Category: Public

HEAD Projects

How to survive in the Swiss art school jungle
The project of Daniel Zea, Hyunji Lee and Andrea Nucamendi is concerned with the inequalities faced by non-European students at Swiss art schools. The research group that understands itself as a collective has identified several administrative and everyday challenges structuring the marginalization of non-European students at HEAD such as money and paperwork, language, artistic and conceptual references, or the lack of courses that transmit basic technical skills. While focusing on the students’ lived experiences, their survival strategies, and their everyday and artistic responses to discrimination, the collective is also asking how a more just treatment of non-European students could contribute to a more successful internationalisation of the art school. These questions will be addressed through the creation of a web-series in which non-European students and teachers speak about their experiences and (strategic) responses to discriminations (see https://vimeo.com/search?q=coKo+nuts for first videos). This video documentation seeks to (1) make visible and raise consciousness about mechanisms of exclusion, (2) to equip non-European students with tools to perceive of (and cope) with discrimination, and (3) to think about the ways in which art schools could enhance their process of internationalisation, notably by making reflection on structural inequalities an integral part of the curriculum.

Alterity put into center
Martine Anderfuhren, Patricio André, Claire Bonnet, Fabio Fernandes Da Cruz and Ivan Gulizia from HEAD’s department of visual communication seek to initiate a series of events that stresses the ways in which students differ from the school’s assumed norm. In a first step of preliminary inquiry, the research team has identified strategies which students deploy to tame and curtail their “alterity” over the course of their study. They developed a definition of “alterity” and found five dynamics – assimilation, concealment, confrontation, resistance, and autonomy – which were tested with the help of a self-administrated questionnaire. The team’s initial concern with the tools students and lecturers may seize in order to call attention to the art school’s internal “others” has increasingly given way to the question of how an informal networking and mentoring system could be developed, whereby different students god-mother_father each other. The first event they have planned for shall be announced by a “fire alarm” signalling the urgency of questioning institutional norms and its processes suppressing difference. It is the requisite initial event from which further unannounced events shall follow, sparking off exchange and conversations on the (existing) diversity within the student and teaching body. The aim is to make “alterity” a functioning principle that is conscious and present throughout institutional processes. In this way and along the events, the project shall grow and eventually spread to other departments of the school and be taken up by further student cohorts.

HEM Projects

The socio-cultural & socio-economic backgrounds of non-European students
Patrik Dasen and Soojin Lee conduct an ethnographic study that investigates the socio-cultural and socio-economic backgrounds of non-European students at the HEM-Genève. They are particularly interested in their musical trajectories and their lived experiences in Geneva. The study is based on semi-structured narrative interviews that focus on a broad range of issues such as the students’ family backgrounds, their current financial situation in Geneva or their relationship to the school’s and the Swiss federal administration (regarding visa issues ect). A preliminary analysis of these in-depth conversations complicates generalized notions about the assumed comfortable, upper-class status and the privileged position of international music students. While evaluating their everyday needs and intense institutional struggles in Switzerland, the researchers also aim at valorising the socio-cultural potential non-European students represent for the school. Further, interested in student-teacher interaction, they are also interviewing teaching staff. The data generated allows for the sensitisation and the opening up of critical debates among and between students, teachers and administrative staff, concerning the processes of discrimination at the heart of the institution.

Solfège – a universal language?
Victor Cordero, Bernardo Di Marco and Micha Seidenberg suggest that solfège (ear training), as it is currently understood and taught at Swiss music academies needs to be profoundly rethought. Contrary to popular notions about the universality of music theory, the theoretical premises of solfège are far from being universal. Rather, there is a variety of underestimated non-western pedagogic traditions that theorize musical processes in ways that have not made it into higher education. Based on qualitative interviews with students, professors, and executives and on the analysis of statistics by HEM-Genève, the group explores the structural exclusions of (mostly) non-European music students who were not socialized into the inherently Euro-American solfège tradition – hence who have not been trained to read or rewrite a score after hearing music. While solfège plays a decisive role in the admission process at Swiss music academies, its testing demands competences acquired prior to entering higher education. By assessing (universal) cognitive competences according to a regional tradition, music academies are prone to overlook much artistic potential. Given that HEM-Genève wishes to attract and integrate “international” students, thus students, whose cognitive ear training may differ from the way in which solfège has been constructed by Euro-American art schools, the conflicts emerge that are the object of this study.

