By Jay Gearing and Ben Rogaly

The Gladstone Community Association (GLADCA) Annual General Meeting was as packed with graduating ESOL students ready to receive their certificates in October 2018 as it had been the year before. Ben had been invited to the 2017 GLADCA AGM by Alison Davies, herself an academic researcher in the city. Based on his experience then, we chose this as the most suitable time and place for a second public screening in Peterborough of Workers, a film that ‘shows working people in some of the broader contexts of their lives – as musicians and poets, as community activists and informal teachers… as individuals whose employment conditions are onerous and whose creative capacities persist’.

At the screening, members of Peterborough’s multi-ethnic, multi-nationality, multi-faith and multi-lingual working-class came together to celebrate and eat, showing off the city’s diversity. This at a time when a seminar was being announced to launch a new academic book that seemed to legitimate the idea that there could be ‘too much’ diversity.

As David Roediger reminds us, anti-racist struggle is a contributor to the struggle against class inequalities. Theories of racial capitalism show how capitalists have long created, perpetuated and taken advantage of racialised and other socialised difference in the workplace to enhance their power over labour by dividing workers.

When, earlier in 2018, Workers was selected for The Sociological Review’s Undiscipliningconference we were thrilled. Here was a conference organised by an academic journal that seemed explicitly to resonate with Jacques Rancière’s opposition to ‘that ancient hierarchy which subordinates those dedicated to labour to those endowed with the privilege of thought’. The conference also promised an annual lecture by Satnam Virdee whose earlier work had inspired us to think about the historical role of racialised others in UK labour struggles. And there were to be responses by Sivamohan Valluvan and Bev Skeggs both of whom, in very different ways, pioneered critical reworking of the white, male, national citizen version of the image of ‘workers’ and of the English working-class.

Our deep and intimate involvement in Peterborough – through years of research in Ben’s case and being a life-long resident in Jay’s – meant that we already had close relations with people who had worked in the city’s warehouses and food factories to build on. Both of us see listening as central to what we do. Listening to current and former workers as peoplemeant that the film would work as a series of portraits. Following on from Ben’s and Kaveri Qureshi’s interviews earlier in the 2010s we wanted to ask people about their experiences of being part of diverse warehouse and food factory workforces, and about moments when people came together across difference to resist harsh supervisory regimes. At the same time, we sought to avoid defining people according to their occupations at a particular point in their lives and used a broad understanding of creativity to ask about people’s creative lives within and beyond the workplace.

Before Jay came on board Ben had put a version of these ideas together with the rest of the Creative Interruptions team as part of a bid for research funding. It was always a collaborative process in other ways too. An early meeting about the framing of the Creative Interruptions proposal was attended by Agnieszka Coutinho, one of the narrators (Workers, Chapter 5) in the eventual film. Following a model used by Les Back, Shamser Sinha and their co-authors, we are now preparing, with Agnieszka, a jointly-written chapter for a forthcoming collection ‘Creativity and resistance in a hostile world’ being edited by Sarita Malik and the rest of the Creative Interruptions team.

In Peterborough, photographer Chris Porsz had also discussed the ideas for the film with Ben before Creative Interruptions was funded. He attended and spoke at the first of two dinners cooked and hosted for narrators and Peterborough-based digital media artists by Metal Peterborough, where Ben was writer-in-residence. The second dinner was followed by a screening for the film’s narrators of a first cut, using a cinema space secured by Jay at the back of a Peterborough wine bar. The film was greeted enthusiastically and we were urged to complete the work. We released a trailer for the film and arranged a public première at Peterborough Central Library in June 2018, three weeks before the Undisciplining conference. About eighty people attended including many current and former workers, trade unionists and other activists. It was followed by a lively question and answer session at which we were urged to distribute the film widely to assist campaigns for workplace rights.

