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This wiki provides an overview account of a doctoral research project, provisionally entitled "xxxx." The inquiry explores the social and political agency of publishing by investigating the micro-politics of making, articulating, and sharing knowledges from an intersectional feminist perspective.

In practical terms, the research process comprises (i) a range of activities, (art-making, workshopping, publishing, editorial work, collaborative practices, conferencing, organizing, pedagogical interventions, discursive events, etc.) and (ii) a range of stabilizations (publications, chapters, essays, posters, ephemera, archives, reading rooms, exhibitions, etc.). Both the practice and outcomes are developed collaboratively with different actors and constellations.

Publication (in print or code) may be understood as a means of sharing, of disclosing, of passing on, or of 'making public' texts, images, ideas, or what we may summarily call "knowledges." One way of understanding the act of publishing is as an instance of temporarily stabilizing knowledge by fixing it into a material and mobile form (paper, ink, screen, code) – an object. As an object, detached from the makers (person), moment (time) and ecologies (context) of its production it can circulate and spread into different regions, contexts, and epochs or in Florian Cramer's words, "the idea of the book is one that can be read in 1, 5, and 100 years time."[1] It develops a social and intellectual life of its own.

While publication can enable the one to speak to the many, and as such be seen as a mode of address that constructs patterns of dominance[2] the act of publication can also be seen as a tool to give voice and recognition to bodies and experiences, which are not yet acknowledged or articulated or prioritized within the range of existing knowledges.[3] Therefore publication can be seen as a process that invites both assent and dissent, and that produces countervailing views and alternative readings, something that has fueled much debate on "the public sphere." [4] These are themes that have been widely discussed for the rise of European print culture (Eisenstein, 1982; Johns, 1998). However, the specific focus of this research is not the global or historical claims for the impact of print culture but rather the micro-politics of publishing practices at the intersection of contemporary art, radical education, and institutional analysis.[5] Publishing practices, in turn, are not exclusively considered as matters of print culture, but rather within an expanded frame that considers a multiplicity of modes and formats that may be seen to serve as “stabilizations” of knowledge, as indicated above.

Publishing practices are, in this inquiry, not limited to the printed book. They extend to networked digital media technologies with their promise to replace "the fixity and the static (and, by implication, limiting) linearity of print by adding multimedia features, interactivity, hyperstructure and virtually limitless possibilities for non-verbal, interactive, reading and communication for the reader" [6] It is the "unbound" character of the digital that unsettles "conceptual systems founded upon ideas of center, margin, hierarchy, and linearity and replaces them with ones of multi-linearity, modes, links, and networks." The unbound is a moment of recapitulation, and as George Landow claims, "a direct response to the strengths and weaknesses of the printed book."[7] And Gary Hall notes that the defamiliarizing effects of these new conceptions

offer us a chance to raise the kind of questions regarding our ideas of the book (but also of the unified, sovereign, proprietorial subject; the individualized author, the signature, the proper name; originality, fixity, the finished object; the canon, the discipline, tradition, intellectual property; the Commons, community, and so on), we should have been raising all along.[8]

Whether "bound" or "unbound," we observe much discussion of the political agency of the book, however, what arguably constructs "the political nature of the book" is not necessarily the book as a discrete container for radical content alone. Instead, what is of interest in this particular inquiry is the book's assumed capacity as a conceptual and material means to practically intervene, disrupt and change existing systems of production, distribution, and consumption of knowledge. (Adema and Hall, 2014; Thoburn, 2014; Constant, ongoing)[9]

The inquiry is based on my long-term individual and collective publishing practice. Publication as an artistic means became early on the main field of my practice. This was partly because as a student I spend a significant part of my studies working next to the photocopy machines in the art academy and partly because through publishing it appeared that I could shape the terms and conditions of production and distribution and could act without authorization by galleries, curators, collectors, etc.[10] However, while this research is embedded in my longterm artistic practice using the form of publication as a carrier for ideas,[11] this inquiry is not focusing on artists' books in particular. The descriptor artists' books seems too narrow and would limit the investigation to publications made by artists. The questions I will ask are more fundamental and directed towards the processes and agencies of publishing that operate across disciplines and fields, rather than limiting these to the specific commodity genre of the artist’s book.

Take, for example, the early conceptual artists' books in the context of the 1960s and 1970s in the US. They have been described as "a means of democratizing and subverting existing institutions by distributing an increasingly cheap and accessible medium (the book),[...] in order to reimagine what art is and how it can be accessed and viewed."[12] As such they expanded the limits of what was commonly perceived (and traded) as art, and they challenged existing hierarchies and institutions.⟶  see chapter: Survey of the field: Setting up alternative infrastructures My understanding is that this proposed critical agency of the artist’s book, as elaborated in this initial phase of experimentation, has become watered down over the years as the making of "artists books" has become a mainstream artistic practice in terms of the production of collectibles. This is evidenced by hundreds of newly emerging artist book fairs across the globe, sometimes hosted by the most prestigious mainstream museums, such as MoMA PS1 in New York, Tate Modern, or Whitechapel Gallery in London. Florian Cramer provokingly declares that artists' books today tend to be "a genre of graphic design." In printed form, "they strive to become coffee table books, often with warm, fuzzy and unbound characteristics," and therefore turn into "boutique collectibles for rich people."[1]

For the field of feminist publishing, open-source, and Free Software exemplified, for example, through the work of Constant, a feminist technology collective based in Brussels, we observe a very different critical energy. Software for Femke Snelting is a cultural object.