ZHdK Projects

The notion of “good design” in higher design education
The project of Sarah Owens, Tingshan Cavelti and Allaina Venema interrogates the figure of the “good designer“ and the seemingly universal nature of “good design“ with its implicit claim to moral integrity. Starting from the BA course in Visual Communication at ZHdK, they ask how the “good designer“ is constructed within professional discourses and within the logic of tertiary education. A preliminary analysis of design journals and conversations with students shows that the most celebrated designers tend to be able-bodied, white men who represented as “design mavericks” or “design service providers”. In as much as these figures function as role models at German Swiss design schools, it needs to be asked how they shape and homogenize students’ professional identities, and to what extent their construction works to perpetuate the internationally recognized “Swiss style.”
The project thus aims at questioning and interrupting this seemingly natural, reproductive cycle. This will be done by examining curricula and teaching materials, and by instigating critical conversations among students and teachers over unspoken understandings of “good design” and related key terms such as “good taste,” “talent,“ or “creativity”. Finally, the norms constructed within admission procedures, presentation of final works, employment strategies, or criteria for course self-evaluation shall be discussed and, while always considering the school’s institutional framework, possibly modified.

Notions of one’s “own expression” in grammar school art education
Julia Kuster, Laura Ferrara, Lorenz Bachofner, and Nora Schiedt interrogate how grammar school art educators understand the phrase “own expression” (“eigener Ausdruck”) in art education, as well as related key terms such as individuality, autonomy, or authenticity. They are concerned with the in- and exclusions produced by these understandings. Based on their own experiences as former grammar pupils, as MA students of Art Education at ZhdK and as future grammar school art educators, the group sees itself positioned at an interface where aesthetic tastes, norms and values have been reproduced without thorough reflection.
Their preliminary analysis shows that finding one’s “own expression” amounts to more than a learning target. Inscribed in grammar school curricula, this phrase reflects ideas about artist originality that hail from the project of enlightenment. In practice, expression is equated with originality and contrasted with imitation, e.g. when teachers mention a pupil’s manga-style drawings as an example for lacking “own expression”. The group has been collecting, visualizing, and mapping thoughts, questions, pictures and teaching materials; this “mapping” serves as a guide for further interviews (at Kantonsschule Küsnacht) and is continually extended by the examples art educators contribute from their own teaching practice. Based on this mapping, the group envisions the production and dissemination of digital and analogue leaflets, are aimed at sensitizing art instructors at different institutions.

Inclusion und Exclusion through mentoring in artist education
Romy Rüegger and Yvonne Wilhelm are examining the mentoring format in the BA program in Art and Media and the MA in Fine Arts at ZHdK. Mentoring consists of a series of one-on-one conversations between teacher and student or, possibly, artist group: An experienced artist accompanies a prospective artist (group) in developing their practice and recommends references, work methods, decision-making tools ect. Inevitably, these conversations are shaped by differences in artistic socialization and professionalization that foster mutual preferences, discriminations, in- and exclusions. Given that mentoring has been a tool to sustain cultural differences, to perpetuate the existing canon and to reproduce exclusive and excluding relationships within the field of art, the project addresses the (potential) “bonds” and the power relations at the heart of the intimate mentoring situation.
Due to different personal and institutional positions, Romy Rüegger (as an assistant and BA tutor) and Yvonne Wilhelm (as a lecturer in the MA program) follow slightly different approaches. From the outset, they have been documenting their mentoring experiences and research strategies on a semi-public blog. Their sporadic exchange with mentored, co-researching students will be continued and the research results of mentors and students shared on a second, semi-public blog. Further, in spring 2016 a workshop on the mentoring format will be developed and offered; as an artistic outcome, performative presentations on artistic research are being contemplated.

All of you: Thanks for your amazing work!

Serena O. Dankwa.

Colloquium no. 5; Friday 3rd July 2015, 18.00 at HEAD – Genève

The assumption that everybody is physically and mentally fit, efficient and productive is so much at the heart of higher education that ableism is often times not considered when it comes to diversity. In preparing for its fifth and final colloquium, the Art.School.Differences team realized how central disability as a category of analysis is in understanding processes of inclusion and exclusion in the field of higher education.

Disability studies have deconstructed the assumed difference between able and disabled bodies by pointing out that we are all only temporarily abled-bodied: Sooner or later every-body will face physical or mental restrictions and depend on helping hands and devices. Nevertheless, ableism is easily overlooked in our outcome- and efficiency-oriented teaching and research practices. And, ableism is much more than the discrimination or social prejudice against people with visible or invisible impairments. It is based on the notion of an ideal bodily standard and the fundamental distinction from everything that deviates from this standard. In higher art education in particular, the assumption looms large that passion and dedication imply working 24/7 and being ready and able to ignore such basic needs as eating or sleeping. If the aim is to create an art school free of discrimination, we need to ask how the body is represented in and by art schools, and what ableism means for teaching, for learning and for our understanding of art and aesthetics in general.

