curious patterns #8
Why awareness raising is lazy impact, how music helps to achieve the SDGs, and what open knowledge systems can do for the arts and development.
Welcome back to curious patterns, friends of culture, impact and development. And a special welcome to new subscribers from Kunsten ‘92, the University of Leeds, Culture Solutions EU, Splice Media and Culture Lab. I am writing to you fully rejuvenated from a holiday by the mighty Lake Wakatipu two weeks ago. I seemed to have forgotten how majestic and awe-inspiring mountains really are and I’m glad I somewhat reconnected.
And dear readers who receive this newsletter as a forward from your favourite colleague - I see you! If you want to save them the hassle and get curious patterns right into your inbox every month, sign up yourself. And don’t forget to buy your work mate a (virtual?) coffee for being so generous with their good recommendations ☕😬
🇰🇭 In this episode: Cambodia’s inter-ministerial struggle to create a lifeline for cultural organisations, or: When the tourism sector gets a tax break but the arts don’t.
🇳🇬 Slow but steady. Germany is preparing to return Benin bronzes to Nigeria while policy experts and activists in other African states plot future restitution strategies.
🌎 Want to learn everything there is to know for cultural actors in Ibero-America to apply the 2005 UNESCO Convention? Indulge in these jam-packed video sessions!
🇲🇾 Factories and warehouses are all too common, but have you ever seen a supermarket being turned into an arts centre? Well, Borneo Laboratory is going green.
🇺🇬 Talking of arts centres, 32º East | Ugandan Arts Trust is coming along nicely. They’re also doing South-South residency exchanges and local fundraising.
🇬🇧 As the UK’s development funding is slashed, recipients remain defiant and produce ace research on stuff like creative participatory approaches for youth engagement.
🇰🇷 Did you know that Korea’s arts council has a human rights committee that conducts actual human rights assessments? Only two programmes per year, but hey.
☔ How do countries protect their cultural workforce? Here’s a super data-rich ILO report with examples from Mexico, India, Argentina, Uruguay and other places.
🇲🇲 Unless you’ve been living under a rock the past few weeks, you would have heard about the bloody military coup in Myanmar. Last week I received an email from an artist friend. It was addressed to all the people he had met on international tours and collaborations. He said he had just managed to flee his house through the back door as soldiers stormed through the front gate. He is trying to stay low in the countryside for a bit. I feel so incredibly helpless and hope he and his family are safe. Join me and others in supporting our friends’ protest art initiatives and stand in solidarity with artists and cultural actors in Myanmar.
🙈 Raising awareness = lazy impact?
My biggest evaluator pet peeve is reading through project designs and impact logics just to find awareness raising put on a pedestal as the one and ultimate goal, the holy solution to all problems, the impact saviour. And then I silently weep for all the unrealised potential for further action these projects have.
My provocation: Awareness raising is lazy. There is no immediate (or even discernible future) action, no impact. Sure, behavioural change takes time and your awareness raising campaign might have been a contributing factor in a much more complex set of influences for somebody to take action. It is incredibly hard to measure any such change beyond self-reporting over long periods - so how do we really know?
I get it. In art, the work already communicates between creator and audience. Sometimes you might even wonder whether artworks do anything other than communicate. Of course, it instantly makes sense if you want to attach your impact aspirations solely to that communication function of your art. Heck, you might even be opposed to consider any more instrumentalisation of your art because who the hell do you little development practitioner/funder/evaluator think you are.
While it most certainly is not our job to challenge a project’s artistic or curatorial integrity, if we operate in a space that creates opportunities for art and culture to have positive impact on society, economy and environment, we need to take things a step further. We ought to think about the impact of arts and culture in the context of development interventions more holistically. Awareness raising might fit well in the mould laid out by funders (yes, that’s a major problem in itself), but please don’t just see it as your alibi impact.
The report by the Center for Music Ecosystems I discuss below highlights some valuable ideas on how to go beyond this lazy goal of raising awareness. Climate change awareness messaging at a music concert is good, pushing sustainable supply chains and developing community gardens on the concert venue grounds is better, but getting artists, audiences, venues, suppliers, policy makers and communities actively involved is 💋👌.