Free Software culture takes care of sharing the recipes of how this technology (in a cultural sense, not a technocentric) has been developed. [...] And this produces many different other tools, ways of working, ways of speaking, vocabularies because it changes radically the way we make and the way we produce hierarchies. So that means, if you produce a graphic design artifact, for example, you share all the source files that were necessary to make it. But you also share, as much as you can, descriptions and narrations of how it came to be, which does include, maybe, how much was paid for it, what difficulties were in negotiating with the printer, what elements were included, [...] what software was used to make it and where it might have resisted. [...] You care about all these different layers of the work, all the different conditions that actually make the work happen."[13]

Open Software culture, therefore, investigates how technologies and its protocols disrupt economies of authorship and ownership, and implicitly redefines hierarchies and enclosures commonly attached to a publication.

This is also to a certain extent true for the current field of scholarly publishing where new material conditions of academic book production, organization and consumption allow for experiments with forms and concepts of academic publishing[14] Here digital publishing and open access place in question, in Janneke Adema's words, "the very print-based system of scholarly communication - complete with its ideas of quality, stability, and authority - on which so much of the academic institution rests."[15] But open access also poses a challenge since we can observe tendencies of corporate take-over. Since national and international policies demanded that publicly funded research is to be made freely available, commercial, academic presses merely shifted the costs from the reader (who used to pay for an article) towards the author, researcher, or their institution. By imposing "author or article processing charges" (APC),[16] they maintain their income-generating model (profit) whereby creating a range of new enclosures and inequalities, that are discussed in more detail in the interview "Thinking where the thinking happens" with the director of Goldsmiths Press Sarah Kember.⟶  see Summary of material: Rethinking where the thinking happens, interview with Sarah Kember

Many academic activists, such as the Radical Open Access Collective address these counterproductive tendencies of high profile academic journals charging "exorbitant, unaffordable and unsustainable publishing fees" and campaign instead for "new forms of communality, designed to support the building of commons-based open access publishing infrastructures, and promote a more diverse, not-for-profit eco-system of scholarly communication."[17] Gary Hall laid some strategies out in his "Inhumanist Manifesto"[18] and Mayfly Books sums the current situation up as "it seems today that scholarly publishing is drawn in two directions: On the one hand, this is a time of the most exciting theoretical, political and artistic projects that respond to and seek to move beyond global administered society. On the other hand, the publishing industries are vying for total control of the ever-lucrative arena of scholarly publication, creating a situation in which the means of distribution of books grounded in research and in radical interrogation of the present are increasingly restricted."[19]

This very summarily mapping of developments in publishing practices indicates that my practice is situated across art, academia, and activism. The five projects presented here, typically of a long term and collaborative nature, have each explored a range of specific questions and have done so in a way that is both layered and complex. They are not discrete single-issue, single-question experiments but rather complex tangles of issues unfolding in real-world situations and "live" fields of operation. They often developed as responses to specific situations and to problems or questions emergent in concrete locations. As such, they don't intend to operate as works "about politics." Instead, these projects aim at finding operational models to work politically – through the actual practice itself. Hence my artistic concern is not to illustrate a political position, but to actively engage in political experiments in publishing and ecologies of knowledge.

More verb, less noun: the practices

⟶  see Project: Library of Inclusions and Omissions The Library of Inclusions and Omissions (2016) is a practice-based experiment in critical knowledge infrastructures. Setting up a community-run reading room around intersectional feminist and post-colonial materials, the project explores the politics (potentials and limitations) of libraries, online and physical, for accessing, activating, and disseminating knowledge. Defining the library as a knowledge infrastructure (Mattern, 2014), I practically test dominant policies of validation (access) and classification (organization) and ask in which way such a community-run resource is fundamentally different from institutional libraries with their respective instituted selection and validation processes. With the Library of Inclusions and Omissions, I seek to develop a curatorial concept to give voice to hidden, suppressed, or unacknowledged materials. In what ways could such a curatorial strategy help to share un-acknowledged struggles, and subsequently turn a library from being a repository of knowledge (Samek 2003, Springer 2015) into a space of social and intellectual encounter and action? Can such a library project help building a community or connecting different communities?