Only very recently disability has been made part of diversity policies in art institutions. But as Sophie Vögele noted in her welcome address, while the diversity of institutions is measured by counting nationalities of students and addressed by organizing multicultural dinners, there are no serious measures taken so far to tackle ableism. This would imply that “institutions provide access to disabled students and teachers in order to allow them to pursue their studies and work, but it is also important to acknowledge disability as a potential for new or non-mainstream artistic expression.” A famous example for such new forms of expression is the British dance film by DV8 Physical Theatre and its principal character David Tool, a dancer without legs. https://www.youtube.com/watchv=QgUT0Ufmkbk&feature=youtu.be

In his introductory comments Xavier Bouvier, Head of Studies and Head of the Composition & Theory Department of the Haute Ecole de Musique de Genève, addressed the challenge of creating more “equal, fair and non-normative“ art school curricula. In particular he focused on some of the keywords in the latestet version of the Bologna Declaration of Europe’s Ministry of Education. Among other the Bolgona reform, which has initiated fundamental changes  in order to create the “European Higher Education Area,“ aims at developing “competence based“ curricula. The term “competence“ refers to the applicability of knowledge, hence the student’s capacity to apply the knowledge acquired and be fit for the labour market. In this context of applicability and employ-ability, competence profiles are in danger of perpetuating a form of ableism which dis-ables certain students. Unless designers of competence profiles validate the (often creative) ways in which students with disabilities acquire and apply knowledge and consider their alternative skills and strategies as an asset, the logic of competence will not enhance the presence of such students with special needs.

In the art school context the question of who will be employable and which competences will matter most in the future is tricky, given that the market for performing artists has undergone and will continue to undergo enormous changes in the decades to come. Success measured within the normative model of being able to answer to a prior fixed market demand, may be less important than the ability to build new demands. Another point Bouvier singled out is Bologna’s ambitious goal to foster “intercultural understanding“ in order to “strengthen European and global citizenship and lay the foundations for inclusive societies.“ Especially in the context of “conservatoires“ that seek to conserve and transmit certain musical traditions, it is hard work to build up artistic understanding across cultures. Taking into account that music cultures are steeped in traditions that “frequently behave in normative ways much remains to be done.“

Sébastien Kessler the main speaker of the evening, describes himself as an activist. Kessler has an engineering degree in physics at the EPFL of Lausanne and a Master in Health Economics. Asked to represent the point of view of a person with a “handicap,” he got increasingly involved in adult education. Kessler co-founded a consultancy that specializes in universal access and has worked with Swiss hospitals, airports and universities.

Kessler took his personal experiences as starting point to his presentation. As July 3^rd was one of those dog days of summer, he started his presentation by addressing the way in which the heat affects wheel chair users. He did so by polemically instructing us, the non-wheel-chair-using audience, to add something to our curricula: “Stick your feet to the floor, the back to chair and don’t move for an hour. If you don’t manage you’ll get a bad mark.“ The lesson: We tend to be unaware that heat and sweat makes it harder to sit for long hours without getting soar; the ability to sit amounts to an unspoken (ableist) requirement of higher education.

Aimed at informing and educating, Kessler’s presentation highlighted a range of disabling practices, as well enabling strategies and self-representations of “handicapped” people. A North American “disability sensitive training” video he showed (see the link in the last slide of PPT Sébastien Kessler) was particularly impressive, if only because, both white people and people of colour spoke about their disabilities. By explaining how they liked to be interacted with, they account for the fact that it is not easy “to interact with people you are not accustomed to,” as Kessler put it. What goes unsaid of course, is that they are thereby taking on the burden of educating their fellow “non-disabled” people.

A critical aspect that came up when Kessler mentioned Switzerland’s recent vote in favour of embryo testing, was the question of happiness. While some disability organizations supported the new law, others questioned its eugenic premises and the implied link between dis/ability and un/happiness. Kessler suggested that economic privilege – which, as I would add, tends to be accompanied by racial privilege – plays a major role in whether or not an impaired person can live a comfortable, and supposedly happier life. Without further exploring the question of suffering and happiness, Kessler pointed out that a monthly allowance of 1500 CHF, the minimum Swiss disability pension, makes life challenging. He further indicated that his own mobility and visibility as an activist owes much to the fact that his parents had the means to send him to good schools. His social and cultural capital as a white male Swiss citizen helped in finding an internship and enter a job through the backdoor, in making strategic choices about his studies (public health) and becoming an entrepreneur in a sector (the private field of disability) in which, as he says, his visible impairment is an asset rather than a disability.

“Le freak, c’est chick!” the title picture to Kessler’s presentation is a still from the American horror film “Freaks” by Tod Browning.

