Provocations from Reconstructing Practice
So What? What Now?
This post is part of a series of reflections on Reconstructing Practice, a convening held on July 13–14 in Pasadena, CA at Art Center College of Design. This and other reflections have been published in Reflecting on Reconstructing Practice: Toward an Anti-Racist Art & Design Field, available here.
This event also unearthed some provocations — some encouraging and some troubling — for us as organizers of the Antiracist Classroom that extend beyond the momentary convening itself. In this section, we consider: What are the implications of this event? How do we carry it forward?
Who should we — the Antiracist Classroom organizers — serve? Why? How?
As our mission states, we aim to cultivate a space for students who want to find, create, and engage in opportunities for student activism around issues of racism and white supremacy in the classroom and in practice. The scale of Reconstructing Practice brought us in contact with new audiences within Art Center as well. To some extent, the effort required to pull this event off helped us connect with students in ways that brought new potential leaders into the fold: folks who helped by making materials, setting up the space, and taking notes during sessions are now part of ongoing Antiracist Classroom conversations on campus. In contrast, some students’ reactions to this event reminded us that there are folks here who do not identify with the reasons we organize, the critiques we levy, or the motivations that drive us. As Art Center students voice their own interpretations of the events we host, express their evaluations of our inclusivity or exclusivity, and critique our motivations, it leads us to question our positioning within Art Center. Whom do we represent? How do we best communicate with other students?
At the same time, enthusiastic interest from folks outside Art Center presents a similar set of questions. During and after the event, participants expressed excitement around extending this beyond a one-time endeavor. “How do we get the Antiracist Classroom on our campus? Do you have a guide for how it works?” folks asked. “What if this conference traveled between design schools?” someone wrote on the feedback wall. “What if we made and sold a glamour calendar of our hot selves to raise money for next year?” What this becomes beyond our immediate environment may hold a very different promise than it does within Art Center, and each of these encounters challenges us to consider how we ought to evolve, whom we serve, who leads us, and what our future goals are.
“It’s important for people to be able to congregate around these issues, and not just a conversation that happens when people can spare a couple hours around lunch. Having two whole days set aside for it changes the conversation. I wish I had clearer answers about how to make these teachers get on board; but I just honestly think there’s a giant gap in teachers’ education about how to even talk about this stuff. I know for my part I get nervous speaking up sometimes because I don’t know enough about the issue or feel like I’ll be coming in on my white horse or something. I wish Reconstructing Practice or things like it could happen all the time.”
Kati Teague, Art Center Student, Illustration Entertainment Art
How do we prevent this event from falling into oblivion or existing in a bubble?
Art Center has a history of forgetting. Previous student initiatives calling attention to or demanding changes around racism, diversity, inclusion, and equity have been quickly subsumed into a cycle of institutional amnesia as students come and go. As one would expect, student turnover is relatively rapid: Two of our organizers have already graduated, and two more are set to graduate in the coming year. Art Center’s terms run year-round, and the work culture here doesn’t prioritize, let alone leave students much time or energy for, extracurricular activities. So, how do we keep this going? Should it continue? And, if so, how do we help it evolve?
A participant pointed out that Reconstructing Practice represents a sort of “Temporary Autonomous Zone” in the words of Hakim Bey:
“…a liberated area ‘of land, time or imagination’ where one can be for something, not just against, and where new ways of being human together can be explored and experimented with.”
On one hand, it is encouraging that this one event could serve as an aspirational temporal, spatial, and spiritual experiment in anti-racist organizing, fellowship, and dialogue. On the other, it is troubling to imagine that energy, interest, or investment may dissipate as time passes, as the space returns to its typical uses, and as contributors return to their own environments.
What is buy-in, really? Who do we need it from? Do we need it at all?
Reconstructing Practice sought several audiences: Graduate and undergraduate students, faculty, staff, and administrators in higher education, practicing artists and designers, researchers, technologists, and People of Color and white collaborators across the board. We also hoped to use this event to engender buy-in across Art Center leadership in a way that would force our faculty and administration to confront these questions around race and equity on our own campus and on our terms. To that end, we invited contributions of both time and money from every department chair at the college. Securing financial commitments was relatively simple; obtaining commitments of time and attention was more challenging.
Activism takes many forms, and this invitation to Art Center leadership — to spend time, listen, and participate — was an attempt at a sort of dialectical approach. Dialectics are, in short, a way of understanding how change transpires: “To think dialectically…is to recognize that reality is constantly changing and that new contradictions are constantly being created as old ones are negated” (James Boggs as quoted by Stephen Ward, 17). The challenge, then, is engaging the “right” folks in that dialogue and exchange of ideas. We thought Art Center leadership were the right folks, but most chose not to participate. We invited all Art Center department chairs to attend, received responses from three, and just two of our usual enthusiastic supporters attended. Given the relative autonomy of each department and their influence on curriculum, hiring, and student experience, the chairs’ absence was notable and telling. Beyond department chairs, our college president participated, and a few familiar and new faculty or staff members joined us, but the overwhelming majority of participants came from outside Art Center.
Perhaps, like many other neoliberal institutions, institutions of higher learning — and, more importantly, their members — will engage in such dialogues only if sufficient demand materializes: some indicator of demonstrated need, urgency, or financial threat from its “customers” necessitates action. In our closing plenary, Maytha Alhassen reminded us of the relative power students hold relative to the administration:
“Undergraduates do not realize how much power they have…for the most part they make the bulk of the pot of money for the university.” In order to leverage that power, though, we would have to “make sure that students know they’re getting a raw deal and that they have the power to protest around it.”
Rosten Woo challenged us to think through how we frame the terms of that case for racial equity:
“To some extent more than any other institutions, universities are places where moral suasion is still a thing…universities still have the idea of a reputation of what they stand for and things like that. There is real value in building the frame of why diversity and why inclusion — it’s more than just sort of ‘well, because it’s fair’, but actually it makes the university way more interesting, way better, the quality of the work is more relevant. There’s all these things that are obvious, clear benefits.”
In a way, this may simply be a reminder — one that echoes a recent set of provocations set forth by Decolonising Design’s Ahmed Ansari — that “challenging and critiquing the current status quo” and “thinking beyond design as it exists today” are tasks that can only be completed by “ the ones whose bodies, subjectivities, and epistemes have so long been ignored, underestimated, inferiorised, ostracised, or appropriated.” Or, in the words of Paolo Freire: “This, then, is the great humanistic and historical task of the oppressed: to liberate themselves and their oppressors as well” (Freire, 26).
In other words, what can we really expect from a paradigm that was never meant to serve us? And who can we expect to act?
This is our final post in the series on Reflecting Reconstructing Practice: Toward an Anti-Racist Art & Design Field. We’ve got a limited number of hard copies available for purchase on our website. Get yours before they’re gone!
