The Arts and Culture Working Group is a space where scholars, researchers, students, artists and curators from different parts of the world take part in a collective conversation about how to decenter artistic and cultural circulation to include a wider range of cultural producers and products.
For the few last years, we have been working together to define, put into practice, and analyze the results of what we call “collective engagement.” By that we mean, we look, listen, and draw together around an image, song, icon, monument, or work of art as a way to decenter our own positionality. These conversations help us to go beyond talking just about a particular object but also about the spaces and social contexts in which it lives, thereby allowing the social meaning of art and its artistic contributions to come into sharper focus. We ask how our questions and the answers they generate change when we work together. How does engaging collectively lead to a more equitable, polyvocal, and multi-sited view that enhances knowledge by decentering the different individual default categories we each bring to the table.
Some examples of our “engagements” to date include asking why a particular monument gets made or not and how its meaning changes over time? Why do certain artworks circulate more widely than others? What do we learn about meaning making and reception when we listen to multiple versions of the same song? What does the material object of a letter or a photograph express beyond its actual content? What should the role of editors and translators be in the construction of a text? We are now beginning to analyze what we have learned and to specify our practice and what we have learned along the way, which we believe will be useful in our research, teaching, and in the way we move through the world.
At the end of the day, meaning making is inherently collective. What would it mean for the cultural and intellectual life if we took this seriously and purposefully charted pathways that included more voices from around the world to participate in that collective act?