⟶  see Project: The Piracy Project The Piracy Project (2010-15), based in London, is a long-term collaboration with Peruvian artist Andrea Francke exploring the dominant understanding of authorship, originality, and the implications of intellectual property and copyright policies have for knowledge practices. Through an open call for pirated books and our research into pirate book markets in Peru, China, and Turkey, The Piracy Project gathered a collection of around 150 copied, emulated, appropriated and modified books from across the world. Their copying approaches vary widely, from playful strategies of reproduction, modification, and reinterpretation of existing works to circumventing enclosures such as censorship or market monopolies, to acts of piracy generated by commercial interests. Through temporary reading rooms, workshops, lectures, discussions, and debates, The Piracy Project explores the philosophical, legal, and social implications of cultural piracy. In this project, Andrea and I examine the ways in which the pirated, modified, emulated books in the collection transgress the normative concept of authorization, challenge the idea of individual authorship, and the assumed authority of the printed book. In the theorization of this project, I will show in which way the project's unauthorized interventions into "stable" and authoritative knowledge aims to reveal and undo the reciprocity between authorship, originality and intellectual property, a triangulation that, as I will demonstrate, constitutes one of the main blockages for collective knowledge practices.

⟶  see Project: Let's Mobilize: What is Feminist Pedagogy? Let's Mobilize: What is Feminist Pedagogy? (2015, ongoing) is a long-term collective investigation into intersectional feminist, pedagogies, that led to (I) the organization of a three-day international mobilization at HDK-Valand Art Academy, University of Gothenburg and (II) the publishing of a workbook with the same title. A working group developed at the Academy consisting of students, staff, and administrators (Kanchan Burathoki, Rose Borthwick, MC Coble, Andreas Engman, Gabo Camnitzer, Eva Weinmayr). Its aim was twofold: Firstly, to provide a space to discuss the highs and lows in our own learning and teaching and to study and review university policies and institutional habits. Secondly, the group worked towards organizing an international conference (mobilization) that fundamentally rethinks how knowledge is produced, transmitted, and disseminated. We were keen to find strategies to adjust the Euro-centric canon and its exclusions, to question institutional habits and procedures, and to create an understanding of equality that is not blind to difference. The mobilization itself was a practice-based investigation experimenting with non-normative use of the classroom, time and temporalities, languages, and paying attention to the empirical body. The published workbook is understood as an "input" rather than an "output." It aims at redefining the dominant understanding of "impact" in our current systems of evaluation that is often based merely on a logic of calculation. The project proposes to reassess the instituted taxonomy of values within learning and teaching and research at the art academy. It asks what would happen if we valued and gave formal merit to the processes and ways of how we publish. The project inquires how open, enabling, and diverse are our knowledge practices, how inclusive are our tools and protocols by practically examining the moments, formats, and temporalities when knowledge is "practiced" at the art academy. More broadly, this experiment scrutinizes how institutional habits, such as formats of how we meet, the terminologies we use, the procurement procedures we are asked to follow, and the forms of "outcomes" that are expected, enable or hinder collective and inclusive critical knowledge practices.

⟶  see Project: Boxing and Unboxing Boxing and Unboxing, a collaboration with artist Rosalie Schweiker, took place in the course of AND Publishing's six-month research residency at Marabouparken Konsthall in Stockholm and consisted of learning how to box and unbox. It deals, therefore, again with questions of categorization and cutting up boxes, as Rhani Lee Remedes suggests in the "Manifesto for cutting up boxes."[20] Together with curator Jenny Richards AND organized a boxing club for self-defining women. The question was whether sparring, when defined as physical play and not as competition, might allow us to rehearse ways to relate to each other in other areas. The experiment conceived boxing not as a concept of masculinity and violence or the survival of the fittest, but as a moment of intense negotiation of border space, contagion, and border linking (Ettinger 2006). The boxing renders permeable the borderlines of our "proper" subjects (an "individual" conceived as founded in the sole ownership of oneself). As a nonverbal bodily dialogue, it transgresses the very boundaries that we elsewhere seek to protect. During sparring, I deliberately forgo this established immunity – my contours become vulnerable through the mutuality of the touch: My fist touches and is being touched at the same time. In the reflection on this project, I will connect thoughts about immunity and community (Esposito, 2010; Lorey, 2013) to the exhilarating, troubling, and demanding experiences that the sparring during the boxing sessions produced. I will reflect in which way sparring as a radical bodily dialogue could be a method to learn to compete without needing to win and to disagree with respect.

This variety of projects, with their diversity of sites and strategies, is important as a process of testing a wider strategy of feminist publishing understood as a knowledge organizing practice that moves beyond traditional notions of publication. Chantal Mouffe has noted, the fact that "the globalized space is 'striated', with a diversity of sites where relations of power are articulated in specific local, regional and national configurations" means that it requires a variety of strategies. [21] Mouffe describes this as "a counter-hegemonic struggle", "a process involving a multiplicity of ruptures".[22]. I am cautious with the term "counter-hegemonic" since the binary implicit in "counter" simplifies (i) the multi-layered infra-actions at play in the practice itself (collective, transversal), and (ii) the complexities of the contexts in which they operate. But Mouffe helps to argue for the plurality of forms and approaches in my practice that respond to specific issues across a number of different sites: art, education, activism, institutions, culture, business, politics, technology, and media.