When Ben had put out a call for proposals for Peterborough-based film-makers in May 2017 four were received. These were ranked by eight different people from a wide range of backgrounds including Creative Interruptions International Advisory Group member Fatima Manji of Channel 4 News, who grew up in Peterborough; a former warehouse worker; Peterborough-based arts commissioners; and Sarita Malik and Photini Vrikki of the Creative Interruptions team. They all considered the pitches of the people who applied and almost unanimously recommended Jay, who had previously been suggested for the work by Peterborough resident and community garden activist Sophie Antonelli, a mutual friend.

The two of us met often in Peterborough and sometimes in Brighton and communicated frequently by phone, text and email. Using Jay’s equipment and some prior technical training from him, Ben conducted audio interviews in summer 2017 – mostly at the premises of Metal Peterborough – on the basis that this would be the audio used for the film. However, when Jay listened to the recordings he decided that they were not of sufficient quality. Ben had intervened, reassured and assented too often. As an interviewer he was too audible. So when Jay, as planned, visited the narrators’ homes for video footage he also recorded on-camera interviews with each of them, listening to Ben’s interview first, and often using a similar line of questions. Jay built on the intimacy that had emerged through Ben’s relationships with narrators in some cases over a six-year period, and doubled down on this, using his own personal, emotionally aware and intimate approach. He left plenty of time to be with the people being interviewed in their own space. Our conversations before and after each interview, along with the words of the narrators, further honed the themes of the film and informed the editing process. Following an afternoon when we worked together to reduce one of the film’s chapters from two hours to five minutes of audio, the rest of the editing was done by Jay.

There were others who decided not to be part of the film, people whom we had approached and met with. Some of them even attended the Metal Peterborough dinners. At least one of these people stayed closely in touch with the work after recording an audio interview with Ben. We also met with a former revolutionary leader from south-east Asia who had been interviewed as part of Ben’s earlier research and was currently working in a Peterborough warehouse; and we had an introduction to a Sikh woman in her sixties who worked in a potato chip factory and with whom we communicated at regular intervals over several weeks. Two narrators came on board right at the end: Joanna Szczepaniak (WorkersChapter 3), whom Ben had kept in touch with since 2011 and now runs a Polish newspaper, and Natalina Cardoso (Workers Chapter 9), introduced to us by Gladstone Community Association.

After over a decade of austerity, declining real wages and worsening employment conditions, the residents of Peterborough, as of the UK as a whole, face new economic, political and cultural struggles. It is our hope that Workers will contribute in a small way towards moving away from a culture that stigmatises working-class creativity towards one that values and respects people who work in food factories and warehouses as people; and towards bolstering the prospects for collective action in the face of divisive racist and anti-migrant rhetoric and the practices of racial capitalism.

Jay Gearing is an Independent Filmmaker based in Peterborough under the guise of Red 7 Productions. He directed and co-produced Workers. Twitter: @red7productions

Ben Rogaly teaches in the Department of Geography at the University of Sussex. He researched and co-produced Workers. Twitter: @rogaly

Read a review of ‘Workers’ by Dawn Lyon here.

35.875 people have died in the mediterranean sea since 1993 to today trying to reach a safe port. Hundreds continue to die monthly. Spanish and Italian governments have started prosecuting and forbidding navigation to any NGOs that will try to save their lives. Our brothers and sisters keep dying. The seas of the world are filled with black bodies.

In this piercing and heartbreaking piece, Sally uses the Kola nut, and the significance of the ritual behind it, as a narrative device. 

A scene from Sally Fenaux Barleycorn’s short film, Unburied

The Significance of the Kola Nut

“He who brings the Kola nut brings life.”

We recently collaborated with Runnymede Trust, the UK’s leading independent race equality think tank to to write a series of posts for our project on their website Race Matters. Our first post was posted on the 7th of February.

On the post we argued that,

Art is a catalyst. It can drive people, and add energy to advocacy and civic agency. It can reach communities and individuals on deep emotional levels, conveying through action what cannot be said with words. Art provides a space in which stories that are often overlooked or misrepresented by mainstream media find a voice.

