The Move Podcast S1E6: State of Social Emergency (with Kenny Bailey)
In Episode 6, the Move Podcast interviews Kenny Bailey from the Design Studio for Social Intervention.
Co-hosts Ceasar and Ayushi discuss the lack of physical hubs for public intellectuals, the forgotten value of social infrastructure within organizations, and the wider state of “social emergency” facing our communities in need today.
Transcript
Ceasar: [00:00:00] How do we find people who actually think at the scale of civic infrastructure? Who actually want to propose new infrastructures? Who actually want to play that kind of a game? Because most folk seem to be at the scale of issues, or at the scale of the symptoms, but aren’t at the (socialities 00:00:22) coming apart.
So [inaudible 00:00:29], so Ayushi do you know who James Brown is?
Ayushi : Of course I know who James … what kind of question is that Ceasar?
Ceasar: I don’t know, you know who James Brown-
Ayushi: I feel good.
Ceasar: Yeah. You know the hardest working man in show biz?
Ayushi : That’s right.
Kenny: Well today, right now, we’re gonna have the smartest working man in community engagement.
Ayushi : Ooh.
Ceasar: Kenny Bailey. He is someone I’ve known for a while who’s doing really cutting edge work. Really getting at the deep structural issues that are going on in this society around engagement. Not just around planning processes, but period. And it’s really helping us think about these notions of infrastructures for social [00:01:00] inclusion.
So here’s our interview with Kenny.
One of the things I love about the work that Kenny and them do … I’m gonna just say this out front. Is that they are at like the intersection of art and politics and place and diversity and complexity. And they do all of that not just through a project, but how they are as an organization, what they do as work. And Kenny, for me, also is one of the smartest people that I know on the planet.
Ayushi : I want you to know that Ceasar does not introduce most people that way when he introduces them to me.
Ceasar: That’s really true.
Ayushi : I’m excited to have you here. Thank you so much for coming.
Ceasar: So Kenny, what are you up to? You know this is really the thing, because he’s (inaudible 00:01:44) Kenny, you gotta know what he’s up to. I don’t know. You can talk about what he’s done, but that’s not … you know he’s left that. He’s on to something else.
Kenny: It’s funny that we would be talking about infrastructures for civic engagement, because one of the things we’re really sort of struggling with, or one of the questions we’re rapping with right now is [00:02:00] like what kind of infrastructure is needed for people to just make sense of the complexities of reality? Like I was just thinking about in the 90s when I first moved to Boston, this area, we would go up to Harvard Square and hang out with Cornell West at One Potato, Two Potato, and just talk about life.
Like you could just sort of casually talk to public intellectuals, right? If that was your thing. And that was so my thing. But, I don’t know if those kinds of spaces exist. So we’re trying to figure out one, how to sculpt those kind of spaces and how to make a case for them that makes sense given the ways in which people who have resources to help make those kind of spaces happen, think about the current situation we find ourselves in. And we all don’t necessarily see it the same way or have the same sort of take. So, that’s one of the things we’re thinking a lot about is how to find the people [00:03:00] who understand the case we’re trying to make, and sort of get them to experiment with new forms of public infrastructure.
Ceasar: It’s funny that you use that example, because (inaudible 00:03:09) when she came here, (inaudible 00:03:12) is my wife and she came here from Turkey. I mean one day we were walking down the street and she says to me, “So, where are all the coffee shops with intellectuals hanging out and folks have all these things?” And I said, “Ah, we don’t have any anymore. They’re gone. Those spaces don’t exist anymore.” And I think you’re dead on about we need to … they were part of our infrastructure.
Kenny: Yeah.
Ayushi : Right.
Ceasar: They actually were. You know they weren’t the only part, but they were an important part.
Kenny: Right.
Ceasar: And, I don’t know how they emerged. But we have to purposely … I think you’re right … recreate them.
Kenny: Right. Like I think about just everyday life and like I spend so much of my time in the heart of Boston, by Boston Street, because I work out down that way. And when I get off the train is towards sort of Back Bay. And [00:04:00] it’s a mall. Which is fine. I mean, it’s not fine, but it is what it is. So what it means is in terms of social affordances is if you want to do anything you need to have money. And you need to be able to buy. And it’s not any kind of mall, it’s like first world … it’s Gucci, it’s Louis Vuitton, it’s like Dior. So it’s like not only do you need to be able to buy, you need to be able to buy big, right?
