Regulating and resisting queer creativity: community-engaged arts practice in the neoliberal city

This article draws from and advances urban studies literature on ‘creative city’ policies by exploring the contradictory role of queer arts practice in contemporary placemarketing strategies. Here I reflect on the fraught politics surrounding Radiodress’s each hand as they are called project, a deeply personal exploration of radical Jewish history programmed within Luminato, a Toronto-based international festival of creativity. Specifically, I explore how Luminato and the Koffler Centre, a Jewish organisation promoting contemporary art, regulated Radiodress’s work in order to stage marketable notions of ethnic and queer diversity. I also examine how and why the Koffler Centre eventually blacklisted Radiodress and her project. However, I also consider the ways Radiodress and Toronto artists creatively and collectively responded to these tensions. I maintain that bringing queer arts practice into discussions about contemporary creative city policies uncovers sites of queer arts activism that scale up to shape broader policies and debates. Such disidentificatory interventions, acts of co-opting and re-working discourses which exclude minoritarian subjects, challenge violent processes of colonisation and commodification on multiple fronts, as well as fostering more collective and relational ways of being

On DIY Cloth Face Masks and Scalar Relationships in Design

In this paper, we take the case of Do-It-Yourself (DIY) face masks as an entry point to questions of scale and scalar relations in design. We provide two example scalar trajectories that illustrate how DIY face masks - as everyday design artefacts - are in continuous shaping and re-shaping through various forms of active use and design. We also point out how scalar relations manifest in knowledge sharing and circulation of know-how, as DIY masks emerge in a world facing the same COVID-19 virus but within different local realities and relationships.Peer reviewe

Design revolutions: IASDR 2019 Conference Proceedings. Volume 3: People

In September 2019 Manchester School of Art at Manchester Metropolitan University was honoured to host the bi-annual conference of the International Association of Societies of Design Research (IASDR) under the unifying theme of DESIGN REVOLUTIONS. This was the first time the conference had been held in the UK. Through key research themes across nine conference tracks – Change, Learning, Living, Making, People, Technology, Thinking, Value and Voices – the conference opened up compelling, meaningful and radical dialogue of the role of design in addressing societal and organisational challenges. This Volume 3 includes papers from People track of the conference

Real-and-Imagined Spaces: Productive Play in a Multimodal Youth Writing Program

This ethnographic study is driven by the aim of understanding how an out-of-school learning program supports the development of youth artists and writers, particularly when it operates outside of institutional strictures such as mandatory grading, curricular guidelines, and tracking based on age and perceived abilities. The research is guided by the following overarching questions: 1) In what ways do Black, Latinx, and queer students demonstrate investment in critical multimodal literacies? 2) How do world-building projects reveal the possibilities and limits of the imagination? 3) What conditions can inspire youth to articulate their identities as evolving writers and leaders? This work argues that playing with multimodal projects and imaginative world-building opportunities provided generative conditions for young adults’ development as writers, creators, and mentors. By engaging in transdisciplinary projects that invited crafting, coding, urban planning, architectural modeling, and creative writing, youth participants contributed to a participatory learning environment that celebrated their inherent capacities as critical thinkers and actors. My research ultimately highlights the ways that critical multimodal literacies can promote powerful self-expressions, complex articulations of the future, and projections of self confidence through productive play and public engagement with wider audiences