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

Hos in the garden: staging and resisting neoliberal creativity

This article takes up the challenge of extending and enhancing the literature on arts interventions and creative city policies by considering the role of feminist and queer artistic praxis in contemporary urban politics. Here I reflect on the complicities and potentialities of two Toronto-based arts interventions: Dig In and the Dirty Plotz cabaret. I analyse an example of community based arts strategy that strived to ‘revitalise’ one disinvested Toronto neighbourhood. I also reflect on my experience performing drag king urban planner, Toby Sharp. Reflecting on these examples, I show how market-oriented arts policies entangle women artists in the cultivation of spaces of depoliticised feminism, homonormativity and white privilege. However, I also demonstrate how women artists are playfully and performatively pushing back at hegemonic regimes with the radical aesthetic praxis of cabaret. I maintain that bringing critical feminist arts spaces and cabaret practice into discussions about neoliberal urban policies uncovers sites of feminist resistance and solidarity, interventions that challenge violent processes of colonisation and privatisation on multiple fronts

Undecidability and the urban: Feminist pathways through urban political economy

There is a well established body of feminist scholarship critiquing the methodological and epistemological limits of an “objective” view from nowhere in urban research and political economy frameworks. Recent developments, such as the planetary urbanization thesis, have reignited feminist efforts to counter patriarchal, colonial, and hegemonic ways of knowing. Here, we recount our frustrations with the reproduction of dominant political economic modes of “knowing” urban processes such as gentrification and culture-led regeneration in research that seeks to uncover the production of neoliberal spaces and subjectivities. We argue that this narrow approach forecloses the possibility of observing or working with radical world-making projects that stand outside of traditional understandings of the political. Thus, we heed our feminist colleagues’ call to foreground the undecidability of the urban, allowing ourselves and our subjects to express uncertainty about the causes, outcomes, and impacts of urban processes. In what follows, we share short research vignettes from our projects in Toronto and Glasgow and discuss the implications of forging unexpected solidarities, engaging in embodied, participatory knowledge production, and reading urban politics off of persistent, uncertain, under-the-radar projects. We maintain that working from a position of undecidability yields greater potential for renewing our political imaginations beyond neoliberalism

Inner-suburban neighbourhoods, activist research and the social space of the commercial street

This paper tracks the transition of “creative city” planning from the gentrified downtown to the disinvested inner-suburbs. It attends particularly to contradictory notions of community mobilized by proponents of inner-suburban revitalization and by residents and business owners who daily inhabit inner-suburban commercial streets where cultural planning interventions are typically targeted. It further argues that those contradictory notions indicate immanent displacement pressure. The argument builds around data gleaned from an action research project in Toronto’s Mount Dennis neighbourhood, a former manufacturing neighbourhood that is now home to a large number of precariously employed new immigrants. We contend that community engaged research not only allows for an analysis of the race and class dimensions of creative city planning, it consolidates marginalized perspectives and opens up alternative possibilities for planning and development. We also claim that the relational, exploratory and sometimes fraught process of sharing knowledge with community-based researchers enriches critical research on the exclusionary politics of redevelopment planning

In praise of chaotic research pathways: A feminist response to planetary urbanization

This intervention contributes to feminist and queer responses to Brenner and Schmid’s ‘planetary urbanization’ thesis. I discuss the generative potential of their attempts to craft alternative urban research pathways and their critique of urban age discourse, a body of work that defines cities as static sites of ‘innovation’, ‘creativity’, and ‘sustainability’. However, echoing critics of the planetary urbanization approach, I contend that Brenner and Schmid’s research schema risks reproducing exclusionary analytical hierarchies by promoting a totalizing, ‘god-trick-like’ standpoint and ignoring marginalized feminist, queer, and praxis-oriented urban studies approaches. As a result, planetary urbanization ignores situated and relational knowledges and lived experience. Moreover, I question Brenner and Schmid’s efforts to bring order to what they perceive as ‘chaotic’ urban research. I then reflect on the feminist analytic tool kit I employ in my arts-based research in Glasgow, including performing with Fail Better, a cabaret that makes space for politicized artists and under-represented artists of colour, queer artists, and working class artists. I argue that planetary urbanization offers useful strategies for interrogating the globalized geo-economic processes propelling contemporary efforts to re-invent cities into sites of competitive creativity. But I also argue that this approach cannot account for the intersectional inequalities neoliberal regimes reproduce or uncover artists’ and activists’ efforts to forge solidarities. I conclude by calling for feminist, queer, and arts-based research journeys that embrace humility, dialogue, taking risks, and possibly failing in our efforts to chart alternative research pathways

