2. Feedback

Below is a summary of the feedback received for my intervention at different stages. The feedback below is from my PGCert tutor Annabel, as well as my critical friends from the PGCert Nick and Beth.

Feedback on proposal from Annabel

“This is an interesting proposition because you are taking a collaborative approach to building capacity for care on your course. You are also speaking to an area of practice – community / relationality – that is usually framed in its negative sense i.e. conflict, discrimination, complaints procedure, etc. You are taking a pro-active approach in the knowledge that this is an area of your course that needs more attention. However, you may wish to consider how to ensure that intersectionality and relevant topics / concepts from the pre-tasks, blogging tasks and workshops are referenced in your intervention and – later on – in your reflective report. Additionally, I suggest that you and your colleague Anna each select distinct elements of your proposal to outline and test with your blogging groups for peer feedback and to write about in your reflective reports.

Finally, please find some further questions as provocations to support the development of your intervention:

• What resources or provocations can help us frame the ‘problem’ – if we are to pose problems to facilitate dialogic encounters, as critical pedagogy encourages us to do?
  
  ‘Reaching Out’ (p67-90) in Ferner, A. and Chetty, D. (2019), How to disagree: negotiate difference in a divided world, London: White Lion Publishing (e-resource available via UAL library), p 93-116
  
• What exemplars of community care and accountability can we look to as case studies for this work? Or name in the lineage of this work? I note that you have already cited The Care Manifesto, which is great.
  
  Sins Invalid’s 10 Principles of Disability Justice
  
  The Digital Apothecary’s Lab Manual at Northwestern University
  
  Mingus, M. (2019), ‘The Four Parts of Accountability & How to Give a Good Apology’. Leaving Evidence blog
  
  
• How do our own positionalities as staff interact with concepts and practices such as care, solidarity, anti-oppression, interdependence?
  
  Ware. V. (2015), Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism and History, London: Verso – hard copy available in UAL libraries
  
  Equality and Human Rights Commission (2019), ‘Tackling racial harassment: universities challenges’ report

June 17th follow-up discussion:

“You mentioned wanting a clearer critical analysis of the theory and practice partnership. Designs of the Oppressed have sought to address this – specifically working from Freire:

Designs of the Oppressed

Mechanisms for repair – a repair tool?

Praxis – how to teach praxis? Action and reflection in tandem – perhaps linked to the partnership between theory and practice.

Culture – how we create specific cultures when we come together in community.

Are identity or culture complete or established when we arrive into a community (either from our country of origin or within the boundaries of shared identity), or can new cultural practices be produced in the collectives and multitudes in which we find ourselves, e.g. the international and intercultural cohort of a course at UAL? The first paragraph of this chapter is a really helpful signpost.

Hall, S. (2021), ‘Cultural Identity and Diaspora’, Ch 13 in Selected Writings on Race and Difference (eds. Gilroy, P. and Wilson Gilmore, R.), Duke University Press, p257
A PDF version is available here: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/english/currentstudents/postgraduate/masters/modules/asiandiaspora/hallculturalidentityanddiaspora.pdf

How to hold tough-ness, heaviness:

“There are times when personal experience keeps us from reaching the mountain top and so we let it go because the weight of it is too heavy. And sometimes the mountain top is difficult to reach with all our resources, factual and confessional, so we are just there, collectively grasping, feeling the limitations of knowledge, longing together, yearning for a way to reach that highest point. Even this yearning is a way to know.”
hooks, b. (1994), Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, Oxford: Routledge, p92

EHRC – racial harassment report 2019

Advice on doing intervention together with Anna – make sure you are outlining distinct elements of the intervention so that you can be assessed as per the requirements of the PGCert.

I recommend you formulate / draft a clear and specific description of one element of your proposal, so that your peers can give meaningful feedback in your peer to peer feedback session next week. Good luck!

https://abolitionistfutures.com/reading-lists – ‘care’ as a central tenet of abolitionism

https://my.cumbria.ac.uk/media/MyCumbria/Documents/PromptsforReflectiveWriting.pdf – useful reflective writing prompts

We talked about the key factors needed to address the IPU assessment – following the recommended structure for the reflective report (on Moodle) you can still find space for writing in a style/voice that works for you. So long as we (as assessors) can read context (why the intervention is important), what the intervention is, feedback from your peers and its impact, next steps for your future practice.

Intervention – repair kit

Toolkit – conversation cards, using needs as starting points. Pieces of prose or questions that provoke conversation. Non-violent communication practice in an explorative way, using cards as prompts.

Annabel comments final tutorial – Emotional launderette

Tool – collective conversation re: care policy. Last week – created experience of emotional laundrette. Students made own care labels – used needs cards to look at areas of policy.

What students created was v useful.

Noted – hard to name needs if already marginalised.

Reflections – how to host intimate conversation early on in course when students don’t know us or each other?

Reflective practice – what does it look like for you? Is it writing in a notebook / voice notes / images / doodles / sound bites / a textural/multisensory vocab?

Re-sending assessment checklist info:

• Unit Brief and Unit Checklist: In advance of your submission for the unit, please check the Unit Brief and Unit Checklist carefully. The Unit Checklist in particular will help you to ensure you’ve covered what you need for your submission.

Goblin Tools – as a mirror to the emotional laundrette – help breaking ‘care culture’ down into smaller chunks, ticking off key tasks, practising elements. Emotional as mundane and ordinary like laundry is.

Individualism – how to account for more collective conceptions of self? Values / what’s important to us?

Feedback from PGcert colleagues July 2nd

• Care is a term perhaps overused or misused – explore the concept of Care Washing
• Saying a word too much leads to a loss of meaning
• Apply a critical frame onto this exploration
• You don’t have to actually make this all right now – be realistic with time and resources
• Example of a research project aimed at creating Safe Spaces in the Arts https://www.ywmp.org.uk/saferspaces
  YWMP is running a 2-year project funded by Youth Music that will create a policy with procedures on how to make grassroots live music venues safer and more accessible for all demographics, particularly marginalised people. With partners across the UK, YWMP has run a Safer Spaces Exchange. Each event explored the challenges, barriers, and attitudes towards safer spaces in live music venues.
• Critical exploration of the ‘Care’ as a concept in the cultural sector https://www.intersectionsofcare.net/guidelines/taking-back-care
  To care can feel good; it can also feel awful. It can do good; it can oppress. Its essential character to humans and countless living beings makes it all the most susceptible to convey control. But what is care? Is it an affection? A moral obligation? Work? A burden? A joy? Something we can learn or practice? Something we just do? ❨2❩
• In Victoria Horne, Kirsten Lloyd, Jenny Richards, Catherine Spencer, ‘Taking Care: Feminist Curatorial Pasts, Presents and Futures,’ On Curating, 2016 https://www.on-curating.org/issue-29-reader/taking-care-feminist-curatorial-pasts-presents-and-futures.html
• Maria Puig de la Casa, ‘Introduction: The Disruptive Thought of Care’, Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2017, p. 1.

Feedback from students in testing workshop July 17th