Ayushi : Right.
Kenny: And, given the kinds of cultural crises we’re in right now, and given the kinds of public spaces, the public spaces or the spaces we have are in commensurate to the crisis. But, I think we agree on that, but most people don’t even know how to see what we’re talking about.
Ayushi : Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Kenny: I think that public life is not a space for sort of interrogation or a terrain by which people feel a kind of agency with which to sculpt. I think most people are just in it. And I think we’re weirdos in the sense that we actually think space-
Ayushi : Recognize, yeah.
Kenny: We think space, we recognize [00:05:00] space, we feel agency over space. We feel like we have the capacity to shape it. We feel like we have some responsibility about space. And I think that’s just a strange way to think.
Ayushi : Which is so sad, because for one of my classes, I mean here at the Department of Urban Studies and Planning, we had to read … we didn’t actually have to read. I found this book by Ray (Oldenberg 00:05:20) that was not even on the syllabus actually. And it was published in ’89, and it was all about the third place. Right? The third spaces. The coffee shops. The bookstores. The restaurants. The cafes. That were the hub for public intellectuals. And he argues that without the third place there would be no community vitality. There would be no root for democracy. And-
Kenny: And it’s funny because Starbucks pitches itself as-
Ayushi : That was 20-
Kenny: The third [inaudible 00:05:45].
Ayushi : Right. And also, that’s only, what? 20 years ago.
Kenny: Yeah.
Ayushi : That’s 20 years ago. And I was thinking about it with my TA and he said something really insightful about how the third spaces used to be the original internet. The [00:06:00] original way of finding information. And I just think it’s so fascinating how now we’re creating this new infrastructure to kind of reclaim or rebuild those spaces. And that’s been two decades.
Kenny: Right. And when you think about the internet, it’s another thing. It does something else that I don’t know if it’s sort of the difference between a digital and a analog; like in a sense that when you see bodies and you hear voices that does one thing, from when you read sentences and …
Ayushi : Click and scroll.
Kenny: And click and scroll. Like literally the actuality of it, the physicality of it, does something else. So, I’m not making a case against the virtual, I’m saying the virtual is one kind of actual and we need this other kind of embodied voiced haptic actual.
Ceasar: Yeah.
Kenny: And so, back to I don’t want to sort of give up presence, a kind of actual tangible presence, [00:07:00] for a virtual presence.
Ceasar: Part of what you’re talking about here, too, really kind of connects to something else I know you’ve been doing. Which is this Peoples Redevelopment Authority. Is that?
Kenny: Yes.
Ceasar: So what is that?
Kenny: So we pose the question have cities thought about development from the standpoint of the resident? And people in communities? As much as they sort of conceive of development as a process of importing large corporations and industries into a city to increase its tax base? How might it shift its framework for urban development? And you might hear some residents with concepts of spatial justice, and some residences with equitable development. And, for us it’s also a concrete proposition, you know what I mean? Like I guess the investigations is why are cities so infatuated with large corporations? And so willing to give up [00:08:00] anything and everything to import versus grow? Versus sort of support from the ground.
So that’s a project that we’re working on here in Boston and we’re hoping to export and sort of build other partners to continue the investigation. Because we feel like sort of posing these questions you actually can get at some of the concrete levers or some of the concrete handles that actually keep cities into and acting practices and sort of habits that keep cities inequitable. That keep cities … or, keep cities along the line of flight towards homogenization or towards a sort of a … was it Rem Koolhaus who termed the coin the generic city? Was that Rem Koolhaus?
Ayushi : I’m not sure.
Ceasar: (inaudible 00:08:44) not sure.
Kenny: So yeah, so avoiding-
Ayushi : Yeah, the reproduction of those existing-
Kenny: Right.
Ayushi : Right?
Ceasar: Interesting. And the other thing you’ve been working on this whole thing about the [Serc 00:08:55]. And I think these two things like both the people (inaudible 00:08:57) urban authority and the Serc, you’re really [00:09:00] making these propositions around different structures, different ways of coming together that actually we need to have in cities that we don’t have. They don’t exist.
