PROJECT IDEA 1: ethical action plan + notes on process / reading

After receiving feedback from the IP unit on my intervention report, my confidence wavered somewhat. Some of the more densely philosophical and political reading from the unit, though deeply informative on a personal level, appeared to translate only in abstract terms according to the intervention report:

“It is clear that you engaged with the unit thoughtfully and drew out meaningful knowledge and potential actions that can inform your practices. The blog posts and comments you share are good evidence of critical analysis and synthesis of a range of practical and conceptual knowledge.

I’m really pleased to see you bring class into the intersectionality conversation as UAL’s move to being more ‘social purpose’ focused inherently raises these questions. This is a completely valid topic to consider. To push your work further I recommend you compound this approach by highlighting the relevant data sets. I believe you can unlock deeper criticality within your intervention by adding a layer of specificity to the student cohort you are designing for. The thinking and questions are important, but they need more support. Contextualising the importance of this work by naming the groups of people most impacted can help. Embedding the data to your critiques will strengthen them as you move into the next unit. I would encourage you to pursue this intervention and consider the successes and challenges as you implement this work.

Overall, you demonstrated good intention within the subject, and your communication has shown purposeful approaches to social justice and inclusive practices that have been made clear will be a continuous journey as a result of your learning during this unit. I look forward to hearing what you do with these awakened approaches in your teaching practice beyond the unit.”

What I understood from this feedback was twofold —

Firstly, I would need to directly reference the UAL Data Dashboards in the ARP Unit — focusing less on a literary approach to action, and more on targeting and naming specific groups of students who are most impacted by social justice issues, as named in the data sets — rather than through my understanding of the more personal observations, or reports written by thinkers and academics such as Kimberlé Crenshaw¹ and Rhianna Garrett. ²

Secondly, I would need to work to make the intervention more tangible in terms of the data sets and their direct inclusion. My tutor states that ‘a layer of specificity’ is required in addressing ‘the student cohort [I am] designing for’. As the class I am addressing in this intervention contains 129 diverse individuals, adding a deeper layer of specificity to the intervention teaching content (that would have the potential to speak to/address each student directly), might require re-designing the intervention to take place outside of the larger cohort, in a more focussed group.

I felt there would be challenges in implementing this advice: my personal view is that, although this feedback is exquisitely intentioned, the UAL Data Dashboards do not offer a full picture of the groups of people most impacted by social justice issues in the classroom. As a neurodiverse person, I am completely averse (through genuine difficulty) to filling in forms and surveys — and through this, I can imagine that a significant portion of students with disabilities feel equally impacted by this barrier when offered the opportunity to fill in a form by UAL data teams. Perhaps [all of] this is too personal an assumption — but I also feel slightly averse to students offering institutions data of this nature, as I can’t help but be suspicious of ‘box-ticking’, ‘becoming a number’, or, ‘tokenism’, as bell hooks describes in Teaching to Transgress:

“All too often we found a will to include those considered ‘marginal’ without a willingness to accord their work with the same respect and consideration given other work. In Women’s Studies, for example, individuals will often focus on women of color at the very end of the semester or lump everything about race and difference together in one section. This kind of tokenism is not multi-cultural transformation, but it is familiar to us as the change individuals are most likely to make.”³

These feelings present themselves as a challenge in implementing the intervention: how can a group of students who are impacted by social justice issues be identified in a personal and inclusive manner at the outset?

I came across this image in an anthology of the independent postcard press, Leeds Postcards. The question in the image caption, ‘How would you get [information about yourself] corrected if it was inaccurate?’ resonated with me deeply.

Through this question, I knew that in updating the intervention plan, students would need to have autonomy over the way they presented themselves as ‘data’ in the project, and to have access to that data, in order to update what information represented them, should they wish to. In what ways can data be initiated or requested? What information or imagery is left behind, waiting to be made ‘tangible’ through data?

With my confidence yo-yo-ing, I went back to the feedback, and to the overwhelming feeling that the ‘tangibility’ of the social justice elements of the project was the largest issue in the intervention design.

