Reading Group is a reoccurring format where members share and discuss resources used before, during and after teaching illustration. Reading Group takes place on Zoom and lasts for about 1.5 hrs.
Do you want to prepare and share something for our next event? Please let us know at mail@illustrationeducators.org
Books presented
- Together by Richard Sennet (Penguin Books 2013) link
- Disciplinary Disobedience: A Border-Thinking Approach to Design by Danah Abdulla in Design Struggles Intersecting Histories, Pedagogies, and Perspectives Claudia Mareis and Nina Paim (eds.) (Valiz 2021) link
The event
The event was led by Darryl Clifton who introduced two readings; an excerpt from Richard Sennet’s Together and another from Disciplinary Disobedience: A Border-Thinking Approach to Design by Danah Abdulla, an essay included in Design Struggles Intersecting Histories, Pedagogies, and Perspectives which is edited by Claudia Mareis and Nina Paim.
The focus for the first reading comes from a chapter in Sennet’s book that explores the ‘spectrum of exchange’. Here Sennet is essentially describing what motivates individuals to participate in cooperative activity. The spectrum he refers to ranges from altruism to Winner-takes-all. The so-called sweet spot in the middle of the spectrum is the differentiating exchange, ‘the province of dialogics’.
Sennet refers to the history and development of coffee houses, cafés and pubs in eighteenth century England that were designed to encourage customers to talk to one another. Mutual exchange encouraged customers to stay longer and buy more, but equally these chance encounters enabled ‘valuable, unexpected information through gossip,’ where ‘a chance remark may suddenly open up a new vein of endeavour…’. It is this aspect of the dialogic encounter that resonated with me in relation to the provocation ‘who educates’. Chance encounters and informal conversations were prevalent in the studio as it formerly existed in British Art Schools. Here it is also necessary to acknowledge the research of Duna Sabri. Work undertaken while Sabri worked at UAL revealed that opportunities to engage in chance encounters and informal discussion radically improved a student’s chances of achieving at a high level – Sennet’s claim that this degree of informal dialogic exchange might offer new conceptual and practical avenues would seem to have a bearing on this seemingly prosaic (but significant) outcome. So, the ‘who’ of who educates in these scenarios transcends the obvious tutor student (transactional) dynamic, chance encounters, incidental conversations and informality between all participants would seem to offer more to the potlatch of learning – we might all educate one another.
In the text Sennet also refers to the importance of edges and boundaries, he says: “Edges come in two sorts: boundaries and borders. A boundary is a relatively inert edge; population thins out at this sort of edge and there is relatively little exchange among creatures. A border is a more active edge, as at the shoreline dividing ocean and land; this is a zone of intense biological activity, a feeding ground for animals, a nutrient zone for plants. In human ecology, the eight-lane highway isolating parts of the city from each other is a boundary, whereas the mixed-use street at the edge between two communities can be more of a border.”
Sennet’s description of the difference between borders and boundaries segued neatly on to the second reading from Danah Abdulla’s essay in a section called Border-Thinking as method. Here Abdulla contends that “Border-thinking is a decolonial concept “focuse[d] on changing the terms of the conversation and not only its content.”55 Decoloniality crosses borders of thought to craft another space for the production of knowledge.56 ” Abdulla goes on to reference the work of Eleni Kalantidou and Tony Fry and speaks about border thinking as systemic, requiring a ‘rethinking’ of disciplines in order to challenge the hegemony of Eurocentric modernism. Abdulla, alluding to Arturo Escobar, is proposing an erosion of the disciplinary boundaries by first exploring the capacity for Design (and Illustration) to embrace a ‘set of practices attuned to the relational dimension of life’.
Books (and other resources) referred to:
Design in the Borderlands: An introduction by Eleni Kalantidou and Tony Fry
Geopolitics of Sensing and Knowing by Walter D. Mignolo
Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges and Border Thinking by Walter D Mignolo
World-System Analysis in the Context of Transmodernity, Border Thinking and Global Coloniality by Ramón Grosfoguel
Learning to Unlearn: Decolonial Reflections from Eurasia and the Americas by Madina V. Tlostanova and Walter D. Mignolo
Extinction: A Radical History by Ashley Dawson
Worlds and Knowledges Otherwise by Arturo Escobar
The Disimagination Machine and the Pathologies of Power by Henry A. Giroux