Kenny: Right. A lot of our work is propositional.
Ceasar: Yeah, it’s propositional.
Kenny: Yeah, it’s true. We work with propositions.
Ceasar: Yeah.
Kenny: It’s kind of true, yeah. It’s true. We make proposals and try to get people to walk them out with us. Like to step into a proposal and then sort of see its logic through. And so with social emergency response centers, the proposal is we’re in a social emergency, and it’s cultural. And we all are in it. Some people are feeling it differently. Like, you know I was saying Starbucks is proposing itself as a third space in response to what recently happened with them putting the two black men out of Philly. And now these big trainings that are happening on the 29th.
But you know, sort of it’s counterintuitive to the nature and sort of the nature in what we expect from those kinds of spaces, [00:10:00] you know?
Ayushi : Right.
Kenny: So the social emergency response center proposes that we need spaces with which to acknowledge that we’re living in extraordinarily precarious times, and they have effects on us spiritually and emotionally. And we need ways to make sense of them and heal around them. And so you can make your own social emergency response center. So we developed a CAD and a set of techniques and practices that people can do to make their own response centers and to sort of help us propagate the concept. To let other people know that if you were wondering what’s going on with you and why you feel so crazy, it’s because we’re in a social emergency. There’s a reason why, and it’s got multiple tentacles. We keep seeing episodes of it, but there’s a larger dynamic at play out of which these episodes emerge. Sometimes the episodes look racial. Sometimes the episodes look financial. Sometimes they look political. [00:11:00] Sometimes they look cultural. They look like all these different things, but they all are emanating from this sociality coming apart, you know?
Ayushi : Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Kenny: And the distances that then get created by virtual sociality coming apart. So to get back to this question around civic engagement, like I feel like one of the things we’ve been trying to figure out how to find more allies around is trying to get people to actually see the ways in which sociality is coming apart. But then, you know I think for me a question is, again, it gets back to those of us for whom the social is a thing that we actually see and feel like we have some agency around and we pay attention to; to what extent do we need to bear the responsibility to try to make it public? And to what extent does making it public actually do something?
So there’s a (inaudible 00:11:51) proposition that sort of making public the ways in which sociality is sort of coming apart and that society [00:12:00] must be defended to quote (inaudible 00:12:04) in a sense that, if sociality is coming apart and sort of reconfiguring itself, do people need to understand the ways in which that’s happening? And does that understanding then do something else? I don’t know. But I think one of my sort of ethical claims is that we have to at least try to lean on some sense of understanding as a vehicle with which to then move forward.
But I feel like right now most people have no idea what’s going on. And so one of the claims we make around a social emergency is that most of us are disoriented. Like most of us have no idea what’s going on in life, and we’re just seeing episodes and we have no idea where those episodes are coming from. And so a lot of the anxiety and the feelings of precariousness and trauma (inaudible 00:12:51) ground. There’s no way to sort of know where they’re coming from or what to do about where they’re coming from or how to sort of convene and actually try to wrap your mind around it. Because the [00:13:00] sources are rendered unintelligible. Or some say, so …
So yeah, I oppose that. So that’s what we’ve been thinking a lot about is like one, how do we find people who actually think at the scale of civic infrastructure? Who actually want to propose new infrastructures? Who actually want to play that kind of a game? Because most folk seem to be at the scale of issues or at the scale of the symptoms or at the scale of a particular aspect of, what we refer to as a social emergency. But aren’t at the sociality is coming apart. That’s not [crosstalk 00:13:38].
Ayushi : Mm-hmm (affirmative). And redesigning for that.
Kenny: And redesigning for that.
Ayushi : Right.
Kenny: Or redesigning to actually see the ways in which it is coming apart. Like, we just got recently asked to participate in some more meetings around the future of work or the end of work or these questions around work. You know it’s fun when you get asked these end of work questions because it’s one of these angles in. And we were saying you know, the end of work is [00:14:00] like a small way of articulating what’s happening. It’s the end of sociality [crosstalk 00:14:05]. It’s the end of a kind of being and becoming and belonging. It’s the end of a kind of a era. It’s when the (Shogunet 00:14:13) fell down. It’s like you know for the new regime of life emerges.