And we concluded with an invitation to our Festival in June,

The themes of the Creative Interruptions project, which will be covered in our academic arts festival, include creativity, resistance, race and the legacies of British imperialism. They have never been more relevant. The 2016 Brexit referendum, the Grenfell tragedy, the election of President Trump in 2017, and the 2018 Windrush scandal, alongside the growth of far-right politics, have profoundly shaped the experiences of migrants. From those who have moved to the UK from Europe recently, to black Caribbean communities who have considered the UK their home for generations, no one has been safe from the latent xenophobia bubbling to the surface.

You can read the post on Runnymede Trust’s website below:

Arts and Resistance in a Hostile World

These groups, drawn from campaigning organisations seeking asylum-seeker, abortion, socio-economic and LGBTQ rights, culminated in a play, We’ll Walk Hand in Hand, which toured across Northern Ireland in 2018 and was followed up by a range of community-outreach activities. One of these activities—our Schools Outreach initiative—used scenes from the original play, along with community theatre techniques pioneered by the famous dramatist and campaigner Augusto Boal, to facilitate critical thinking on contemporary rights issues.

The result, documented above, suggests the power of theatre in enabling critical dialogues and debates about controversial issues that don’t always get discussed in schools. We’re planning further follow-on events this year, and are working on an education pack that will help integrate these activities into the GCSE Citizenship and Learning for Life and Work curricula, following consultation with educational authorities and feedback from students and teachers.

This programme of schools activities was part of a collaboration between Queen’s University Belfast academic Dr Michael Pierse and the playwright Martin Lynch’s theatre company, Green Shoot Productions, and facilitated by a range of actors and theatre professionals led by Tom Finlay, who discusses here the process of linking up with schools.

We hope you enjoy the film!

The film will be shown as part of an exhibition taking place in the Linen Hall Library, Belfast, from July-August 2018.

Irish working-class history and writing are attracting increasing academic interest, and rightly so. With the recent publication of the 22-chapter A History of Irish Working-Class Writing (Cambridge University Press), a leading luminary in the Irish Studies field, Declan Kiberd, could write that that volume’s focus on “an astonishing range of writing – from work-songs and political rhymes to poetry and government reports, from novels and plays to biographies by or about working people”, would “set many of the terms of cultural debate in the decade to come”.

As Kiberd also noted, “they could hardly be more timely”: as Ireland’s post-crash society came to grips with the inequalities inherent in policies of austerity and the injustices of the financial system, class sentiment seemed most manifest in, for example, the anti-water charges protests that gained increasing popular support during the recession period. Researchers such as Rory Hearne have noted a nascent, post-Celtic Tiger politicisation of working-class areas. And here, a sense of continuity with historical struggle was a key resource, as suggested, for example, by the compelling debates that emerged in Ireland’s sometimes clumsy celebrations of the centenary of the Revolutionary Period. Much of the debate would focus on what James Connolly might have thought of the Ireland that subsequently emerged, his condemnations of capitalism jarring with the tax-haven Republic’s arguably selective celebration of his legacy. Connolly, as the subject of lore and song, has endured as a semi-mythic figure in Irish working-class life. And “subliterary” forms such as song have indeed been integral to the formation of working-class culture.

When “The Full English”, a digital archive of twelve manuscript collections of English folk songs, was launched in 2013 by the English Folk and Dance Song Society, playwright and screenwriter Lee Hall described it as “the most exciting and significant thing to happen to British folk music in at least a generation […] To give everyone the keys to the archive of our common heritage will be an invaluable inspiration to generations of musicians and writers”. It was interesting that the scriptwriter of a classic film of the northern English working class, Billy Elliot (2000), had felt such affinities. Here was an archive, as Billy Bragg recognised along with fellow folk musicians and playwrights such as Hall and Neil Leyshon, which was rich with the history of the common folk, the peasant, the working class, and which, as Bragg stressed, has relevance for working-class struggles today. Such connections are not incidental, but built into the very fabric of this kind of creativity. Folk songs emerged over centuries as a form of popular entertainment that could provide wellsprings of resilience, rebellion and sedition for the poor. They were easily learned and transcribed, handily stored (often hidden from authorities) and regularly modified, if need be, to suit the particularities of a specific place and time.