Spaces for feminist commoning? Creative social enterprise’s enclosures and possibilities

This paper contributes an intersectional feminist analysis and methodological approach to debates about commoning and social enterprise. Through a narrative description of feminist social enterprise projects based on action research with the Kinning Park Complex, a social centre with a radical history in Glasgow’s South Side, I demonstrate how contemporary community economic development models can entrench intersectional exclusion. Specifically, I show how market‐oriented social enterprise models reproduce precarious work, hinder cooperative ethics, and promote depoliticised notions of difference. However, I also investigate the ways that community organisers and activists at KPC are re‐working these neoliberal models to carve out spaces for feminist commoning. Through these acts, women‐identifying and non‐binary activists, artists, and community organisers grapple with the classed, raced, and gendered politics of community organising and foster solidarities across difference

Continuing Education and the Changing Needs of Rural Communities: A Case Study of Two University Extension Programs at the University Of Saskatchewan, 1911-1964

A historical sociological approach is used to explore the role of University Continuing Education (UCE) in meeting the changing needs of rural communities in Saskatchewan, Canada during the twentieth century. Results yield insight in the relationship between UCE and social change

Inner-suburban neighbourhoods, activist research and the social space of the commercial street

This paper tracks the transition of “creative city” planning from the gentrified downtown to the disinvested inner-suburbs. It attends particularly to contradictory notions of community mobilized by proponents of inner-suburban revitalization and by residents and business owners who daily inhabit inner-suburban commercial streets where cultural planning interventions are typically targeted. It further argues that those contradictory notions indicate immanent displacement pressure. The argument builds around data gleaned from an action research project in Toronto’s Mount Dennis neighbourhood, a former manufacturing neighbourhood that is now home to a large number of precariously employed new immigrants. We contend that community engaged research not only allows for an analysis of the race and class dimensions of creative city planning, it consolidates marginalized perspectives and opens up alternative possibilities for planning and development. We also claim that the relational, exploratory and sometimes fraught process of sharing knowledge with community-based researchers enriches critical research on the exclusionary politics of redevelopment planning

Digging into the Creative City: A Feminist Critique

Abstract: This paper contributes a critical and intersectional feminist analysis and methodological approach to debates about creative city policies and practices. Through a narrative description of community-engaged arts interventions based on action research with the Toronto Free Gallery, an artist-run centre and activist space, I demonstrate how feminist arts activism uncovers the multiple exclusions that creative city policies and practices entrench. In some ways, community-engaged arts interventions can be complicit in exclusionary gentrification dynamics, particularly the production of spaces of white privilege and heteronormativity. But neoliberal imperatives are not always over determining. Feminist artists and activists are also finding ways to performatively and playfully push back at this highly regulated, gendered, and raced regime

Estimation of grain boundary segregation enthalpy and its role in stable nanocrystalline alloy design

Grain boundary segregation provides a method for stabilization of nanocrystalline metals—an alloying element that will segregate to the boundaries can lower the grain boundary energy, attenuating the driving force for grain growth. The segregation strength relative to the mixing enthalpy of a binary system determines the propensity for segregation stabilization. This relationship has been codified for the design space of positive enthalpy alloys; unfortunately, quantitative values for the grain boundary segregation enthalpy exist in only very few material systems, hampering the prospect of nanocrystalline alloy design. Here we present a Miedema-type model for estimation of grain boundary segregation enthalpy, with which potential nanocrystalline phase-forming alloys can be rapidly screened. Calculations of the necessary enthalpies are made for ~2500 alloys and used to make predictions about nanocrystalline stability.United States. Army Research Office (Contract W911NF-09-1-0422)United States. Dept. of Energy. Office of Science (Solid-State Solar-Thermal Energy Conversion Center DE-SC0001299