It’s like what are these kinds of closings and openings, you know? And so should we take that for granted? Should we allow this close to happen in the way that it is? Should we investigate it? Is it a fait accompli? Like these are the kind of questions we like to ask, but finding other people who want to ask those kind of questions to partner with and ally with and finding people with resources who actually are willing to invest in those kind of investigations is difficult.
Ayushi : Mm-hmm (affirmative). These are the questions we’ve been asking. This is literally why we’re here. It’s incredible to hear you say this and to just know that you and so many others along with you have been thinking about it. Because thanks to you, Ceasar, for introducing us. It’s just powerful to hear the validation, you know? Just [00:15:00] sitting here. To feel the validation of you saying this is a social emergency. Even just hearing you say that is so great. Because I think otherwise, yeah, it does feel really one off. Yeah, it does feel like a very individual experience. And every time there’s another pair of black people thrown out of Starbucks, or yeah, another incident. You know right now we’re talking about student organizing and unionizing at graduate student levels. I mean every single incident I’m just like why is this all so reactionary? Because we’re in the state of emergency.
Kenny: Mm-hmm (affirmative). And time is implicated. Or speed, really.
Ayushi : Right.
Kenny: Or less more than time. It’s the experience of time. It’s the speed and the virtualization of speed vis a vis our memories, media, social networks. So then it sort of shapes time and we get then caught in sort of feeling like we need to function in metrics of attention economy, which you know. So all of that feeds back into this experience.
Ayushi : [00:16:00] Right.
Kenny: Of one offs. And sort of keeping us from actually paying attention to sociality is coming apart.
Ayushi : Right.
Ceasar: Wow, there’s so much to go with you know from there, with this. Because, I think one other thing I want to point to really clear is not only can you have an articulation of this, but you actually then start to figure out well then what’s the experience I can create on the ground? That allow people to actually start to come to this meaning themselves? So like when you do a Serc it’s not just the concept, you actually kind of create these events.
Kenny: Right.
Ceasar: You know you actually make it real for people that (crosstalk 00:16:37) kind of go do this. And the same thing with the Peoples Development Authority. It’s a real thing. You know you gotta go, you experience, and you start to grapple with it. And I think that’s one of the things that’s really beautiful about this, because it’s taking these concepts that are really thought through about where we are in the world and see whether this manifests something that really addresses that. Right?
Kenny: Right.
Ceasar: And how people experience that as a way of really [00:17:00] understanding what’s going on. Because that’s what makes it real for folks, and then they can experience something different. They realize, oh, as you said, I’m not crazy. You know I’m not crazy. That’s why there are 200 people in this room doing these different things, because we’re all feeling this. And there’s a way to think about it.
Ayushi : And to have it be the haptic experience you were talking about earlier that is perhaps otherwise missing in a lot of peoples lives. Especially when that time is so warped by attention span.
Kenny: Right.
Ayushi : Right. What are some of these … I mean, maybe I’m not in the know here, but what are some of these engagements? What do they really look like? If I go to Serc, what am I experiencing?
Kenny: Well, you’ll get a … this is so funny, I’m gonna do a tacky plug.
Ceasar: Yeah, sell that.
Kenny: On May 29th we’re asking for participants to help us sort of enact a series of social emergencies. Almost like commercials, you know what I mean? Not full on social emergency response centers, but like just announcements. Like, [00:18:00] “We’re in a social emergency.” Like, “This thing that happened at Starbucks is bigger than Starbucks. It’s bigger then this thing here or this thing there.” But to use that sort of moment in the public zeitgeist to erect a series of public events. And so if you’re interested, you can email us at serc@ds4si.org, and get more info in order to help us make em happen. And we’re trying to do em all around the United States.
So, concretely, if you step into a Serc, you might be in a corner in the healing section doing a dance with a set of dancers that are making you sort of get in your body. Or a set of drummers that are making you drum and scream. Or you might be in a conversation led by somebody like Ceasar or another friend of ours [Pedja 00:18:56], or any of these types around [00:19:00] the state that we’re dealing with politically. Or you might be in a corner knitting. Or you might be sitting by yourself reading a book about racial capitalism.