This inquiry is situated within a Western context and - as will emerge in the analysis and theorization of the projects - it is situated with respect to such overarching constructs as those of modernity, possessive individualism, and the neo-liberal subject. As a White European female subject, I move between practices, institutions and discourses mostly across Europe and North America. It is here where I investigate the micropolitics of knowledge practices informed by concepts found in feminist theory, media theory, radical pedagogy, as well as social science and philosophy.

Authorship, authorization, authority: the questions

Based on my previous practice, I started with a range of observations and questions. These initial questions got refined through the practice. Things were moving and opened up – or got destabilized.Speechbubble.png

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Through the thinking embedded in practice, and the multiple ways of doing things and the different entry points I came to reframe, re-describe, and refine the initial problems and assumptions.

I set out - drawing upon Gabriel Tarde's proposition that knowledge is a mode of socialization and "social communication" (1928) – to investigate publication as a social and pedagogical – and as such a political process. I asked what is the relationship between "making" and "making public"? Between experience and articulation? How does the "outside space" (distribution) shape the "inside space" of publication (content) and vice versa? How can publishing create spaces, in the figurative and physical sense, for better mutual understanding and rethinking relations between people? "Thinking with" Donna Haraway, I wondered what the ecologies of compost, the "feeding, digesting, excreting", what "thinking with" rather than "thinking about" would entail for publishing practices. "Being populated" by Claire Parnet and Gilles Deleuze, I tried to figure out what "populate" and "being populated by others" could mean for authorial practices and systems of attribution.

I asked if I understood publishing as a verb (the process) instead as a noun (the finished object) could practice itself be seen as a form of publishing. What kind of "public" and which "publics" does a process of publishing require? So for example: Is a teaching situation a form of publishing? A workshop, where knowledge is collectively produced and disseminated at the same time? When we think of the collaborative as a situation, scene, process, dynamic, method, or mode, can we frame such a situation as "publishing"? What is contextual publishing? Is publishing necessarily always tied to a document, whether scriptural, a film, a drawing, a photograph? What is a document? The French librarian and documentalist Suzanne Briet proposes in her study "Qu'est-ce que la documentation?" (1951) that an antelope running wild in the Savannah is considered as an animal, yet a wild antelope captured, brought to Europe to be exhibited in the zoo, caged, described, measured, and classified is being turned into a document.[23] It is analyzed, described, categorized, classified, and exhibited as a specimen, a process that constitutes a key paradigm to the project of Colonial-Modernity. [24]

In short, my initial presumption that publishing is an outright positive and constructive act, a tool of giving voice and developing emancipatory agency has been challenged. I am much more doubtful today. Institutional pressure (publish or perish) seems to erode practice based on agency, creativity, criticality, experimentation, and collective knowledge making. Publishing (and writing) in institutional or semi-institutional contexts has been arguably reduced from a process of communication, discovery, and exploration, to a system for the assembly of more and more new products, merely based on a logic of calculation.[25] Rebekka Kiesewetter observes that "the significance of a publication is often reduced to a consumable or proof of excellence and a claim for authority; and publishing activities mostly are pursued within an output-led environment, in which the suggested formats and the institutional, economic and procedural frames tempt the interpretation of every outcome, every representation as vessels for contents, static, backward-looking, absolute, finalized, and set." [26] Several points are raised here. Firstly it points to systems of validation and audit culture, secondly to the stasis of the "finite" object and thirdly to the authority these discrete objects produce.

These three topics form the main "blockages," as I will argue, for emancipatory, collective knowledge practices. With these three blockages, I wrestled practically and theoretically throughout this inquiry, each with different entry points and from different perspectives. To be more specific: as the inquiry developed it became clearer that what I was exploring was the coercive mutual reciprocity between authorship, authorization, and authority.

In this sense, this inquiry seeks to gain insight, to make a discovery by moving from a vague apprehension of these three terms' mutual interactions to a clearer framing of their "coercive reciprocation." So the result of this inquiry could be described as the development of that insight alongside potential models for emancipatory, critical, intersectional feminist models of knowledge "making and sharing". In the practice, doing things, one gets caught in tensions, paradoxes, and double-binds. Being caught in these double-binds only becomes frozen or locked, if one stays at the level of writing, or thinking, or talking about it. As soon as one involves multiple ways of tackling the issue practically, experiments with different ways of doing, it is often possible to find new resources with which to rethink the way the problem is set. By implementing these different experiments I began to refine the description of the problems in terms of the described set of blockages and their reciprocal interaction.