Folk songs’ capacity to voice concerns and protests from society’s most marginalised meant that they flourished and translated from region to region, and however radically changed in that process, so often retained a similar ethics of alterity—challenging the status quo in a form of publication (broadsides and ballads were often written down and the first reading encounter of many poor people) that was easy to disseminate and difficult to suppress. Furthermore, these legacies stretched out over time. In Christy Brown’s Down All the Days (1970), working-class characters sing maudlin ballads of “the ubiquitous underdog, the worm that turned, the berated beggarman roaming the streets with flapping uppers and bleeding feet”. In Crumlin of the 1950s, the words of songs stretching back perhaps centuries before in origin were still a resource for those uprooted from the city centre and sent to newly built suburban social housing. The same sense of historicity is evident in the Behan family’s love of Irish songs. In A History of Irish Working-Class Writing, John Moulden draws our attention to the ways in which, “from the poorest in society, the Irish working class created, contributed to, transformed and consumed the verbal art that impinged upon them in oral or cheap printed or, occasionally, more substantial form”, creating, singing, and distributing a folk culture that would travel and transform through space and time, lamenting injustices, such as in ‘The Cottager’s Complaint’, recounting common experiences or remembering exceptional individuals, like ‘Hannah Healy the Pride of Howth’, or ‘Biddy Mulligan the Pride of the Coombe’. But why not a ‘Full Irish’ archive, then?

Clearly we could do more on this side of the Irish Sea to excavate, preserve, and make available the artefacts and treasures of Irish working-class and peasant experience. Despite the development, over many decades, of a sophisticated and diverse range of critical approaches in Irish Studies, there is a paucity of discussion around how class has shaped and shapes the contours of Irish social, political and cultural life. This, however, paradoxically suggests its importance. Class is at the heart of Irish society, north and south, its operations, apparatuses, privileges and anxieties; it is central to its academies and its intellectual culture. It is embedded in tensions not so much bubbling under the surface as imposing themselves insistently on the dominant ideologies of Irish life, despite the strange aversion to or ignorance of much of Ireland’s commentariat regarding its pervasive force.

‘Class is always in some sense present’

In terms of how Ireland has been written, in fiction, theatre, poetry, biography and song, to what extent, then, has class shaped what we know, what we read (or don’t read) and how it is read? Has the Irish working class’s cultural production across various genres been addressed (or not addressed) and why? John Kirk begins his study of the British working class in film, literature and television by observing how ‘Class is always in some sense present: whether in our refusal to accept it, our inclination to acknowledge it or insist on it or, as in some cases, our being privileged enough not to have noticed it.’ It is often when class is least noticed and spoken about, or when it is most comfortably acknowledged to be old-fashioned or irrelevant, that it is most pressing in our social machinery and everyday lives.

As A History of Irish Working-Class Writing illustrates, if questions about the aesthetic merits, ideological complexity, or formal challenges of many who write the Irish working class puncture the romance or even impede the simple enjoyment of their works, they also create important conversations between those writers, readers, scholars and students about what we can learn from the writing, its original contexts, its reproduction, the present, and also perhaps how we construct the future. As I have argued elsewhere, the ways in which class impacts culture is an issue Irish working-class authors repeatedly draw attention to themselves. When Brendan Behan’s English soldier, Leslie, encounters an Irish-English IRA veteran, Monsewer, amongst his captors in The Hostage (1958), their antagonism pointedly hinges on class rather than the expected ethno-national enmities:

MONSEWER.     Are you a cricketer, my boy?

SOLDIER.   Yes, sir. Do you like a game?

MONSEWER.  By Jove, yes.

SOLDIER.   Mind you, I couldn’t get on with it at the Boys’ Home. They gave us two sets of stumps, you see, and I’d always been used to one, chalked up on the old wall at home.

MONSEWER.  That’s not cricket, my boy.

SOLDIER.   Now there you are, then. You’re what I call a cricket person and I’m what I call a soccer person. That’s where your race lark comes in.