So we create these spaces where there are overlapping themes. Sort of the radical librarian thinking. Sort of eating and cooking and being in that way. Making and doing in that way and healing in sort of respite. And they all exist in the same sort of room. So it would be like if this were a Serc, one corner would be one theme, this would be a theme, this would be a theme, and this would be a theme. And they all would be happening at the same time and there might be times that we all get pulled into one theme. But most of the time you’re all separated and doing whatever you want to do, and it’s just a space for people to just sort of step out of the episodes of a social emergency. To have a little bit of time to say, “Oh, there’s something that connects us and it’s a crisis. And we have to fortify ourselves to deal with the larger theme.”
Ayushi : do [00:20:00] you see these social emergency response centers as filling in a place that might have existed in the past in a form of a coffee shop or a form of the home of a local leader or otherwise? I mean or are these envisioned to be a completely new design?
Kenny: I think they’re meant to give a coffee house or the home of a leader a framework to use to just program. Just to give it a little bit of a framework. For us it’s just a contribution to those kinds of spaces. Like to just have a way for people to name this experience and have a way to orient around it, and then pivot from it.
Ayushi : Yeah. And take a step out of the day to day.
Kenny: Exactly. And for us, I think that’s the biggest problem that we face right now with sociality is there’s no way out of the day to day. So without there being a way out of the day to day, you’re always sort of … there’s no way to reflect on it. There’s no way to actually make [00:21:00] sense of it, you’re just always in it.
Ayushi : Right.
Kenny: And so I feel an ethical responsibility to try to build spaces that give populations, not at the scale of populations, to step out and make sense. But, you know then the thinker in me is like … well, one, let’s do it. Like how do we find people that want to do it? Like it doesn’t even exist. And then two, I guess the next question out is … or maybe it’s not even a question because it hasn’t even existed. Like we haven’t had the opportunity to even see it. But, what does that do? Like if there are these spaces, what gets produced in them? But I guess that’s a premature question because the spaces don’t even exist. We haven’t even really had the time to iterate to that scale.
Ceasar: Right. So, one of the things we keep running up against, at least you know in our thinking about this stuff, is that people like you, you know who are doing things tangentially, outside of, sometimes in collaboration with the system; whatever that may be. Planning departments, whatever it may. [00:22:00] And how do we move inside those places? You know?
Kenny: It’s a struggle. It’s a real struggle. Like, these opportunities for me … I try to use them to try to help sharpen my own questions. Because it seems to me like institutions don’t think the social. Like I don’t know how to better put it. Like institutions are so captured or so enticed by the social that they don’t think it. And because they don’t think it, the state of the social, or where things are in the social, don’t seem to affect it in a sense. So you can’t … you’re not having the same conversation.
Ceasar: Right.
Kenny: Then you’re always trying to figure out how to negotiate a language that you share, but it’s not the actual thing. It’s you’re trying to parse and sort of figure out what’s intelligible to the institution? Since the social (isn’t 00:22:52)
Ceasar: You know I had this experience at one point in my life after I went and worked with the school system up in Alaska. And just speaking to this point, it was a new school [00:23:00] system that was in this area that was predominantly Inupiaq, up above the Arctic Circle. And the superintendent of the school system hired me. And he hired me, first, to be an organizer. And he said you report to me directly. And I thought this was really interesting for a superintendent to do. And I asked him why he was doing this, and he said, “Look, we’re a new school system. We’re really connected right now with the folks. But, because we’re a system, we’re basically going to protect ourselves as an institution of bureaucracy. No matter what our intentions are. So we need to have a way to make sure that the public out there is organized, right? Because otherwise, through our structure, be it the school board or whatever it is, it’s not going to allow us to actually pay attention to the things that are really important in this community.”
And I just thought it was profound. Just to say like we know this about ourselves, right? Whatever our intentions are, our structure, who we are, it’s not [00:24:00] gonna allow us to do the things we want to do. We have to organize against ourselves in order to actually deliver what we’re supposed to be delivering. And maybe that’s one of the things that we’ve … we’ve always thought a lot about organizers working for nonprofits and community based organizations; maybe they need to be inside institutions organizing the public to work against the institutions. Or, sometimes it’s not against, sometimes it’s with, but whatever it is you know? It’s like there needs to be a higher status role inside of our cities because the way we’re doing it now isn’t getting us to the change that we need.