Produced in 1932, its actors and actresses usually performed in carnival sideshow where they were to show case their physical “deformities.” According to Wikipedia, the original version of “Freaks” was considered to be too shocking and was destroyed. Today, people with disabilities figure in dogma films such as Lars von Trier’s “Breaking the waves “ or “Danger in the Dark” (see picture below). It would have to be examined not only how exactly they are portrayed, but also how they are positioned in terms of their racial, gender, and class affiliation.

“Disabled people are never represented as normal. They are either super intelligent or they are incorporated as the villain, they are represented as either inefficient or as highly talented.”[1] The later notion of being extraordinary, intersects with attempts to produce positive images, by portraying what, say, sportsmen in wheel chairs are capable of. Showing a video ad on disabled sports, Kessler mentions that he himself, regardless of his non-sportive looks, has been asked whether he plays Basketball. Ironically, as I would add, able-bodied young Black men get asked the same question; the connecting logic perhaps being: there are certain “other“ fields, such as sports or music, in which even non-normative bodies are credited for their successful performance.

Kessler himself did not focus on the ways in which different minoritized groups are interpellated by the same norms, or excluded in different or similar ways. Neither did he engage with the ways in which different marginalized groups are being played against each other, politically and in cultural representations. Rather, concerned with determining the needs of and providing universal access to people with a variety of physical and mental impairments, his key message was: “you are not disabled everyday, you are in a disabling position depending in your environment and what concepts you meet.“ This important message also transpires in his carefully put together powerpoint presentation PPT Sébastien Kessler.

[1] However, Kessler also reminded us of the adds that depicted happy children affected by trisomy 21 (Down syndrome) in the late 1980s, in which people with disabilities are portrayed as, at least potentially, “normal” consumers.

Serena O. Dankwa
is a classical musician who became a radio journalist who became a black feminist anthropologist
https://www.zhdk.ch/?person/detail&id=201721

Colloquium no. 4 Friday 24^th April 2015, 18.00 at ZHdK

Radical lectures delivered in less radical institutional settings tend to be opened by official welcome notes that are well-intended, but often boring or that even downplay the radical stance the lecture itself is about to propose. This was not the case on April 24^th, when David Keller, head of International Affairs at ZHdK, welcomed Melissa Steyn and Marie Buscatto in Zurich. In front of a full house, Keller opened the evening by acknowledging the ambivalence of his own position, as a “super privileged, white, heterosexual man from a middle-class background,” in the context of an programme that aims to destabilise the hegemony of that very position.

Having been involved with literacy projects in development cooperation in Latin America, Keller was particularly interested in Steyn’s concept of “critical diversity literacy.” Steyn argues that “those socialized into spaces of relative disadvantage tend to be more literate in critical diversity,” than those who are born into positions of privilege. Taking this statement at face value, Keller wondered if he was invited to attend the evening in order to improve his own “diversity literacy,” hence his own capacity to read and recognize processes of discrimination, by being exposed to an experience of multiple exclusion himself (as supposeldy one of the few straight white men in the lecture hall). While this remark might have sounded a bit heavier than intended, it does speak to the spectre haunting those who are indeed comfortably occupying privileged social positions.

Without justifying those who feel pressured, threatened or even “discriminated” against when confronted with the demands of a critical diversity agenda, Keller suggested that such (defensive) responses indicate that “something powerful is coming.” Further, he held that Paulo Freire’s major work “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” should be inverted and rewritten into a ”Pedagogy for the Oppressor“ who is ready to work on his ”failed socialization“ and be educated on the injustices he did not learn to see. Keller closed his opening remarks by welcoming Melissa Steyn as the “critical friend” needed to ask provocative questions and offer her critique.

Keller was followed by Carmen Mörsch, head of the institute for Art Education, who introduced the lecturers in more detail, after assuring Keller that Art.School.Differences project considers him an ally: Keller’s attempts at reflecting on ZHdK’s process of internationalization by discussing critical theories were, she said, highly appreciated by the Art.School.Differences team.

18.15h
Melissa Steyn (Wits Centre for Diversity Studies, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg)
Getting into focus for the 21st Century: Critical Diversity Literacy as an essential lens

Melissa Steyn, best known for her work on whiteness in post-Apartheid South Africa, has been developing Diversity Studies as field in Higher Education since 2001. She holds the South African National Chair in Critical Diversity Studies and is the founding director of the Wits Center for Diversity Studies, which challenges ideas about difference through research and education.