Potential ramble: on tangibility, I started thinking about touch and intentionality in making illustrative works or outcomes, and wondering when an outcome of a making process becomes something worth sharing, or being seen. If a work addresses a social justice issue physically or visually, is this tangible data? And should it be seen? Should it be attributed a name, or does this kind of tangibility or ‘visibility’ make the work difficult to understand, unravel, or update, like a number, or a pie chart with a tough, opaque crust, illustrated in digital teal and turquoise?

Is an image enough? What do words do? What can they do?

I started to become interested in both the power of language, and in the anonymity of data sharing. Two projects came to mind on this thread of thinking: Allan Bridge’s Apology Project, and Matilda Della Torre’s Conversations from Calais: Sharing Refugee Stories.

Initiated in 1980 New York, the Apology Project‘s author, Allan Bridge, invited callers to phone an anonymous answering machine and ‘apologise’ for their ‘wrongdoings’. I found the call-out fascinating in relation to it’s transparency in data usage, and the way in which the social groupings juxtapose [and potentially subvert] notions of privilege/power:

Conversations from Calais is described by Matilda Della Torre as:

Documenting conversations between volunteers and migrants met in Calais. Sharing them with the world by pasting them on our cities’ walls. Re-humanising the refugee crisis.

Again, anonymity plays a role in this project towards humanisation, and freedom of speech, rather than towards categorisation and statistical accuracy. This idea brings me back to the questions posed in Leeds Postcards:

“A [document] could contain [up to 3000 words of] information about you. How would you find out what was on it? Who has access to it? How would you get it corrected if it was inaccurate?”

In making these documents public, both Allan Bridge and Matilda Della Torre offer open access to the information they have gathered, inviting the conversation to continue. In their use of anonymity, participants are presented with an opportunity to see their data made tangible, and to reflect on that data without fear of being tied to it.

At this point I went back to my tutor’s feedback to ask myself how I could ‘push [my] work further by highlighting the relevant data sets’ — deciding that the only way to do this would be to somehow humanise our data sets. In exploring this idea, I trialled a workshop with my MA student group at the Royal College of Art, inviting the students to bring in ‘academic’, ‘published’ or ‘acclaimed’ writing, then guiding the students in prompts to test how this language could be ‘translated’ through their own voices.

MA student Lukman Ipese brought in the quote “Poor people don’t have time for investments because poor people are too busy trying not to be poor.” Through my workshop slides, I offered Lukman the prompt: “Whose is the voice delivering your piece? Imagine another voice, preferably that of a character already existing within the work in question. (This doesn’t have to be a person; it could be an animal, inanimate object, or other being.) Rewrite the story from its perspective.” The intention of this prompt was for students to question the power and authority of the original perspective, to see if this affected the validity of the data that the piece proffers. From here, the writing transformed into a new text, written from the perspective of an imagined investment opportunist: “Ay, yo, my boy can triple your money. Ever seen donkey hooves? The finest delicacy for the elite. Leave me some cash and in a few weeks you’ll be eating good!” Something happened here — something that felt human, individual, and much more descriptively specific — coming back to my tutor’s advice in ‘adding a layer of specificity’ to the data. Lukman’s work made me consider whether voice could be an integral strand of the action research project. As a piece of writing, Lukman’s statement felt like a ‘tangible’ example of student voice — what remained was only to find a way to physically publish and disseminate the ‘data’ that the students were creating.

It was here that I wrote the first draft of my ethical action plan:

I planned to stage an optional Relief Print workshop where students had the opportunity to make their voice/writing ‘tangible’ — setting students a brief within a 2—3 hour workshop, to write a short form piece of text (using their individual voice), which they would then document through printmaking within the workshop.

All the while, asking myself the pedagogic research questions:

1. How can printmaking and/or experimental communication be used to make everyday histories and student voices physically present?