By mistaking class for race, Leslie’s retort of course suggests how the former is more important in this encounter between English and Irish soldiers. Another IRA man’s (Behan’s) affinity with the working-class English boys he met during time spent in an English borstal is somewhere in the mix.

Leslie, like his class, doesn’t have or know the right things; he encounters here his lack of proper acculturation, his inauthentic playing of the game of the upper classes. It is all the more ironic in that, in this conversation that Behan uses, in a deeply satirical manoeuvre, to ridicule post-colonial class relations in Ireland, the Irish have secured their ‘freedom’ only to rehabilitate the colonial master’s class politics. In Behan’s writing, working-class kinships continually thwart ethno-national divisions: Leslie and his lover Teresa; Dubliner Chuckles Genockey and his co-conspirator, the London-Cockney, Angel, in The Big House (1957); Behan himself and his English borstal comrades in Borstal Boy (1958), whose friendship across national lines yet excludes toff English prisoner Ken Jones, whom other English inmates can’t abide because of his perceived elitism. Behan, an auto-didact like many of the other writers explored in A History of Irish Working-Class Writing, repeatedly makes claims for how class solidarity ought to trump national allegiance, and continually draws attention to the othering of his class within hegemonic and national constructions of cultural capital. As Ian Haywood notes of one of Behan’s most noteworthy antecedents in Irish working-class writing, Robert Tressell – whose The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists’ “mythic status has been preserved by generations of leftwing readers” – “this canonisation runs counter to the book’s absence from mainstream and academic literary tradition”. We might add here the book’s absence from the Irish literary canon.

Ruth Sherry could observe some thirty years ago that “the concept of Irish working-class writing is not a well-established one.” The same could be said today. That Sherry could at least identify some of the major prose writers of the Irish working class prior to the publication of her article, “The Irish Working Class in Fiction”, in 1985, suggests that the relative neglect since is inexcusable. Despite important book-length studies on Behan, Seán O’Casey, Sam Thompson, Christy Brown, Stewart Parker, Roddy Doyle and others, studies that link such writers together as ‘working class’ are very rare. Some of this has of course to do with the very structure of our education system.

“Not Posh”

As Simon J. Charlesworth observes in his anthropological study of late twentieth-century English working-class life, A Phenomenology of Working-Class Experience (1999), “the experience of formal education has consequences for their relation to the disposition of learning, one that makes it an experience of anxiety that can be confronted only through a heightened, even extreme, tension.” Does the academy buttress the inequality in how cultural (and social, and other forms of) capital are distributed in Irish society, north and south, through the education system? In a recent (2015) comparative study of the experiences of working-class English and Irish university students, for instance, Fergal Finnegan and Barbara Merrill found promising strides through “widening participation” measures in higher education but also, more depressingly, the endurance of feelings of alienation amongst working-class students.  The Irish working-class students they spoke to had a very strong sense of class: “one-third of people interviewed spontaneously chose to describe themselves in class terms – mainly as ‘working class’ but also ‘disadvantaged’ and ‘not posh’” and “more significantly, awareness of class emerged through their descriptions of everyday life and how this is affected by limited access to material and cultural resources.”  A high proportion had, at university, experienced “a feeling of dislocation, or at least a sense of social distance, from the dominant culture in universities”, one of the Irish students describing the academy as ‘‘a foreign country”. Those attending elite institutions were particularly alienated, “in some cases interviewees discussed going through the difficult and painstaking process of cultural adaptation [… and] These accounts of fitting or not fitting in at university were often discussed as something which was felt as embodied and as deeply emotional by the students.”

While questions of access have come to the fore in universities on these islands, how many have asked how the class of people working and studying in universities influences the class of subjects researched and taught? bell hooks has argued, albeit in a US context, that “nowhere is there a more intense silence about the reality of class differences than in educational settings.” Hooks’ efforts to challenge class inequality in her own teaching practice were drawn from a personal experience at odds with prevailing, mystifying assumptions of the exceptionality of HE as a place apart from society, where all become equal in the classroom. But, as British working-class interlopers in the academy such as Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams would discover, the university has always been a place of intense class politics. hooks recalled how

I went to Stanford thinking that class was mainly about materiality. It only took me a short while to understand that class was more than just a question of money, that it shaped values, attitudes, social relations, and the biases that informed the way knowledge would be given and received. 