The majority of this work was conducted from 2010 onwards between the United Kingdom and Sweden. A significant dimension of the policy contexts referenced in this inquiry is specific to the UK. However, the UK may be taken as indicative of wider tendencies in higher education and research elsewhere, because the UK started early on, coming from a centralized government, with a level of explicit formulation of the change of agenda in higher education and research towards a culture of audit and metrics, in form of the Research Excellence Framework (REF) for example.[27]

"Thinking with": the format

The format I choose for this Ph.D. inquiry is a compilation thesis, comprising a distinct set of practical experiments and the "kappa" (Swedish, translated to English "cape" or"coat").Speechbubble.png

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The kappa is what you are reading here on this wiki. The purpose of the kappa is to disclose the contribution made by the research project and to locate that contribution with reference to existing knowledge-practices.

In Swedish academia, the kappa is understood as a coat, a cape, a wrapper that bundles, connects, discusses, and reflects on the range of experiments I have carried out without turning them into a monolithic entity, as does the monograph (the alternate typical format for a doctoral submission). The kappa is meant to allow that the components retain their discrete, self-contained identities, but also to enable them to be joined together as elements of a larger construction. As Gary Hall pointed out in one of my Ph.D. Progression Seminars, one could potentially think of all the different elements of a coat: the sleeves, the collar, the lining, the buttons, all stitched together to form a larger construction. Here it would be interesting to think about the nature of the joints. Still, both metaphors seem not to be reflected in how I worked with this inquiry. The stitching together of the different parts still suggests a unified whole, the coat, and the other, the formless cape, the wrapper suggests an enclosure that shields the different parts from the outside. Perhaps Ursula Le Guin's "carrier bag theory" is more fitting? The vessel, Le Guin suggests, is mankind's earliest tool, not the spear, as often claimed. "A leaf a gourd a shell a net a bag a sling a sack a bottle a pot a box a container. A holder. A recipient. [...] Since "what's the use of digging up a lot of potatoes if you have nothing to lug the ones you can't eat home in - with or before the tool that forces energy outward, we made a tool that brings energy home." The only problem is, as Le Guin notes, that a carrier bag story isn't, at first glance, very exciting. "It is hard to tell a really gripping tale of how I wrested a wild-oat seed from its husk, and then another, and then another, and then another, and then another, and then I scratched my gnat bites, and Ool said something funny, and we went to the creek and got a drink and watched newts for a while, and then I found another patch of oats…"[28] As well as its wandering narrative, a carrier bag story contains no heroes. Instead, as Siobhan Leddy observes, there are "many different protagonists with equal importance to the plot [...] and the bag's inside is messy and sometimes conflicted. Like when you're trying to grab your sunglasses out of your bag, but those are stuck on your headphones, which are also tangled around your keys, and now the sunglasses have slipped into that hole in the lining. This lack of clear trajectory allowed Le Guin to test out all kinds of political eventualities, without the need to tie everything neatly together. It makes room for complexity and contradiction, for difference and simultaneity."[29]

I have been thinking a lot about protagonists in this narrative, in this Ph.D.. Since most of the practices are collaborations, I saw the danger that it will be solely me who is narrating them, who is framing them, and to an extent historicizing them from my perspective alone. The struggle was to differentiate the "I" and the "we" throughout this writing and thinking; they are often difficult to disentangle. This "I" also shifts, is not stable, perhaps incoherent, because it has been populated by others while working and thinking together.

I have also been thinking a lot about tools and "containers" for this kappa, and how the tools, shape the way I write and read. After one year into the writing, and after meeting folks from Constant at a three-day research meeting in Basel,[30] I decided to drop the solitary word document on my hard disk and continue in the form of a Wiki.[31] This for me was a "paradigm shift" from the protected, private and proprietary environment of my hard disk to a web-based, open, and some extent "public" environment of my tentatively thinking, writing and archiving. There were moments of anxiety when I shared the URL knowing that lots of stuff are not resolved, not thought through or tentatively worded. But it felt important to share this process because it created dialogues and conversations. It was still cooking, and lots of precious ingredients have been added by others through these conversations - only because it was open and accessible throughout.

One specific tool that had been coded by Cristina Cochior and Manetta Berends from Varia (Rotterdam) is the annotation feature.Speechbubble.png

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It is used by the folks in the various collaborations. So far, Andrea Francke (Piracy Project), Andreas Engman, MC Coble (Let's Mobilize: What is Feminist Pedagogy?), and Rosalie Schweiker (AND, Boxing and Unboxing) have added anecdotes, thoughts, observations on working with these specific projects.

