Context: 

Faith in the promise of inclusive and equitious education and research is undermined in many contexts across the globe by the continued exclusion of misrecognised and disadvantaged groups from participation in quality higher education. Policy, legal regulation and conventional research dissemination has not addressed the retention of such key players, who play a central role in democratizing institutions of higher education. Central to the history of universities across the globe, and the continued systemic problems and barriers it enacts on people and places, are colonial and imperial notions of quality as exclusion and sameness, and the concurrent delegitimation of knowledges and ways of being that do not fit with the western-oriented university’s image of itself.

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This Project hopes to contribute nuances and complexity to the stories of change in author-ity in our societies. 

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The Process: 

Practitioners within higher education and artists working with the moving image were invited to participate in the Project.

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Artworks were created – either through processes of collaboration and dialogue between the artists and the practitioners directly; or through processes of interpretation of an audio file, transcript or text. The latter was created by the practitioner, in most instances facilitated by a researcher. 

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During the process, reflective discussions with the artists and practitioners were undertaken to better comprehend the methodologies. Analysis about the works and the themes they evoke, feed into the curated texts which are associated with the works shown on the site.

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To explore the conceptual impact of the artworks as contributing to counter-narratives, responses are being gathered through ‘audience reception surveys’.  You are invited to participate in this, by adding your own perspectives and insights to enrich the project.  On this site, these surveys are hyperlinked alongside each work. The questions posed therein are also asked at workshops, screenings, conferences, exhibitions and events facilitated by project partners and fellow researchers. 

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Responses from the surveys will be shared with the participating artists and practitioners, for their reflections on the efficacy of the methods and the larger process for creating impact in relation to the ways they had intended. They will also be drawn upon to inform research. Click here for more information about the research component.

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Critical Higher Education Studies

This project is informed by the multidisciplinary enquiry and intellectual lenses which aim to address systemic injustice by revolutionizing higher education from within. Known by a plethora of many names across the world, such ‘Critical Higher Education Studies’ or Critical University Studies’, this project draws from various interpretative approaches including cultural, political, social and education theories, concepts and praxes.

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This Project is a pilot which looks at two issues in Critical Higher Education Research. 

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The first has to do with a mistaken assumption about academic voice, and its relation to academic citizenship and critique from within the institution. It is assumed that those within higher education, particularly ‘academics’, are skilled in representing and creating knowledge about and for the world. Many bear witness to the complexities and problems of the world beyond academic boundaries. However, many are not well-prepared to voice nor theorise their lived experiences about higher education; many others find that the conditions are not conducive for them to articulate such issues without cost or risk professionally or personally. 

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And when the darker side of higher education is exposed, many have discovered that neither complaints nor the conventions of reporting research findings, lead to impact. It is possible that dispassionate academic conventions are not effective in moving people to act beyond their self-interest, nor in creating the solidarities required for negotiating and sustaining the process of substantive institutional change towards a just future.

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In turning to artmaking and the experiential engagement they enable, this Project explores a way of addressing the problem of impact which arose from another research project. It was inspired by responses to a practitioner-aimed online project of existing counter-stories that Dina Belluigi established in 2016 and curates, A Higher Education Studies Arts Archive. 

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Video Art Making

Through activating possible imaginaries and affective connections, it may be possible to create the conditions for social change against the odds. Much contemporary creative practice is pluralistic and heteronomic – avoiding easy solutions, superficial ‘take aways’, single perspectives, soothing impressions, lulling entertainment. Rather, artmaking concerned with justice engages its audiences with mis-readings of everyday and taken-for-granted norms; which it does in complex and demanding ways. In these artworks, the questions of authorship, representation and interpretation are pushed to the foreground: whose stories matter when it comes to authority? What are the obligations and limitations of one person being the author of another’s voice? How does one represent structural change - its aspirations, promises, failures, futures – through the story of one individual without evoking problematic exceptionalist ideas?  In what ways can single artworks contribute to dialogue around larger narratives? How does video art, with the moving image, sound, text and experience, extend the possibilities of activating critical consciousness?

 

Rights and responsibilities

The project has been led by Dr Dina Zoe Belluigi in partnership with Brent Meistre as the curator of Analogue Eye: Video Art Africa. Information about each contributing artist, whose creative research practice is demonstrated within the artworks, can he found here. The names of the particular practitioners within higher education have been obscured, except in cases where that person expressly requested to be a named collaborator.

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All rights to the artworks within this project are retained by the artists. Permissions to show the whole work and parts thereof for the purposes of this Project, related research, dissemination of the findings and the methodology, have been provided by the participating artists. Should you wish to reproduce parts of the work, please contact the artist directly or the project team. Reference to the artworks should be in full, as cited on each relevant page.

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The research component is led by Dr Dina Zoe Belluigi. The study has been approved by Research Ethics Committee of the School of Social Science, Education and Social work at Queen’s University Belfast, under the full title of ‘Authoring Authority: Counter-narratives of Higher Education’. The pilot project networking costs were partially funded by the Global Challenge Research Fund (GCRF) (DfEd seed funding). 

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