Steyn understands diversity as a mode of “being different together” that is enabling for everybody. As simple as this may sound, in reality it’s complicated. Especially since diversity has become a core trope for the world and since claims to be in favour of diversity have become standard – not least in Higher Art Education. Steyn’s framework of “Critical Diversity Literacy“ accounts for the fact that achieving true diversity is a struggle that is far from being a carnivalesque celebration and consumption of differences, as neo-liberalism tries to make us believe. This critical type of literacy is much more than a private, cognitive skill to encode and decode written texts. Rather, this literacy connotes the socially and culturally embedded capacity of reading, or, drawing on France Winddance Twine, “of receiving and responding to a social climate and prevalent structures of oppression.” ^[1]

Steyn defines Critical Diversity Literacy (CDL) as “an informed analytical orientation that enables a person to ‘read’ prevailing social relations as one would a text, recognizing the ways in which possibilities are being opened up or closed down for those differently positioned within“ a specific social context. For years, Steyn has been working on and extending the criteria to assess (someone’s) CDL. I will focus on three of the ten critical points she outlined in Zurich:

1. an understanding of the role of power in the construction of differences that make a difference.
Point one gets at the heart of how the social is constructed. It conveys that unequal power dynamics are the medium through which differences become salient. We first need to detect the discourses that hold centres and margins in place and determine whose life opportunities are restricted and whose are enabled as a result. This can only be done by putting power at the centre of analysis.

2. recognition of the unequal symbolic and material values of different social locations. This includes acknowledging hegemonic positionalities and concomitant identities and how these position non-hegemonic others.
Dominant groups are the ones who possess the freedom to define which differences matter. The privileged have the power of define the oppressed populations as the others. While these others may also have internalized normative understanding of themselves (as an example Steyn mentions that “good Blacks“ in South Africa perform their blackness in a way that makes whites feel comfortable), they still tend to have a better more receptive understanding of how social dynamics of exclusion are operating.

9. understanding the role of emotions, including our own emotional investments, in all of the above
As affect theory has shown, the way we feel about others and about ourselves, our emotional responses are not inevitable or “natural”, but acquired. Through socialisation we learn who we are supposed to trust and feel close to, and who we are supposed to fear. CDL requires the willingness to explore of our sense of self and to recognise our privilege or complicity. However uncomfortable this process be, becoming aware of how we have been shaped emotionally is crucial to the process in letting go routinized responses and becoming critical diversity literates.

Last but not least, as Steyn emphasizes, point ten reminds us that critical diversity literacy implies not just the capacity to read but also the capacity to (re)write the script that lead to exclusions:
10.  an engagement with transformation of those oppressive systems towards deepening social justice at all levels.

While I have picked out four point that seem particularly relevant to myself, you should consult the powerpoint presentation in which Melissa Steyn names all the ten criteria she developed: Steyn_PowerPoint

Discussion:
Steyn’s insistence on a critical perspective reflects that un-critical diversity projects are part and parcel of neo-liberal agendas. The fact that diversity is a form of literacy that needs to be acquired (rather than consumed and celebrated), implies that it is crucial to focus on power dynamics. Steyn understands diversity as struggle against existing power blocks that need to be changed. Asked about the strategies of survival of those who try to enact critical diversity literacy, Steyn pointed out that it is important of being aware of how draining and “dangerous” this work can be. Comparing the Swiss situation of diversity and its study to the South African engagement with diversity, Steyn holds that it is in fact harder to persuade the “centers” (like Switzerland) to shift. In South Africa discussions concerning the need for critical diversity are held less politely and with an urgency that is perhaps necessary to make changes.

19.15
Marie Buscatto (Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne)
Art worlds as gendered worlds

Marie Buscatto is well-known for her empirical work on “artistic practices as gendered practices.” An amateur jazz musician herself, she has used both ethnographic and classical sociological methods in exploring the role of female artists in the world of jazz in particular. In her presentation at ZHdK she set out to explain why men in arts “always fare better than women in terms of becoming and remaining recognized as artists,” and why, nevertheless, increasing numbers of female artists are being successful. With regard to her binary use of gender categories (“woman” / “man”), Buscatto sent ahead that she considered “transsexuals” a recent and relatively marginal phenomenon that she did not consider in her study.