Since, when you work together, there is always a range of assumptions, motivations, and misunderstandings that are not necessarily articulated while plotting and "doing stuff". Strangely, you often assume that everyone else thinks the same as you do. Therefore, the annotation feature invites the collaborators to comment, add, disagree with my account of the processes and steps that made up the projects. And as such, it turns the thesis from constituting an authoritative text into an occasion of negotiation, disagreement, and consultation. This approach is not a "writing up", but an experiment in itself. Lastly, this work is not locked up in a scholarly monograph in a university library, but openly accessible, if someone has access to the internet. This is key for folks who don't have access or just don't visit Western university libraries.[32] This openness allows for feeding back something into the communities outside of academia in which most parts of the activities developed and are grounded in.[33] And as such tries to avoid extractive economies that Femke Snelting addresses in the transcribed conversation "title to come".⟶  see conversation with Femke Snelting

Roadmap

The kappa is structured in 13 pages and the appendices. It is important to note that the kappa is not the final or only form of disclosure. It is a device being used to disclose the practice to meet the terms of a doctoral exam process – the work also circulates more widely in the world in other wrappers (carrier bags) and on different terms. It will be useful to explain the different layers of the text you are reading on this wiki. The main text body (black) is the text I have written. It has a substantial notes section at the bottom of each wiki page that operates as a parallel layer to the main text. I wanted to keep the main text crisp and easy to follow. Therefore lots of detailed info, unpacking of specific terms or concepts takes place here. The left-hand column is the navigation menu that brings you to the individual pages (chapters). It does the same job as the index page but is easier to use since it stays visible on each page. In the right-hand column, you will find annotations by persons I collaborated with in the practice projects, and peers, friends, and colleagues who were thinking with me during this inquiry. These annotations vary between textual comments and visual comments since not everyone felt that text is the medium they can best express themselves.

(2) The chapter Introduction gives an overview of what the inquiry is about, of the basic research task, agenda, and purpose. It lays out the context, the problems I will address the questions I started with. It also gives info on how the wiki is structured and how it can be read.

(3) The chapter Mapping the fields presents and discusses practices, movements, concepts that others have developed. These examples are spread widely in terms of geography and history, and they draw on a wide range of disciplinary frames and epochs. This broad field of sampling stems from a commitment to work transversally and not to be bound by the protocols of one field alone – such as contemporary art or feminist organizational practices or radical education. They are all instances where the dominant paradigms of publishing and the formation of knowledge have been in one way or another adjusted, acting as declared counter-political projects. This page also maps a network of relationships since I have been working with some of the discussed projects in the form of workshops, seminars, talks, friendships, or other moments of thinking and doing together.

(4) The chapter Summary of projects & submitted material provides a short factual description of the submitted material to make explicit the material through which the contribution has been made. They include five long-term practice projects, the published (fixed) materials, such as articles, chapters, papers, and ephemera as well as the discursive (unfixed) practices describing the workshops, talks, moments of "thinking with" that constitute not an "outcome", but a practice.

Each of the Project pages (5-9) describes one of the five practice projects in more detail. They break down the context of each project they responded to or intervene in. They also sketch out step by step their elements, methods, and strategies employed. They are AND (5), Library of Omission and Inclusions (6), The Piracy Project (7), Let's Mobilize what is Feminist Pedagogy? (8), Boxing and Unboxing (9). All of these practices are collaborations and developed over time.

(10) The chapter Reflection, theorization of projects and submitted material provides more depth in reflecting the projects and experiments I have carried out. This part is provided to disclose the significance and importance of the contribution made by the research project. This is a long chapter that discusses the complexities and contradictions of each of the practice projects individually and articulates its underlying concepts and theories.

(11) Building on the reflection and theorization of the five practice projects, the chapter Analysis zooms into the micro-politics knowledge practices with a focus on the scholarly field. Touching on the politics of citational, and experimental authorial practices, I analyze this experiment of writing the thesis in form of a wiki that practically tests and experiments with some of the claims made.

(12) I wrote the Acknowledgments page in place of a colophon. The complexities of "colophons" are discussed in Appendix 01.

(13) The page References lists the resources that have informed both practices and thinking and writing. It goes, therefore, beyond the strict "cited sources" task since it includes materials that have indirectly informed my practice. Where possible, I linked to their sources for reading or download or uploaded them directly to this wiki database. As such, this section extends to a degree the concept of bibliography and operates partly as an archive.Speechbubble.png

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(14 - xx) The Appendices pages contain sources and materials that did not fit in the index structure above.

Appendix 01 - Thoughts on the colophon Appendix 02 - Collected Visual Comments by Rosalie Schweiker Appendix 03 - "The name Eva Weinmayr..." log. Appendix 04 - Interview with Femke Snelting, (Constant) Appendix 05 - Interview with Ann Butler Centre for Curatorial Studies Bard (CCS) Appendix 06 - Interview with Karen Fletcher, Fine Art Librarian Central Saint Martins (UAL) Appendix 07 - Interview with Martino Morandi and Anita Burato (Infrastructural Maneuvres) Appendix 07 - Interview with Mick Wilson (HDK-Valand Academy) ...

