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1 Creative Democracy Optimism about democracy is today under a cloud. (LW2: 304) Unfashionable democracy When Dewey published The Public and Its Problems in 1927, democracy had become somewhat of an unfashionable aspiration, with populations in Europe beginning to turn to the extreme Left and Right for their political settlements. In Russia the October Revolution was nearly ten years old, in Italy Mussolini had been in power for three years and in Germany both volumes of Mein Kampf had been published. At home in the United States of America, even the pretence
9780719079740_C06.qxd 6 22/2/10 15:33 Page 127 Jack Mapanje Creative incarceration and strategies for surviving freedom The delights of moving house For what it’s worth, I want to tell you the story of how my family and I have been surviving our freedom since we arrived in the UK. I was adopted as a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International, Pen International, Africa Watch, Human Rights Watch, and many other associations and organisations of writers, linguists, scholars and human rights activists throughout the world – the list is limitless – and it
3 The Obstacles to Creative Democracy at Home and Abroad Only sheer cynicism and defeatism will deny that it is possible to create a workable world government. There have been times when the moral ancestors of present day defeatists would have scornfully declared that a rule of law over a territory anything like as large as our present United States was impossible. They would have said that outside of family groups and small neighbourhoods, the custom of every man’s hand against other men could not be uprooted … If peoples, especially their rulers, devoted
Introduction Artist–academic collaborations are becoming increasingly popular in socially engaged research. Often, this comes from a drive to ‘have impact’ outside of academia, as creative pieces are often seen as more engaging and accessible for non-specialised audiences. The impact on collaborators (both on the collaborating ‘researchers’ and ‘creatives’) also comes into play here, as interdisciplinary work could be a form of re-thinking how we
field report submitted by Sara Wong on the artist-academic collaborative project PostiveNegatives and the Drugs & (dis)order project foregrounds the questions of authorship, knowledge production and power relations suggested in the research articles. The report reflects critically on one of the group’s creative collaborations – part of the Drugs and (dis)order project in Colombia – and particularly on the interpersonal relations and questions of capacity building and learning which form part of
life and live out the fascistic dream. That doesn’t mean to say the threat of violence ever truly dissipates from the relationship. Once the power over life is normalised, the spectre of violence is in fact omnipresent. It has to be that way or else the still existent capacity to resist might result in a reversal of fortunes. In the absence of violence there is an absence of fear. And in the absence of fear life can live affirmatively, creatively, resistively in the primary and ontological sense of these terms, with all the public and joyful expressions of difference
and a tight timeframe, yet they managed to respond creatively to the peculiar situation in Vienna, where huge empty office buildings had been allocated to shelter new asylum seekers during the ‘summer of migration’ in 2015. The architects had focused on adding simple furnishings that created a more homely environment, articulating a careful, human-centred approach that had interpreted shelter not as four walls and a roof but as a calming and secure internal space. The aim
was very confused – a mixture of creative narrative and academic historiography– as I sought to position my experiences in context. It was all a lengthy, unedited mess to be honest, but at least I had finally ‘got it out of my system’. RR: Did you have an imagined audience in mind while you wrote the book? Did that influence how you approached the writing? TR: I had three audiences in mind. First, I wanted my colleagues, both academic and clinical, to accept the contents, and at times criticisms, as a true and fair reflection of the events that they either
have. This is not a problem until a situation arises which presents an existential threat and a paradigm shift is required purely for survival, which was of course the rationale that the original ALNAP study gave for innovation. This rationale draws on the idea of creative destruction, the phrase coined by Joseph Schumpeter to describe how the ‘fundamental impulse that sets and keeps the capitalist engine in motion comes from the new consumers’ goods, the new methods of production or transportation
the NGO for which he worked had a policy against the use of military escorts. Yet, in a context where, due to the insecure nature of the field environment, the use of military escorts was ‘the only way authorities would accept movement’, they reached a creative solution by which the NGO travelled behind the armed convoy, ten minutes later. Another interviewee described similar dynamics at play during a hostage situation. The NGO he worked for had a policy precluding payment to secure hostages’ release, but in practice during hostage negotiations, the organisation