Despite the public perception about the open-minded of the art world, it is highly gendered in ways that leads to the marginalisation of female performers over time. Here’s a summary of the main points of this gradual, cumulative process:
1. as in other professional fields, female performers are overrepresented in devaluated, feminine connoted areas such as dancing and singing. In jazz this imbalance is striking – 96% of all instrumentalists are male and 65% of all singers are female – and reflects how the gendered order is naturalized in music from an early age. Boys, for instance, may be encouraged to pick up an electric guitar and allowed to explore informal (musical) environments, whereas girls are rather called into learning formal, classical instruments.
2. socializing works better for male than for female performers. Buscatto mentions that it is difficult to feel comfortable as a woman in an otherwise all male band, because the men “don’t feel comfortable with you either.” To the men feels safer to play (music) with colleagues of your own gender, and, as I would add your own race.
3. persistent stereotype about women not being powerful creators, complicates recognition as an independent female artist. When female pop musicians do become famous, it’s assumed that someone else writes their hits for them, that they are backed by powerful boyfriends, or that it is their (physical) seductiveness that makes them successful. Male seduction, however, is associated with action and creativity.
4. women struggle to articulate private and professional life not because they have children, but rather, because unlike their male who are backed by a helpful girlfriend, heterosexual female artists tend to have lovers who are themselves busy artists and less prepared to cater to their partner’s career and professional needs.

Nevertheless, a number of factors have contributed to the raising numbers in women in art, since female artists are strategically:
1. turning feminine stereotypes into an asset; women artists in particularly “feminine” and devaluated fields (such as knitting) managed to revert stigma and end up being considered original.
2. consciously or unconsciously deploying “feminine capital such as seduction” as a marketing strategy, while remaining aware that drawing on certain stereotypes is counterproductive, because it makes you a “feminine artists” and not a universal artist.
3. “compensating” exclusions by drawing on formal funding programmes and/or on their class privileges. Generally, female musicians are equipped with more cultural capital and have better access to (male) social networks.
– they tend to have higher educational degrees than men; art schools are efficient in allowing young women to practice networking and performance skills that are hard to gain in stigmatizing, informal spaces.
– public funding and projects for underprivileged youth in popular music and dance seem to have a positive effect for women.
– it has been shown that the use of screens to hire orchestra musicians has elevated the percentage of female orchestra musicians by 30%.
4. involving themselves in collective action and commercial and/or feminist initiatives organized for (or by) all-female bands and groups of artists.

Discussion:
While appreciating Buscatto’s empirical findings, her neglect of intersectional and historical works by black and queer theorists was critiqued. First, her pre-empting comment about trans*issues being a recent phenomena was interrogated on the basis that gender-queers (people transgressing gender binaries in various in/visible ways) have existed long before the term trans* gained currency. The risk of reproducing certain stereotypes (e.g. about women’s use of seduction) looms large, when gender binaries are taken for granted. This leads to an epistemological blind spot, for instance on the structuring effects of what queer theorists identified as “male homosociality”  or on what disables or allows for the reversal of certain stigmatizations and not others. Further, it would be interesting to consider contemporary female performers who reject to play on their femininity (by wearing baggy clothes ect) against the background of a long history of female musicians who cross-dressed and/or passed as men in performance spaces. This “queering” of the gaze does not mean we look for “homosexuals.” It compels us, however, to consider strategies of seduction or of non-seduction by making use of interdisciplinary theories on the intertwinement of gender and sexuality.

The discussion continued the following day in the colloquium among the professors and co-researchers during the Art.School.Differences colloquium. It illuminated the challenge of communicating across disciplines and the need to connect sociological research tools to cultural theories in order to understand the many faces of exclusion.

^[1] France Winddance Twine refers to reading practices in the context of what she coined as “racial literacy.”

Serena O. Dankwa
is a classical musician who became a radio journalist who became a black feminist anthropologist
https://www.zhdk.ch/?person/detail&id=201721

Colloquium no. 4

Friday 24^th April, 18.00 at ZHdK

Radical lectures delivered in less radical institutional settings tend to be opened by official welcome notes that are well-intended, but often boring or that even downplay the radical stance the lecture itself is about to propose. This was not the case on April 24^th, when David Keller, head of International Affairs at ZHdK, welcomed Melissa Steyn and Marie Buscatto in Zurich. In front of a full house, Keller opened the evening by acknowledging the ambivalence of his own position, as a “super privileged, white, heterosexual man from a middle-class background,” in the context of an programme that aims to destabilise the hegemony of that very position.

Having been involved with literacy projects in development cooperation in Latin America, Keller was particularly interested in Steyn’s concept of “critical diversity literacy.” Steyn argues that “those socialized into spaces of relative disadvantage tend to be more literate in critical diversity,” than those who are born into positions of privilege. Taking this statement at face value, Keller wondered if he was invited to attend the evening in order to improve his own “diversity literacy,” hence his own capacity to read and recognize processes of discrimination, by being exposed to an experience of multiple exclusion himself (as supposeldy one of the few straight white men in the lecture hall). While this remark might have sounded a bit heavier than intended, it does speak to the spectre haunting those who are indeed comfortably occupying privileged social positions.

