May we become FAB PALS?

• I am an artist and I work at the University of Southampton. I work with the staff and students of Social Practices Lab and Winchester School of Art Exchange (WSA Exchange).
• Previously, with 11 partner institutions, I co-curated a festival to celebrate Black History Month 2020 which reached 18.2 million people, and was picked up by BBC Radio 4 as a story. You can also watch this film or read this page to see another example of a project I did previously with psychiatrists and neurodivergent people, to learn about how our minds wander. 
• Drawing on the Matrix of Domination by Black Feminist scholar Patricia Hills Collins, I acknowledge the privileges and marginalisations that occur simultaneously in our identities. In my case, these privileges includes the use of the English language to communicate. I acknowledge that this language and other cultural habits I inhabit were adopted by those before me under duress, and that others may need to translate this into to their own language. I live in the global north which is causing significant pollution on the planet. I live in a western high income country that has colonised countries (like the one I was born in), and I am a first generation migrant living in England, UK. I am of East/Southeast Asian origin, and use she/they pronouns. I am a cis-gender female, and present as female. I am neurodivergent/neuro-queer, and come from a working-class background.

• Mapping Social Impact: A Data Study of Southampton and Winchester Social Practices Lab’s Co-Convenors Professor of Critical Practice Ed D’Souza and Professor of Theory, Practice & Critique Sunil Manghani
• SENIOR RESEARCH ASSISTANT: Dr Zoë Burgess, who is also Wessex Sound and Film Archive Curator). Zoe worked with Ed and Sunil on Leg I of the project (2022-2023).
• We managed to learn about 700 activities that create social impact by various organisations /groups in Hampshire. The data has been gathered from publicly available information.
• See our initial mapping here, or above, and see the slides in the Gallery to find out Leg I’s aims, how it aligns with UN Sustainability Development Goals and more.
• Social Practices Lab played a key role at the WSA Exchange launch, sharing this project and aims for Leg II (see next tab).

• This is a scoping exercise April-June 2024, as well as psycho-geographical quest. I am doing some leg work and sweating, away from the desk, screen, armchair and ivory tower, visiting various organisations making social impact in the region that are not yet captured in the map for whatever reason. I am visiting them at their turfs, and participating in their activities as observer/volunteer, engage in deep listening. I want to better grasp the picture as a new resident and neighbour, how to best optimise the little resources we have to work together. We can share our work together to more people. It’s also about university systems being better pals – and hopefully fab pals in the longer run – with their neighbours.   
• What these groups, often described as hard to reach easy-to-ignore, are sharing, are disrupting and expanding how Winchester and Hampshire are usually understood. I am getting very troubled + excited about how much support they need/we can give!
• Unsurprisingly, there are many many asks and wish-lists. As my own resources are limited, I need to be strategic on how best to focus our energy and expertise, and build plan towards longer-term structures for future grant, not just carry out one-off fun events. I am beginning to be clear about the need to make visible those doubly-, triply- erased within these groups eg black and global majority, trans-gender.       
• LITERATURE REVIEW: My adventure includes visiting collections, exhibitions and libraries in the area (eg Gurkha Museum, spending a long time chatting with Nepalese curator Hon). Hanging out at the Winchester Library made me look creepy, but enabled me to meet people beyond the bubble of the ivory tower, including a librarian who had recently migrated from Ukraine. I have also been participating in activities that use related methods/framings (embodied, participatory, counter-hegemonic, decolonial, cultural justice etc). Examples of the latter include:
  • Professor Dorothy Prices’ re-imagination of Royal Academy’s collection;
  • a moving decolonial love story to cinema at Whitechapel Gallery by Zineb Sedira;
  • lecture by Professor Wessie Ling on a joined up approach traversing past, present and future and en route centring power and agency, in and beyond global fashion.   