Notes Settings

  1. 1.0 1.1 Florian Cramer, "Unbound Books: Bound Ex Negativo", presentation at "The Unbound Book", Institute for Network Cultures, Hogeschool van Amsterdam, 19-21 May, 2012.
  2. To Do: insert references to ideas of print culture as part of homogenizing and creating the nation, etc. and why one speaking to many tends to a mode of “dominance"
  3. I will explore the question of how knowledge is delimited further into in the thesis. For the moment I only set an initial rough frame, that knowledge is considered as a mode of socialization and social communication (Gabriel Tarde, 1928), and that knowledge is connected to an apparatus of legitimization that is discussed and problematized further in the following chapters. (A further discussion will follow in the next editing step in June.).
  4. To Do: explain the term "public sphere"
  5. It may help to briefly explain how these three intersecting terms are employed here by way of locating the inquiry. Contemporary art here refers to the broad terrain of art production from 1960s onward. However, rather than a period designation, it is used here to refer to a broad domain of practice that may be termed "post-representational" (Sternfeld, 2018), "post-conceptualist" (Osborne, 2010) or "relational" (Bishop, 2006). "Radical education" here refers to several distinct traditions of educational practice that is explicitly framed with revolutionary or politically transformative intentions and objectives. These traditions include, for example, Paolo Freire's "Pedagogy of the Oppressed" and bell hooks writings on intersectional feminist pedagogy, such as "Teaching to transgress: education as the practice of freedom" (1994). Radical pedagogy has been practiced and tested by collectives such as the "Anti-University" in London, the artist collective Ultra Red, Malmö Free University for Women and have been theorized for example in the field of art and curating ("Curating and the educational turn," O'Neill, Wilson, eds., 2010) and in the field of higher education by Piya Chatterjee and Sunaina Maira (eds.) in "The Imperial University" (2014). By "institutional analysis" I am intending not to describe a sub-domain of sociology, organizational studies or political science but rather the intellectual and practical traditions of institutional critique from within the contemporary art field as this intersects with feminist and intersectional analyses of power – which is of course informed by elements drawn from these other disciplines, but manifests a different tendency and a different literature. For more on this see "Institutions by Artists" (Vancouver 2012), "How Institutions Think," (O'Neill, Steeds and Wilson (eds.), 2017), "Creating Commons," University of the Arts Zürich, 2016-19).
  6. Anne Mangen "Why bother with print? Some reflections on the role of fixity, linearity and structure for sustained reading", presentation at "The Unbound Book", Institute for Network Cultures, Hogeschool van Amsterdam, 19-21 May, 2012.
  7. George P. Landow, "Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Literary Theory and Technology," Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press, 1992, page 2.
  8. Gary Hall, "Pirate Philosophy, Hall, Gary, Pirate Philosophy, for a Digital Posthumanities," Cambridge, MA and London, The MIT Press, 2016, page 158
  9. This citation without pointing to a specific stabilized publication might surprise the conventions of academic standards. It refers to a 20-year practice of feminist technology collective Constant in Brussels, that explore and demonstrate through their practices, "how to practically intervene, disrupt and change existing systems of production, distribution, and consumption of knowledge". See Constant
  10. I took copies of my first two independently published publications, ("Lery - a story of facts and faxes," 1998 and "Mexico," 1997, with Vera Büchlmann and Joachim Melf) on my first trip to New York, walked into Printed Matter art book shop and sold them ten copies each on consignment. What an empowering moment, which was more exciting than any exhibition opportunity I ever had.
  11. Having published with big mainstream commercial publishing houses (Hatje Cantz) as well as small independent presses (Temporary Services, Half-Letter Press, Occasional Papers and BookWorks in London) I got more and more interested in exploring and setting up own publishing infrastructures and subsequently co-founded (with American artist Lynn Harris) AND Publishing in London (today run with Rosalie Schweiker).
  12. Janneke Adema and Gary Hall, 'The Political Nature Of The Book: On Artists’ Books And Radical Open Access', in New Formations, vol 78, issue 1, 2014, pp. 138-156, p.140, DOI:10.3898/NEWF.78.07.2013
  13. "Performing Graphic Design Practice", Femke Snelting in conversation with Cornelia Sollfrank in the context of the research project "Giving what you don't have", 2014. http://artwarez.org/projects/GWYDH/snelting.html
  14. Of course, within the field of scholarly publishing there is some variability, for instance, the role of the monograph in parts of the humanities in contrast to the role of the double-blind peer review article in some of the medical sciences, or the role for the critical edition in the humanities as against, say, the meta-research analysis paper in the social sciences, in short, there are different scholarly publishing hierarchies and protocols across the disciplines, but the overarching claim is still viable despite this.
  15. Ibid., p.139.
  16. For a summary of the range of instituted models, such as "Gold", "Green", "Hybrid" see "What is open access?". https://www.openaccess.nl/en/what-is-open-access
  17. See for example Radical Open Access in 2015 [[1]] Radical Open Access and the Ethics of Care in 2018 at Disruptive Media Lab at Coventry University, [[2]]
  18. Gary Hall's "Inhumanist Manifesto" proposes ten strategies:
    1. Work collaboratively and collectively.