Without justifying those who feel pressured, threatened or even “discriminated” against when confronted with the demands of a critical diversity agenda, Keller suggested that such (defensive) responses indicate that “something powerful is coming.” Further, he held that Paulo Freire’s major work “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” should be inverted and rewritten into a ”Pedagogy for the Oppressor“ who is ready to work on his ”failed socialization“ and be educated on the injustices he did not learn to see. Keller closed his opening remarks by welcoming Melissa Steyn as the “critical friend” needed to ask provocative questions and offer her critique.

Keller was followed by Carmen Mörsch, head of the institute for Art Education, who introduced the lecturers in more detail, after assuring Keller that Art.School.Differences project considers him an ally: Keller’s attempts at reflecting on ZHdK’s process of internationalization by discussing critical theories were, she said, highly appreciated by the Art.School.Differences team.

18.15h
Melissa Steyn (Wits Centre for Diversity Studies, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg)
Getting into focus for the 21st Century: Critical Diversity Literacy as an essential lens

Melissa Steyn, best known for her work on whiteness in post-Apartheid South Africa, has been developing Diversity Studies as field in Higher Education since 2001. She holds the South African National Chair in Critical Diversity Studies and is the founding director of the Wits Center for Diversity Studies, which challenges ideas about difference through research and education.

Steyn understands diversity as a mode of “being different together” that is enabling for everybody. As simple as this may sound, in reality it’s complicated. Especially since diversity has become a core trope for the world and since claims to be in favour of diversity have become standard – not least in Higher Art Education. Steyn’s framework of “Critical Diversity Literacy“ accounts for the fact that achieving true diversity is a struggle that is far from being a carnivalesque celebration and consumption of differences, as neo-liberalism tries to make us believe. This critical type of literacy is much more than a private, cognitive skill to encode and decode written texts. Rather, this literacy connotes the socially and culturally embedded capacity of reading, or, drawing on France Winddance Twine, “of receiving and responding to a social climate and prevalent structures of oppression.” ^[1]

Steyn defines Critical Diversity Literacy (CDL) as “an informed analytical orientation that enables a person to ‘read’ prevailing social relations as one would a text, recognizing the ways in which possibilities are being opened up or closed down for those differently positioned within“ a specific social context. For years, Steyn has been working on and extending the criteria to assess (someone’s) CDL. I will focus on three of the ten critical points she outlined in Zurich:

1. an understanding of the role of power in the construction of differences that make a difference.
Point one gets at the heart of how the social is constructed. It conveys that unequal power dynamics are the medium through which differences become salient. We first need to detect the discourses that hold centres and margins in place and determine whose life opportunities are restricted and whose are enabled as a result. This can only be done by putting power at the centre of analysis.

2. recognition of the unequal symbolic and material values of different social locations. This includes acknowledging hegemonic positionalities and concomitant identities and how these position non-hegemonic others.
Dominant groups are the ones who possess the freedom to define which differences matter. The privileged have the power of define the oppressed populations as the others. While these others may also have internalized normative understanding of themselves (as an example Steyn mentions that “good Blacks“ in South Africa perform their blackness in a way that makes whites feel comfortable), they still tend to have a better more receptive understanding of how social dynamics of exclusion are operating.

9. understanding the role of emotions, including our own emotional investments, in all of the above
As affect theory has shown, the way we feel about others and about ourselves, our emotional responses are not inevitable or “natural”, but acquired. Through socialisation we learn who we are supposed to trust and feel close to, and who we are supposed to fear. CDL requires the willingness to explore of our sense of self and to recognise our privilege or complicity. However uncomfortable this process be, becoming aware of how we have been shaped emotionally is crucial to the process in letting go routinized responses and becoming critical diversity literates.

Last but not least, as Steyn emphasizes, point ten reminds us that critical diversity literacy implies not just the capacity to read but also the capacity to (re)write the script that lead to exclusions:
10.  an engagement with transformation of those oppressive systems towards deepening social justice at all levels.

While I have picked out four point that seem particularly relevant to myself, you should consult the powerpoint presentation in which Melissa Steyn names all the ten criteria she developed: Steyn_PowerPoint

Discussion:
Steyn’s insistence on a critical perspective reflect that un-critical diversity projects are part and parcel of neo-liberal agendas. The fact that diversity is a form of literacy that needs to be acquired (rather than consumed and celebrated), implies that it is crucial to focus on power dynamics. Steyn understands diversity as struggle against existing power blocks that need to be changed. Asked about the strategies of survival of those who try to enact critical diversity literacy, Steyn pointed out that it is important of being aware of how draining and “dangerous” this work can be on all levels. Comparing the Swiss situation of diversity and its study to South African engagement with diversity, Steyn holds that it is in fact harder to persuade the “centers” (like Switzerland) to shift. In South Africa discussions concerning the need for critical diversity are held less politely and with more urgency that is perhaps necessary to make changes.