Kenny: And these sort of resource distribution institutions too. Because I feel like, that’s where for these kinds of initiatives where the rubber really hits the road is institutions that hold resources, philanthropic or otherwise, don’t think the social either. They think at the scale of issues or tactics. And so, because that happens, it’s hard to make [00:25:00] these cases to even do these kinds of tests because they don’t fund themselves. And you can’t get people to do em charitably. So like trying to figure out that pickle I think is another sort of weird thing that you know it’s always sort of a trap. Or, how do you find resources that are so experimental … I don’t know if that’s the term, so experimental … but, for people that may not necessarily understand what we’re saying, but they trust our track record enough to say, “I don’t know what you’re talking about but I’m gonna trust you.” Or like, “We believe that you can think.” Or whatever. Whatever they have to do in order to sort of give this kind of work support.
But now it’s like you’re always doing a bit of a song and dance to make sense, to be intelligible.
Ceasar: Kenny, it’s been great having you here. We’re gonna have to have you back because there’s a lot more-
Ayushi : I feel like we’re just getting started.
Ceasar: I know, I feel like we’re just getting started, and just as you said earlier on, the demons of time are actually cutting into our conversation right now [00:26:00] unfortunately. So we’re gonna have to have you come back again.
Ayushi : Please.
Kenny: That’s cool.
Ceasar: Because there’s a lot to go over with and to deal with and to talk through. I do want to just … you know as I told you, our show is the move. And we always think that everybody is making these moves. You know there are people out there we’re inviting in, I should say, who are doing different moves to help improve society and move democracy and equity. And so I always like to ask people like what’s the move for you right now?
Kenny: What’s the move? I feel like trying to build these new spaces. Like it really is trying to put new spaces on the ground to demonstrate em, and trying to find the right partners with which to make em intelligible. Like that’s the thing. I feel like that’s the move and that’s the question and that’s the conundrum for us right now.
Ceasar: Right. Kenny, thank you so much.
Ayushi : Thank you so much.
It was so great being able to have Kenny with us today and being a lot about [00:27:00] the root causes of problems he was getting to. I think one of the things I struggle with, both as a student, but even in conversation with friends is the word system is used so much. But, I don’t really know that any of us really has a clear understanding of what we mean when we say the system. You know it’s like the man. But what really are we getting at there?
Ceasar: Yeah, you’re right. And you know even thinking about systems change, right?
Ayushi : Right.
Ceasar: And thinking about that. You know it’s like well, what system are we trying to change? And what is that system and how does it operate?
Ayushi : Is there a singular one?
Ceasar: No.
Ayushi : Are there multiple? Right, like-
Ceasar: There are multiple ones.
Ayushi : Right. Who’s managing them? Is there a who? Right, like-
Ceasar: There is no who. But, I think what Kenny does so great and what was really wonderful about having him on the show is he does have a way of thinking that there is a system out there that needs to be disrupted. He may not even know how to name it, but he’s really kind of clear about well these are the [00:28:00] things you can do to start to disrupt the patterns that we’re in. The patterns of non-questioning. The patterns of non-examination. The patterns of assumption, that might get us to unveil kind of what’s going on underneath. That’s creating some of the problems; both social problems or personal resistance problems, whatever they may be. And allow us to kind of imagine and create something different.
Ayushi : I love that, right? He’s putting a name on something that, I think for a lot of us, including myself, is often nameless. And yet is under our nose the entire time.
Ceasar: Yeah. I mean just the whole idea of a social emergency response center, right?
Ayushi : Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Ceasar: Which is, I would say, is an approach, right? It’s a systemic intervention, right?
Ayushi : Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Ceasar: Because it’s basically, even in the name, right? It gets you to start to think about oh yeah, we don’t have one of those. Why not?
Ayushi : Right.
Ceasar: You know because I certainly feel like I need one.
Ayushi : Right.
Ceasar: And as soon as you start to think [00:29:00] about the idea of that and start to build it, it opens you up to understanding things at a much more structural level in the society.
Ayushi : Mm-hmm (affirmative). Thanks so much for tuning in with us today. Next week we’ll have another great guest, another great conversation for you. In the meantime, you can check us out online at themove.mit.edu, as well as on Facebook and Twitter at the move.mit.edu
Originally published at https://themove.mit.edu on October 2, 2018.