• I said hello to Winnall Rock School (music-making with low income and often neurodivergent children), Homestart (for low income single mothers/non-nuclear families with neurodivergent children in Stanmore) and New Forest Heritage Centre (which boasts a vast but undocumented collection including audio-visual materials in a vast range of formats and artworks; offers unique space with underused gallery, and is uniquely positioned to tell and own a powerful sustainability story of live green living museum in Europe at its backyard ie New Forest), and Greater Rushmoor Nepalese Community (GRNC) plus hopefully soon, a behind the scenes tour of Wessex Film and Sound archives (with Zoe). 
• I wish to learn more about the amazing work that organisations in Winchester, Southampton and further out in Hampshire, and find ways to support them in creative ways + work with academics and practitioners. Could I visit as an observer and learn about what you do and how you work? Could I help out as a volunteer? Could we get together at the University with other local groups for a walk, and share our stories and dreams for the future, and how we can help one another? We have some funding to support your participation in these activities (example: cover transportation, provide bursaries). 

The following is extracted from an op-ed I wrote for the Society for Research into Higher Education in new year 2024, which was published for Valentine’s. This article contextualises FAB PALS as part of a larger programme Looking for Love. Read the whole article here (no paywall), and a summarised version here on the Council for Higher Education in Art and Design (CHEAD) website.

For the new year, I’m doubling down on my insistence on love. I’ll do so through a new project, entitled FAB PALS.

In the pilot, I will travel to different parts of my new adopted home of Hampshire, to look for artful leaders amongst hard to reach easy to ignore. This includes the Nepalese community who had made immeasurable sacrifices during the ‘good old days’ of the British Empire, but whose courage and creativity are now all but forgotten. I will volunteer at each site, to learn about their efforts on social and climate change, and how they survive and thrive within structures not built for and often designed to harm them. We will co-create stories set in the future, to visualise alternative, better realities that they aspire towards. These stories will irritate the dominant narratives of Hampshire as a twee stomping-ground of the elite, consistently ranked UK’s most desirable place to live in, and/or the best place to escape from a zombie apocalypse. Festivals are fab, so we will showcase this in a festival called Futures Artful Biennale (‘FAB’).

This can then be scaled-up and extended, to create a model of allyship and solidarity between HE and the community, in and beyond Hampshire. The spotlight will be on how the ‘undercommons’ within HE can find and team up with the under-dogs outside, and collaborate as artful leaders. Networks go beyond performative allyship and foster meaningful friendships, so we’ll do so through a network called ‘Partnering Artful Leaders’ (‘PALS’).

FAB PALS flips the narrative HE art and design as under-valued, as outlined in a report led by CHEAD. It does so by using EDI as a positive force and creative solution — not an appendix or problem. It will enable others, including ‘naysayers’, to learn about and from participants as consultants and collaborators. In the longer run, FAB PALS will co-develop a visual access rider with local communities about equitable ways of working with HE. FAB PALS critiques the common narrative of HE helicoptering into communities to colonise efforts, and/or confuse and harm with bureaucratic processes, contracts and forms demanded by research ethics offices thick with legalese to minimise risk for HE, then leaves, just as suddenly, once the ‘public engagement’, ‘impact’ and ‘diversity monitoring’ boxes are ticked. 

• MENTORS: Social Practices Lab’s Co-Convenors Professor of Critical Practice Ed D’Souza and Professor of Theory, Practice & Critique Sunil Manghani
• SENIOR RESEARCH ASSISTANT: Dr Zoë Burgess, who is also Wessex Sound and Film Archive Curator). Zoe worked with Ed and Sunil on Leg I of the project (2022-2023).
• WEBSITE, LOGO, FLYER AND OTHER VISUAL AND COMMUNICATIONS ASSETS: Kai Syng Tan. I designed theses. For the logo, I have drawn on, with permission, elements from the original textile design created by WSA BA Textiles student Yanxiao Wu, which was made in response to my brief on tentacularity.
• IN-KIND SUPPORT: FAB PALS is supported by a new colleague in a new role (since January 2024) that I have helped to create. Ellen Gillett‘s job title follows mine as ‘Arts and Cultural Leadership Coordinator’, is funded by my Access to Work/Department of Work and Pensions grant. Ellen provide essential, specialist support, and is helping me in a few aspects of FAB PALS. Ellen is also an independent artist and curator. She is Co-director and a founder of ZEST Collective.