    2. Operate according to a non-profit philosophy.
    3. Act in a non-rivalrous, non-competitive fashion to explore new models for property, ownership and the economy.
    4. Take a hyper-political approach. Gift labor as a means of developing notions of the community, the common and of commoning that break with the conditions supporting the unified, sovereign, proprietorial subject.
    5. Generate projects that are concerned, not only with representing or critiquing the world but also with intra-acting with the world.
    6. Interrogate those propositions that are often taken for granted by theory. The list is a long one. It includes data, the digital, the human, technology, the printed text, the network, and copyright. Other propositions that are assumed by theorists when drawing conclusions about the media are capitalism, liberalism, humanism, freedom, democracy, community, communism, and the commons.
    7. Engage with the existing institutions – especially those to which theorists are most closely tied such as the university, the library, and the scholarly publishing industry – so as to transform them.
    8. Use different personas or masks to experiment with producing multiple authorial 'I's, different to the liberal humanist subjectivity that is the default adopted by even the most supposedly radical of theorists.
    9. Reinvent both the humanities and the posthumanities as the inhumanities by adopting ways of being and doing as theorists that actually take account of and assume an intra-active relation with the nonhuman. Gary Hall, "The Inhumanist Manifesto", Media Theory, August 2017, pp. 168-178, page 177. http://journalcontent.mediatheoryjournal.org/index.php/mt/article/view/29>.
  19. See Mayfly Books [[3]]
  20. Rhani Lee Remedes, "Society for cutting up boxes," The SCUB Manifesto, LTTR#1, 2002. http://lttr.org/journal/1
  21. Chantal Mouffe, On the Political - Thinking In Action, London, Routledge, 2005, page 114.
  22. Íñigo Errejón and Chantal Mouffe, Podemos: In the Name of the People, London, Lawrence & Wishart, 2016, page 40.
  23. Suzanne Briet's treatise has been written as a contribution to the discourse of what constitutes a document. A question that was fiercely discussed in the early 1900s with Paul Otlet claiming that not just written documents, but also three-dimensional objects could constitute a document, when they serve as evidential objects. Briet expanded this concept by saying that naturally occurring phenomena could as well be documents, such as stars, pebbles, and animals when they had been observed and recorded and classified by an individual. See Suzanne Briet, "Qu'est-ce que la documentation?" Bibliothèque Nationale de France, EDIT, Paris, 1951. English edition, translated and edited by Ronald E. Day and Laurent Martinet with Hermina G. B. Anghelescu, Lanham, Maryland, Scarecrow Press, 2006, 84 pages. Find pdf here: https://monoskop.org/log/?p=11894
  24. xx
  25. See Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Generous Thinking - A Radical Approach to Saving the University, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019. I am referring to the published draft version: Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Generous Thinking The University and the Public Good, chapter "Critique and Competition," Humanities Commons, 2018. https://generousthinking.hcommons.org/. Fitzpatrick’s working method with writing this book presents an interesting approach to scholarly publishing. She published the draft of her book online on Humanities Commons, inviting readers to comment. Based on these responses, what one could call a process of open peer review, she revised the initial draft for publication with John Hopkins University Press. While one could say this is some form of collective authorship, the now published title carries her individual name. The final print version is
  26. Rebekka Kiesewetter, "Publishing as a Processual Device", "Šibenik Alternating Currents - Publishing Acts II", published by DAI-SAI (Association of Istrian Architects) and dpr-barcelona under the umbrella of Future Architecture, 2019, page 5.
  27. For example, the "Research Excellence Framework" (REF) [explain]
  28. Ursula Le Guin, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction", in C. Glotfelty and H. Fromm (eds.), "The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, 1996, pp.149-54, pp. 150-51.
  29. Siobhan Leddy, "We should all be reading more Ursula Le Guin", 'The Outline, 28 August 2019. https://theoutline.com/post/7886/ursula-le-guin-carrier-bag-theory?zd=3&zi=zsnwrv3k [accessed 4 April 2020]
  30. Femke Snelting and Michael Murtaugh
  31. To DO: improve: a web-based content management software that also powers Wikipedia. The first wiki software (WikiWikiWeb) was developed by Ward Cunningham in the mid-1990s to enable a community of software developers to work together. Wikis are web-based content management systems that allow users to collaborate on content asynchronously. They contain a series of extendable hyperlinked pages to which users can add, edit and delete information, alter the structure, and so on. Every change is automatically recorded, viewable and reversible by users. Wikis use a very simplified mark up language and as such users require no knowledge of code, nor any specialist software or plugins. Cunningham described wikis as the "simplest online database that could possibly work." See http://www.wiki.org/wiki.cgi?WhatIsWiki.[accessed 30 April 2020].
  32. Silvia Rivera Cusiquanci, El Colectivo 2, La Paz-Chukiyawu, "A Stroll through the Colonial Library", unpublished paper presented at the conference Dis/Locating Culture: Narratives and Epistemologies of Displacement, Rice University, Houston, December 9-10, 2011.
  33. Charlotte Cooper produced a helpful "Research Justice Diagram" that shows the ethics of research that draws on communities outside academia. In Charlotte's case research on Fat Activism. See the diagram here. See also Charlotte Cooper website