Discussant: Dr. Susan Kelly
Hybrid seminar
Seminar room 2, Konstfack : Please email mathew.gregory@konstfack.se to attend in person
Or online via Zoom: konstfack-se.zoom.us/j/9155816328?omn=67674611841
"Against-ing Outsourced Bodies of Care – Methods for Resistance, Refusal and Inhousing", examines through collective research practices with cultural workers, care workers and trade unionists, the problematic implications and effects of outsourced care and care work in Sweden and the UK.
The thesis reflects on three distinct collective research practices which are discussed in three chapters. The first, shares work with members and organisers in small, worker-led unions campaigning against outsourcing; the second, is a focus on Manual Labours, The Global & Multiplying Staffroom, 2019-ongoing, that examines the impact of workers outsourced and itinerant without access to care infrastructure at work; and the third, reflects on Vård och Värde (Care and Value) 2020-2024, and the effects of working within an outsourced Swedish care system.
The overarching aim of this practice-based research is to find ways artistic and curatorial interventions can confront the divisions outsourcing entrenches that prevent workers organising. Collective practices are committed to cultivating methods that build time and space for workers to meet one another, care, connect and communicate across differences that can expand capacities for organising against the logics of outsourcing. Emerging from this research is the concept tool "against-ing", which suggests that to respond to outsourcing is not only by resisting or refusing its exploitative logics, but to institute structural change that expands collective access to care infrastructure which would allow us to reproduce ourselves differently.
This seminar focuses on the Phd Thesis and its curation and translation into a compendium for analysing and sharing its practice-based research. The compendium includes a set of tools developed by workers through the research which are intended to be used to support worker-led organising.
I will be joined by collaborator and interdisciplinary designer and artist Johnny Chang in a brief introductory presentation of the compendium, followed by a longer reflection by the invited discussant Dr Susan Kelly.
The seminar will be introduced and moderated by Lisa Tan (Professor of Fine Art, Konstfack) with support from Helena Mattsson (Professor in History and Theory, KTH School of Architecture) and Janna Graham (Senior Lecturer in Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths University of London).
Johnny Chang is an interdisciplinary designer and artist based in Stockholm. His practice engages with collective and citational sense-making (and breaking)—or poetics—of visual-material language, seeking resilient and nourishing capacities for sensing, feeling, and being. Through occasional residencies, his artistic research attends to tactics for gathering, listening to critical knowledges from below that emerge from diaspora liminality, community memory, and social movement archiving. He co-organises the mini culture house and community library Munnen, the slow publishing collective Wake Up, and the occasional publishing imprint (Something) Something. Johnny Chang and Jenny Richards have been long-term collaborators for over seven years, working together on books, publishing, teaching, workshops and exhibitions. www.livingwithimages.info
Dr. Susan Kelly is a writer, artist, organiser and educator who researches the relationships between art and micropolitics informed by autonomous Marxism, schizoanalysis, institutional analysis, materialist feminism and radical pedagogy. She works individually and in the context of collectives situated between the fields of art, education and political organization and activism (including Micropolitics Research Group, Precarious Workers’ Brigade, and previously, Carrot Workers Collective and 16Beaver, New York). Susan Kelly is active in movements against free labour, precarity and exploitation in cultural work and universities, and the pedagogical, therapeutic and institutional ideologies that support its proliferation. She is currently a senior lecturer in Fine Art Critical Studies, Goldsmiths, London.
To receive seminar materials in advance, please email: jenny.richards@konstfack.se