Remember that we're living in the age of the attention economy. Everyone and everything wants to raise awareness about something. It becomes increasingly hard for people to filter through this information overload. Pure awareness raising activities, if not supported by other pro-active measures, are very likely to get lost in the noise of political campaigning, for-profit marketing and influencers’ egocentrism. So, do better!
IMPACT
🎨 Could your evaluation maybe use some elevation? That’s what the authors of the World Food Program’s EvaluVision publication have made their mission. Visual thinking in evaluation can be particularly powerful when trying to validate findings and insights with affected communities. All aspects of an evaluation can benefit from visualisation, though. Keep in mind that this basic methodology book for utilising graphic facilitation is designed around qualitative data visualisation.
📊 Ok, so you’re into visualisation now but you don't know how to code and have a deep running hatred for excel charts? Worry not. RAWgraphs is an open source data visualisation framework that you can use right here in your browser via drag and drop. It’s got a bunch of great chart types that all come with a tutorial page. Just make sure your data is properly cleaned before uploading and you know what you want to achieve. Otherwise you’ll be looking at a hot pile of jumbled up graphs.
🏛️ How to make sense of art is a form of evaluation. That’s how Patricia Moore Shaffer started her long journey from museum educator via NASA to Deputy Director of Research and Analysis for the NEA. I found it fascinating listening to her career trajectory. And it seems evaluators face common challenges in working with reluctant clients all over the world. Hey, we just want to be friends of process after all.
🤝 If you’re a grant maker and want to get better at it, here’s your community. The Trust-Based Philanthropy Project has a new peer exchange mailing list. I’m on it. It’s just kicking off, so still a bit wobbly on the feet but it looks very promising.
🎶 Songs for eternity
Your Guide to Music and the SDGs
(2021: Shain Shapiro, Paloma Medina, Azucena Mico)
So, you found one music solution for every sustainable development goal? Tell me more! Your Guide to Music and the SDGs was published by the new Center for Music Ecosystems, which is explicitly set up to conduct research to lobby for more music relevance in global policy making.
The reason that music often struggles to be provided the investment, policy framework and attention that it deserves as a development tool, educational framework or driver of equality is that there is no global policy language that recognises, explains and demonstrates the role of music as an ecosystem that intertwines all of us, no matter where we are.
I do admire the publication’s attempt to view music holistically as
as an industrial mechanism, as a vocation, as a rehabilitative tool, as a poverty eradicator, as an equaliser and a women’s empowerment tool.
While I think that many of the arguments why music is important for global policy making are equally true for most other forms of art, I don’t want to diminish the importance of this particular lens. Yet, I am not sure I would agree that the global non-recognition of music in particular really constitutes a systemic problem. This discussion ought to be much bigger than that. Anyhow, the report acknowledges the power of collaboration and partnership as well as the complementation of existing policy frameworks and initiatives. Perhaps Your Guide to Music and the SDGs (just like ICOMOS’ heritage and the SDGs report) can be a stepping stone to that larger discussion.
Now, let’s go for a dip, shall we? 🏊
Four pages are dedicated to each of the 17 SDGs and feature a problem statement, examples of current initiatives addressing these problems and a list of policy recommendations. You will see a mix of music activities that have a direct impact on other parts of society, economy and environment, measures for secondary impacts (such as greening supply chains) and self-referential action points for the music sector to take on board to become more sustainable. The examples and recommendations also come in various strengths of their impact logics.
Let’s look at SDG 1, poverty, for example:
no poverty ← employment & royalties ← strengthen intellectual property structures
Making sure that you can earn an income from your art, both at the initial stage and through a catalogue for years to come, requires strong IP laws and royalty collection mechanisms. Music as a vocation - the connection to eleviating poverty makes perfect sense.
no poverty ← parents work longer hours ← after school music programmes
In this example, after-school music programmes do not just serve as a goal in itself but more importantly enable parents to work longer hours, earn more money and lift themselves and their children out of poverty. I wonder whether childcare was initially identified as a major obstacle to take up paid work, and thus a contributor to poverty.