Representations of working-class experience continually call attention to such alienating experiences in educational settings: Catherine Dunne, Lar Redmond, Hugh O’Donnell, Brendan Behan, Patrick Gilligan and Noel Ó Briain (in their controversial RTÉ drama series, The Spike (1978)), Thomas Kinsella, Roddy Doyle, Stewart Parker and others repeat the kind of sentiment that we find above in various forms. The young Stewart Parker recalled his experience as a non-Rugby playing, working-class East Belfast late entrant in a grammar school where cultural instruction came with a heavy dose of superciliousness:

I had two and a half years of Latin, French, History, Snobbery and Conformity to catch up on […] The social stuffiness and intellectual drudgery combined to make me resentful, morose, wretched and inwardly priggish and arrogant: in short, adolescent, but with a vengeance.

As Marilyn Richtarik recalls in her biography of Parker, his headmaster, undoubtedly with the best intentions, summoned Stewart to his office to suggest that he try to modify his east Belfast accent. That “really got up his nose”, Stewart’s sister recalls. Similar scenes were being played out in headmasters’ studies throughout Northern Ireland around this time, but not every pupil so exhorted rejected the advice with the same disdain.

Shame is perhaps the more usual response. As Pamela Fox puts it, “those most likely to feel shame are those made feel ‘inappropriate’ by dominant cultural norms.”

To encounter English Literature is to know something of those dominant cultural norms. Since at least Matthew Arnold’s foundational comments on the “tend[ing] to anarchy” that results when “this and that man, and this and that body of men, all over the country” begin “to assert and put in practice an Englishman’s right to do what he likes”, English Literature (and the operations of acculturation more generally) has been too often about refusing to “teach down to the level of the inferior classes” and rather trying to bring the “masses” up towards the lofty heights of “the best that has been thought and known”. But as Hans Bertens argues, the “opposition between superior high culture, whose literary branch preserves the best that has been thought and said, and the debased anthropologically defined “cultures” that always threaten its existence runs like a red thread through pre-1970s English and American criticism”. It is, in fact, this opposition between high culture and the various – and socially dominant ways of life or cultures that threaten it that gave English studies its extraordinary self-confidence.

As Bertens notes, such disdain for the “inferior classes” was not informed by any significant research on those classes or what they produced culturally, and it is not until figures like Hoggart and Williams began (as former members of those classes) to challenge the complacent presumuptions of English studies that we see a way in for the working class. The challenges that come from France, from Barthes, Althusser and Foucault, and from Gramsci in Italy, much earlier but only translated in the 1970s, all in their various ways suggest the importance, not just of culture, but of its precepts and assumptions, and its constructedness, in the matter of political power.

Thus, to adapt a turn of phrase of Terry Eagleton’s, there is no need to bring class into literature, it has been there right from the start. In Irish literature, we are beginning to see welcome attention, from a range of scholars, to the ways in which the canonical has been shaped by class, and the ways in which class has emerged in writing—whether in the form of political poems in the pages of the Irish Worker, the novels of Roddy Doyle, or the representation of Dublin’s underworld in RTÉ’s TV drama Love/Hate. This will hopefully lead to new ways of conceptualising Irish cultural history and indeed of coming to grips with the dynamics of Irish society as a whole. Often this work is being conducted by working-class “amphibians” – as Michelle Tokarczyk terms them – those critics from working class backgrounds who, she argues, “act as a bridge between working-class and academic sensibilities”. Certainly, in a context of interminable austerity, and with growing student fees, these “bridges” are needed to challenge the ways in which the working class is written, or written about.

This article first appeared on The Honest Ulsterman.