19.15
Marie Buscatto (Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne)
Art worlds as gendered worlds

Marie Buscatto is well-known for her empirical work on “artistic practices as gendered practices.” An amateur jazz musician herself, she has used both ethnographic and classical sociological methods in exploring the role of female artists in the world of jazz in particular. In her presentation at ZHdK she set out to explain why men in arts “always fare better than women in terms of becoming and remaining recognized as artists,” and why, nevertheless, increasing numbers of female artists are being successful. With regard to her binary use of gender categories (“woman” / “man”), Buscatto sent ahead that she considered “transsexuals” a recent and relatively marginal phenomenon that she did not consider in her study.

Despite the public perception about the open-minded of the art world, it is highly gendered in ways that leads to the marginalisation of female performers over time. Here’s a summary of the main points of this gradual, cumulative process:
1. as in other professional fields, female performers are overrepresented in devaluated, feminine connoted areas such as dancing and singing. In jazz this imbalance is striking – 96% of all instrumentalists are male and 65% of all singers are female – and reflects how the gendered order is naturalized in music from an early age. Boys, for instance, may be encouraged to pick up an electric guitar and allowed to explore informal (musical) environments, whereas girls are rather called into learning formal, classical instruments.
2. socializing works better for male than for female performers. Buscatto mentions that it is difficult to feel comfortable as a woman in an otherwise all male band, because the men “don’t feel comfortable with you either.” To the men feels safer to play (music) with colleagues of your own gender, and, as I would add your own race.
3. persistent stereotype about women not being powerful creators, complicates recognition as an independent female artist. When female pop musicians do become famous, it’s assumed that someone else writes their hits for them, that they are backed by powerful boyfriends, or that it is their (physical) seductiveness that makes them successful. Male seduction, however, is associated with action and creativity.
4. women struggle to articulate private and professional life not because they have children, but rather, because unlike their male who are backed by a helpful girlfriend, heterosexual female artists tend to have lovers who are themselves busy artists and less prepared to cater to their partner’s career and professional needs.

Nevertheless, a number of factors have contributed to the raising numbers in women in art, since female artists are strategically:
1. turning feminine stereotypes into an asset; women artists in particularly “feminine” and devaluated fields (such as knitting) managed to revert stigma and end up being considered original.
2. consciously or unconsciously deploying “feminine capital such as seduction” as a marketing strategy, while remaining aware that drawing on certain stereotypes is counterproductive, because it makes you a “feminine artists” and not a universal artist.
3. “compensating” exclusions by drawing on formal funding programmes and/or on their class privileges. Generally, female musicians are equipped with more cultural capital and have better access to (male) social networks.
– they tend to have higher educational degrees than men; art schools are efficient in allowing young women to practice networking and performance skills that are hard to gain in stigmatizing, informal spaces.
– public funding and projects for underprivileged youth in popular music and dance seem to have a positive effect for women.
– it has been shown that the use of screens to hire orchestra musicians has elevated the percentage of female orchestra musicians by 30%.
4. involving themselves in collective action and commercial and/or feminist initiatives organized for (or by) all-female bands and groups of artists.

Discussion:
While appreciating Buscatto’s empirical findings, her neglect of intersectional and historical works by black and queer theorists was critiqued. First, her pre-empting comment about trans*issues being a recent phenomena was interrogated on the basis that gender-queers (people transgressing gender binaries in various in/visible ways) have existed long before the term trans* gained currency. The risk of reproducing certain stereotypes (e.g. about women’s use of seduction) looms large, when gender binaries are taken for granted. This leads to an epistemological blind spot, for instance on the structuring effects of what queer theorists identified as “male homosociality”  or on what disables or allows for the reversal of certain stigmatizations and not others. Further, it would be interesting to consider contemporary female performers who reject to play on their femininity (by wearing baggy clothes ect) against the background of a long history of female musicians who cross-dressed and/or passed as men in performance spaces. This “queering” of the gaze does not mean we look for “homosexuals.” It compels us, however, to consider strategies of seduction or of non-seduction by making use of interdisciplinary theories on the intertwinement of gender and sexuality.

The discussion continued the following day in the colloquium among the professors and co-researchers during the Art.School.Differences colloquium. It illuminated the challenge of communicating across disciplines and the need to connect sociological research tools to cultural theories in order to understand the many faces of exclusion.

^[1] France Winddance Twine refers to reading practices in the context of what she coined as “racial literacy.”

Serena O. Dankwa
is a classical musician who became a radio journalist who became a black feminist anthropologist
https://www.zhdk.ch/?person/detail&id=201721