In general, I am quite impressed with the overall presentation of the publication - it’s really fun to flip through the pages and snack on some of the points made. Sure, not all ideas are equally strong, but, then again, impact isn’t something you can just make up. I do have issues with some of the language used, though. I thought third world was already sipping cocktails in the cosy retirement home for commonly misused and outdated terminology by now.
This report shows that it is easy to see a cultural dimension in all of the SDGs and yet it is not quite as easy to fit specific activities into the mould of each single goal. Echoing a familiar sentiment, I advocate for a fully fledged arts and culture goal in the next edition of the SDGs. This publication is definitely an important step in the advocacy journey for that, and with its wealth of creative examples, there is a lot of inspiration to guide us.
LIMINAL SPACE
🏠 I am a settler. Are you? One of the key questions in culture and development is clearly where our work takes place. And if that is not on our land, do we consider our position as settler, even as potential perpetuator of colonialism? If you want to listen to sharp and poetic thoughts of six Indigenous Pasifika people on this issue, please really make some time to listen deeply to this Deep Pacific podcast episode. And once you have digested that, there’s also a great episode on artivism I absolutely recommend.
🤟 Listening is a radical act of social change. Other ways of humanising the virtual space as a facilitator include moving at the speed of trust, being aware of different listening types and decentralising organisation if possible. This short presentation by SecondMuse and DSIL Global is a charming collection of learnings and experiences from shifting social change facilitation into the digital space. Intrigued? Go take a look!
🃏 And while you’re thinking about inclusion, why not use some help? Shuffle your deck of Cards for Humanity to tickle your synapses when designing inclusive programmes. You will encounter a bunch of fictional diverse personas that might help you think more inclusively. Lovely initiative.
🌊 Deep listening
Opening today, Taloi Havini’s Answer to Call is about the ocean, hopeful futures, indigenous knowledge, belonging and interacting. It’s about deep listening.
Answer to the Call, a twenty-two-channel sound piece, uses an ancient compositional technique that produces a dialogue between these different ways of knowing through a method of a call and response. Through the inclusion of her own Hakö language and instruments that conjure her navigational ancestors, Havini moves beyond a sonic measuring of space and distance, asserting the presence of a much deeper, cyclical understanding of the ocean, space, and time. The track evolves to include archival sources, such as hydrophone recordings of sonar mapping taken on the R/V Falkor, ocean traveling chants, and an instrumental piece composed by renowned Bougainville musician Ben Hakalitz.
OPPORTUNITIES
6 May: Workshop about solidarity in collaboration (online workshop)
✊ I love card games. This online session will introduce The Gamified Workshop Toolkit to demonstrate how this very card game might help you and your collaboration partner to better understand each other in terms of values and modes of thinking. And since solidarity is something that’s definitely missing a lot in our everyday interaction, I’d be chuffed to try this out with some co-collaborators in the future.
6 May: Rehearsing (for) the Future (call for ideas)
🔮 Just a very modest amount of money, but if you are an artist self-identified as Asian wherever you are based as individual, a collective or Asian-and-non-Asian mixed group and you want to research futures, specifically how artists can shape these futures, this call might be for you.
12-14 May: ENCATC Academy on Cultural Relations (online conference)
🦋 Under the motto International cultural cooperation: Renew, Reimagine, Reconnect, this ENCATC online conference is set to talk North-South cooperation, virtual networking and academia as conduits for international cooperation. As a primer, you might already want to tune into the policy debate on EU-Latin America and Caribbean cultural relations and how to fix them on 6 May, though.
18 May: Learning Across Initiatives - Finding Ways Forward (online roundtable)
☕ This one I am really excited about. How can we make learning and insights from our evaluations more openly accessible and contribute to a global and open body of knowledge? How can we learn both from failure and success? How can we better collaborate rather than compete in a system that relies on grants? This session is solution-oriented and specifically addressed to knowledge stakeholders in funding institutions to improve the systems we currently work in. I’ll be joining as a participant. See you there?
curious patterns is a monthly email newsletter on all things culture, impact and development, written by Kai T. Brennert (Twitter | edge & story).
Please forward this newsletter to a friend, and do reach out: kai@edgeandstory.com