Opportunity

We invite proposals from artists in any visual arts discipline or film to propose work for inclusion in the Creative Interruptions Residency and Exhibition (details below), which will involve a month-long cost-free artist residency at Preet Nagar (http://preetnagarresidency.in/), an international art community founded in the 1930s and currently run by the Preet Lari Trust, in November 2018 and an exhibition of resulting work at Preet Nagar and in the city of Amritsar in February 2019. We seek, in particular, work that calls the past into the present by engaging with the local past, local communities (of artisans and others) and/or diversifies the voices represented to, and as, the public.

Background to the project

This project is funded by an Arts and Humanities Research Council research grant (UK) called Creative Interruptions (http://creativeinterruptions.net/) which seeks to use the arts and humanities as a tool for exploring and enabling grassroots creativity. The University of British Columbia (Canada) and the University of Strathclyde (UK) have collaborated with the Preet Nagar Trust (Indian Punjab) and CRCI (Delhi) to produce a series of opportunities to explore how research and practice can be enhanced through collaboration, and how the creative arts can enhance heritage management, and our theoretical understanding of it as a practice. To read more about past Preet Nagar residencies, see http://preetnagarresidency.in/.

In the Indian Punjab context, this project addresses local history, the history of diverse communities, and the importance of the past in the present. 2017 was the 70th anniversary of the Partition of the cultural and linguistic region of Punjab into the nation-states of India and Pakistan, which divided a once united and religiously integrated culture into two. This project seeks to address this troubled history as it relates to the lived experience of the past in the Indian Punjab and in relation to a range of memory projects that seek to excavate and recognize a once-shared past, as explored in the prior research of Project Lead from the University of Strathclyde, Churnjeet Mahn, and Anne Murphy of the University of British Columbia (Partition and the Practice of Memory, Palgrave, 2017). We invite artists to work on a combination of solo, collaborative and community-engaged projects to explore the issues of culture and memory in Punjab.

Background information

Date of residency: November 2018

The residency will include: 4 weeks of accommodation with meals at Preet Nagar, and a support budget of 20,000 INR for materials and resources. You will be offered advice on logistics locally, as well as contacts to local craftspeople/organizations. Participants will be required to provide proof of travel insurance (including emergency evacuation) and health insurance for the duration of the program. Each participant is responsible for securing funds for travel to the residency; this is not provided by the program.

Application information

To apply, please send (as a single compressed file): a 1-page summary of why you would like to come, a one-page preliminary description of the work you will pursue with up to three associated image, a CV, and 10 examples of your work (either as a PDF, jpeg, or weblinks; please include a one-page list of these samples, with details).

Applications due: June 10, 2018

Please send applications and enquiries to: churnjeet.mahn@strath.ac.uk

Collaborators include migrant and long-term resident, food factory and warehouse workers in the East of England; African, Caribbean and South Asian screen practitioners and activists in the UK; refugee, migrant and LGBT communities in Northern Ireland; Palestinian filmmakers and solidarity networks in the UK and internationally and a cross-section of faiths in Punjab and the Punjabi diaspora in Scotland. The research team is based at Brunel University London, the University of Sussex, Sheffield Hallam University, Queen’s University Belfast and University of Strathclyde.

One of the key theoretical insights underpinning our approach to co-creation is the idea of ‘lived theory’ conceptualized by A. Sivanandan, Sri Lankan novelist, Director of the Institute of Race Relations and founder and advisory editor of the Race & Class journal. ‘Lived theory’, as Sivanandan elucidates in an interview with Avery Gordon,[1] emerges from a reorientation to people’s actual experiences and unfolding struggles for equality. It is a call for lived experience to be translated into action while resting the authority of that experience in the people themselves. This approach calls for a break with academic orthodoxies about race, immigration, class and dispossession (some of the central themes in our research) – a move from the general to the particular and then again to the general. It involves prioritizing the experiential and the subject’s authority over that experience, using the central concerns and desire for social change in the interests of ‘the oppressed’ as well as considering their well-being as the yard stick for theoretical and practical inquiry.