1. How can creative methods be used to examine, interpret, and describe socio-cultural narratives?⁴

John O’Reilly’s notes on the ethical action plan were interesting, especially in unpacking the potential meanings of terminologies such as ‘everyday histories’ and ‘student voice’. He recommended a text called Notes Towards a Speculative Methodology of Everyday Life by Mike Michael (2016)⁵, where I discovered complexities both in support of, and challenging, the desire for the ‘multisensoriality’, in making student voice ‘physical’ or ‘tangible’:

“a ‘sensory ethnography’ that ‘attends to the multisensoriality of the ways in which ethnographers and research participants experience their lives and worlds, and to the tacit and unspoken as well as verbal actions and categories they use to classify and represent these to others.”⁶

In my mind, this reading highlighted a need for individuality in the workshop’s approach to visualisation, that was potentially lacking in the action research project at this stage — as in order to stage the print workshop as a stand-alone, optional learning activity (rather than embedded in the 14 week unit, where my IP tutor felt specificity was lacking) I would need to provide pre-designed making materials and letter sets in order for the brief to be achieved in the timeframe.

I decided the best approach would be to begin testing the workshop, and discussing the potential call out materials, with my Level 7 RCA students and with my PGCert tutor group, in order to gain feedback on the idea, and to re-work where necessary, before opening the call-out to my Level 4 UAL students.

Testing the call out was enjoyable on a practical/visual level, but again the problem of conceptual ‘specificity’ arose in writing the copy for the poster — and my PGCert tutor group all agreed that the social justice element of the invitation needed to be more explicit at the outset. In spite of feeling the same, I was already feeling uncomfortable about the prospect of potentially closing the type of content/subject matter that the workshop welcomed, or steering students in a direction that felt potentially self-serving (in terms of the PGCert brief which specifies the necessity of ‘tackling a social justice issue’) and even harmful (in terms of the inherent risks involved in sharing struggles of social justice or marginalisation in the University space). More testing/researching/writing was necessary.

I tested the physical workshop materials on a group of 23 RCA students, asking the students to develop “statements” from their research (rather than paragraphs/essays) as a nod towards accessibility, immediacy, and audience — offering the students each a piece of a lino for carving, and also use of my custom letter sets to save them carving time if limited by the workshop hours. I was particularly interested in this idea of questioning ‘audience’ and ‘accessibility’ after reading another text recommended by John, called Bitter After Taste: Affect, Food, and Social Aesthetics, by Ben Highmore:

“Anyone interested in the history of aesthetics must be faced with this odd predicament: how does a form of inquiry that was once aimed at the entire creaturely world end up as a specialized discourse about fine art?“⁷

Which made the RCA students and I question [through making]: by ‘shortening’ our research statements, will they become more accessible or more immediate to a wider audience?

The student work came out of this workshop was of an excellent standard in terms of visuals, and the students reported that the process of ‘simplifying’ their research was useful and held inclusive potential for engagement. Despite all of the students really enjoying the tactile nature of the making process, some of the students felt that the limitations of the medium of relief printing was not entirely successful in terms of their preferred individual visual palette, and that the time-consuming nature of the process meant that making/disseminating multiple copies of these research materials/outcomes would be laborious. Again, more testing/researching/writing was necessary…

1. Crenshaw, Kimberlé (1990) Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color. Stanford Law Review43 (6) ↩︎
2. Garrett, Rhianna (2024) Racism shapes careers: career trajectories and imagined futures of racialised minority PhDs in UK higher education, Globalisation, Societies and Education, Routledge, DOI: 10.1080/14767724.2024.2307886 ↩︎
3. hooks, bell (1994) Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, Routledge, p.38 ↩︎
4. Research questions both borrowed and adapted from: Fauchon, Mireille (2024) Illustration, Narrative and the Suffragette, Bloomsbury Publishing ↩︎
5. Michael, Mike (2016) Notes Towards a Speculative Methodology of Everyday Life, Sage Publications ↩︎
6. Ibid. p.4 ↩︎
7. Highmore, Ben (2010) Bitter After Taste: Affect, Food, and Social Aesthetics, Duke University Press, p.122 ↩︎