitly prescribed, modes of participation that were culturally alien to those we most wanted to involve.

Deconstructing Homelessness: Alternative Narratives on and by Marginalized and Homeless Groups in the City of Bologna

Francesca Sabatini — Thu, 27 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0200

The paper addresses the political and cultural problem underpinning mainstream narratives on homelessness. The absence of data, in conjunction with the misconceptions associated with homelessness, translate into the criminalization and stigmatization of homelessness, both at the local level and in fragmented policies at national and international levels. Section one presents an overview of homelessness as a cultural and political problem; section two then introduces the Italian situation and Bologna as a case study. After a presentation of the method followed in section three, sections four and five describe and then discuss two projects initiated by a political collective in the city of Bologna that directly involve homeless people in the deconstruction of imageries and narratives around homelessness. Finally, section six draws conclusions about the need to generate new narratives capable of accounting for the intersectional and complex nature of the phenomenon of homelessness: new narratives capable of restoring to the homeless their articulate human identity.

What Should the Rules Be – or Should There Be Rules? Embodied Popular Education and the Production of Facilitated Space

Aidan Jolly, Wendy O'Connor, Cristina Justino do Nascimento — Thu, 27 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0200

Drama facilitation takes place in “social world” spacetimes that are governed by hegemonic norms. These are created by a complex interplay of global historical processes, the specifics of local factors in the present, and the experience of participants. In Merseyside, UK, these processes create intersectional oppression, which, despite a rhetoric of “inclusion,” renders engagement in creative work either uncomfortable or unobtainable for diasporic and working-class communities in the area. These communities also continue to disproportionately experience various forms of violence. Our response is a trauma-informed “conscientization through the body,” using an eclectic mix of emergent methodologies that intentionally co-create emancipatory spacetimes.

Participation Beyond Expectation: Contemporary Art Installation Provokes Unexpected Responses in an English Country House

Layla Khoo — Thu, 27 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0200

In 2019 artist Layla Khoo created and installed a participatory artwork at Nunnington Hall, a property owned by the National Trust, UK. The artwork, named Change in Attitudes, was a response to the taxidermy collection of hunting trophies displayed on site, all shot and collected by the last owner of the house, Colonel Ronald Fife. The work sought to encourage visitors to consider their thoughts on this difficult part of the collection, both in its historical context and in light of current societal norms, by inviting them to participate with the artwork through choice-making. This case study first analyzes the impact of this work on visitor engagement at the site, both in the participation methods intended by the artist and in the unexpected participation methods employed by the visitors as the installation evolved. The questions raised by this case study are then considered, as well as the research currently under way which seeks to answer them.

This Cosplayer Has Claws: The Disruption and Replication of Gendered Norms in Cosplay Communities

Daniel Skentelbery — Thu, 27 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0200

‘Cosplay’ is the abbreviation of ‘costume’ and ‘play.’ The practice of cosplay is both an artistic medium of craft and performance and a lively subcultural activity. Consequently, ‘cosplayer’ refers to someone who participates in the craft and performance of cosplay. Many fan and cosplay scholars have provided unique definitions of the craft; for example, Joel Gn defines cosplay as “a performance art in which the participant masquerades as a character from a selected film, television series, or comic book” (Gn 2011, p.583). Gn here presents a well-rounded definition of the term that resonates with earlier work by McCormick (1999) as well as more recent work by Lamerichs (2018) and Winge (2019). Drawing on Gn, I define cosplay as the act in which fans dress and perform as characters from popular media (namely, from film/television/games/comics), but I place more emphasis on the performative aspects of cosplay, which separates the practice from fancy dress. This distinction, furthermore, allows for much more diversity on the part of the cosplayer in terms of subject matter and creative outlet.

The findings presented in this article present a portion of my thesis, “ Cosplay: Community, hierarchy, and the Acafan methodology” (Skentelbery 2023), completed at Keele University on March 15, 2023. My research, influenced by the work of Bainbridge and Norris (2009, 2013), Gn (2011) and King (2013, 2016), began optimistically. Initial data collected suggested that cosplay subcultures regularly create storms and disrupt the gendered norms of modern Western society by creating transformative spaces at fan conventions. My research, however, revealed that something much more complicated was occurring. My research findings, which combined auto-ethnographic participation and interviews, drew on a broad swathe of traditional audience scholarship, and post-feminist criticism. These data sets and theoretical frameworks suggested that there were in fact complexities and contradictions that exist within cosplay communities, and that cosplayer also replicated gendered and sexual norms. In this article, cosplays of DC Comics’ iconic cat burglar Catwoman are the focal case study. Through the case study, in relation to Catwoman’s long history across comics, film, and games, I examine how cosplayers not only create storms, but also replicate norms and gender power imbalances.

Norms and Storms in Cultural Participation: A Conversation Between Leila Jancovich and Alice Borchi

Leila Jancovich, Alice Borchi — Thu, 27 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0200

AB: Thank you so much for agreeing to have this conversation with me, Leila. The first thing I’d like to discuss with you is around the norms of participation – what we might consider the implicit rules of participation in the context of culture.

LJ: There are so many different meanings of participation, in so many different contexts, that it’s quite hard to say whose norms or rules we are talking about. In my research I have argued that the word risks becoming meaningless because of its ubiquitous use (Jancovich, 2015). But in terms of political science theories, which is what I draw from, participation is about having the power to influence change (Bevir and Rhodes 2010). So participation should be about breaking norms, not reinforcing them.

But of course that’s not the definition that’s commonly used in the cultural sector, where “participation” often means “taking part” in something that’s being created for you, rather than shaping it (DCMS 2023). So in the cultural sector it is often about “fitting in” to social norms. This of course varies across the sector: cultural participation can also be about, as Nora Sternfeld (2013) said, “having the ability to change the rules of the game.” So even that question – “What are the norms?” – it depends for whom.

For participatory artists, their norm might be to direct the experience and retain authorship, and the participants might be their props, whereas for the socially engaged or community artist, the norm might be about the participants having agency and some control over the content itself. But in both cases, the norm is to start with artists, who then reach out to find participants to engage with. What if the new norm was to fund communities to decide what kind of cultural offer they want?