Applying this idea of ‘lived theory’ within the Creative Interruptions project, we take the perspectives and actual experiences of diverse research collaborators and participants as our starting point. We seek to create a space in which people in various contexts of disenfranchisement can discuss how their creative work seeks to be ‘interruptive’, by challenging current and past practices of exclusion in society. Our conceptual ‘leaps’ lie in the fact that members of our research team are connected to and part of lived and on-going struggles of communities on the ground in a number of ways: either they were born in these communities, worked with them for long periods of time, or have been part of organisations that support marginalised communities. Following Sivanandan, our “thinking is constantly being fed or being challenged by our immersion in ‘the facts on the ground’.”

Motivated by a concern to listen to largely unheard stories, Creative Interruptions engages with past and emergent grassroots creativity that has specifically been intended as a response to migration, racisms and forms of social exclusion. Co-creation facilitates the assembling of new public memories based around themes such as heritage, race relations, intensive employment regimes and the effects of colonialism. Insights into the actual, ‘creative’ experiences of those that have been disenfranchised, also helps to deepen wider public understandings of diverse creative practices and the values placed on different forms of ‘culture’ and ‘creativity’.’ By co-creating research on these particular experiences of creativity, the role of creative processes in challenging exclusion is also foregrounded.

Our method of co-creation also seeks to build on existing studies by developing an alternative, decolonised paradigm where disenfranchised communities are actively part of the research process and are situated as agents making claims on their own terms, including through creative practice. Thus an additional dimension relates to our concern with engaging in a decolonised research process in which knowledge about race, racism, intensive work regimes and coloniality is resituated and reclaimed within the project through the act of co-creating knowledge.

We have combined this decolonised paradigm with the research approach facilitated over the past decade through the AHRC Connected Communities programme, and specifically the collaboration on methodologies it has supported through the Centre for Social Justice and Community Action at Durham University and the National Co-ordinating Centre for Public Engagement (NCCPE)[2]. In their Guide to Ethical Principles and Practice in community-based participatory research, the collaboration between Durham and the NCCPE emphasises principles of mutual respect, equality and inclusion, democratic participation, active learning, making a difference, collective action and personal integrity—all of which we endeavour to embed within our project through adhering to the practical steps outlined by the Guide and through other, cognate research, for example on co-created theatre.[3]

Thus this is a collaborative research endeavour that also requires us to be deeply reflexive about inherent power relations within our own study, including in terms of the established (colonial) dynamic that is often inherent between researchers and those being researched. We attempt, within the research process, to also engage with the decolonisation of research methods by centring the concerns of those who have been colonised, or impacted by coloniality, in order to understand theory and research from their perspective.

Creative Interruptions provides a basis for further scholarly inquiry into co-creation, community-based participatory research and how it links with experiences ‘at the margins’ including the power to define what the ‘margins’ are. Questions also arise about the role of public arts and humanities projects in working in solidarity with people experiencing disenfranchisement and exclusion.

[1] See Avery F. Gordon, ‘On ‘lived theory’: an interview with A. Sivanandan’, in Race & Class, Volume: 55 issue: 4, page(s): 1-7, First published online: March 31, 2014; Issue published: April 1, 2014 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/0306396813519941

[2] Centre for Social Justice and Community Action at Durham University and the National Co-ordinating Centre for Public Engagement, Community-based participatory research: A guide to ethical principles and practice (2012). Accessed online: http://www.livingknowledge.org/fileadmin/Dateien-Living-Knowledge/Dokumente_Dateien/Toolbox/LK_A_CBPR_Guide_ethical_principles.pdf [4 August 2017]

[3] See for example B.A. Walmsey, ‘Co-creating theatre: Authentic engagement or inter-legitimation?’, Cultural Trends 22:2 (2013), 108-18; Luisa Enria, ‘Co-producing knowledge through participatory theatre: reflections on ethnography, empathy and power’, Qualitative Research 16:3 (2015), 319-329.

The launch event will take place at 6pm in Griffith College Dublin tonight 24th November. All welcome!