IDEA & GOALS:
Across the world, calls for greater equity in the halls of academia, museums, archives and publishing houses are loud and clear. They demand more “diversity” and “inclusion,” or that the university should be “globalized” or “decolonized.” Why, then, if everyone agrees that business as usual is no longer acceptable—and that a wider range of voices need to be heard—is change so slow? How is it that progressive institutions created as the solution are now part of the problem? Changing what happens in university classrooms cannot happen without changing how the knowledge that gets taught there is produced. The institutional supply chain that connects them—or what we call the inequality pipeline—places barriers to entry for artists, writers, thinkers, and critics who live outside the traditional centers of power at every step of the way.
To disrupt this and to democratize global cultural and intellectual production and reception, we need to better understand how the inequality pipeline works.
How, and for whom, are the global academic and cultural worlds becoming more inclusive and how does that affect what is featured in university classrooms, museum galleries, archives and libraries. If we were to “clear the ground,” as the Lebanese artist Walid Raad urges, what would new spaces of learning, displaying, and organizing and classifying global ideas and culture look like?
We propose reimagining decentred ways of learning, displaying, and caring for ideas and objects by convening encounters with thinkers, culture workers, activists, and audiences working in current day universities, museums, libraries and archives. We want to go beyond transforming these institutions as we know them but to imagine and design such spaces from scratch. In the process, we will also hone a set of creative practices to contribute to a methodological laboratory for research on how to decentre cultural and intellectual production including playing and game-type protocols that challenge participants’ longstanding practices and viewpoints in order to imagine new tools, arrangements, and underlying worldviews.