• What several groups are doing – eg making music with low income and often neurodivergent children – is helping to open up how Winchester is perceived. We often already think of these participants as hard to reach ‘easy to ignore’. Still, within these, there are yet others who are doubly- or triply- ignored/erased, such as black and global majority, or trans-gender, and so on.
• I will be keen to help to connect with some of the 7.5% of non-white population of Hampshire, including some of the 10, 575 Nepalese people in Rushmoor alone (23%, 2021). There are many languages spoken in Southampton. According to the 2021 Census, English (84.6%) aside, the top 10 languages are Polish, Romanian, Chinese, Portuguese, Spanish, Persian or Farsi, Arabic, Greek and Bulgarian.
• As a new migrant to Winchester, I have been surprised that their stories/voices/accents are hardly heard in the cultural calendar/dominant story of Winchester and Hampshire more broadly. They are nearly completely invisible in many of the cultural sites I have been visiting as part of my fieldwork, such as Winchester Cathedral, Winchester City Museum, Winchester Army Museums, Westgate Museum and more. FAB PALS seeks to help to shift this diagram of power.

I’ve spoken extensively about the importance of working with the next generation of artful leaders. This also ties in with Social Practices Lab’s educational remit. As I state in Looking for Love, ‘Any discussion of the future must include the next generation, as well as education. My generation – myself included – have been responsible for much of the lovelessness and harm that we see now and for a while. Which is also why we must help to clean up after ourselves, to learn from beloved communities to push back on the push-backs‘ (Tan 2024). For FAB PALS pilot, I am working with three primary groups of students, many of whom are also migrants and local residents of Winchester and Southampton, and will be able to contribute with local as well as global knowledges:

• Winchester School of Art MA Arts and Cultural Leadership:
  • The MA ACL is a relatively new masters programme on arts and cultural leadership designed by Professor Dan Ashton, and for which I have been recruited as subject specialist and joined WSA since 07/2023.
  • Between 07/2023-06/2024, as Module Leader for two 30 credit units, I have been calling upon hooks, Joyce and others, to not just decolonise, but love-bomb the curriculum, including through a series of ‘Masterclasses to Dismantle the Master (sic) Story of Leadership’. Rather than those offered by run-of-the-mill arts management degrees, the modules I lead on seek to dismantle the master’s story of leadership, and to build one out of love. I was more than proud to have received a 5000-word assignment entitled ‘love’ submitted by a student, which explores the role of oxytocin and power-sharing in leadership, amongst other EDI-centred approaches to leadership from the inaugural batch.  
• WSA Textiles BA students: I set a brief in Fall 2023 to create original designs to express the ‘tentacularity’ of Tentacular Pedagogy. Around ten students responded, and spent 3-4 months to research, design, produce and exhibit their wonderful creations. Those by Reni Zhou and Yanxiao Wu shared in the Gallery stood out. I am honoured to be able to borrow these original creations wearing these to FAB PALs activities.
• Southampton University Student Union (SUSU) groups: Working with students in this way allow FAB PALS to reach students with shared interests but from diverse disciplinary and cultural backgrounds, and stages of learning within HE. There are many exciting societies, including Palestine Solidarity Network, Nepalese Society, LGBTQ+ Society, Southampton Student Action for Refugees, Enactus (social enterprise), Persian Dance Society, Black Women’s Project, Volunteering Society, Jazz Orchestra and Baking Society amongst others.

The University of Southampton, ranked top 1% globally, is a founding member of the Russell Group. WSA was ranked 7th in subject area ‘Art’ in the Guardian University League Table 2019. The University played a critical civic role for Southampton during the Covid-19 Pandemic. FAB PAL’s aims and objectives aligns with and can extend that of the University and its diverse stakeholders, initiatives and research centres:

• In 2020, the University confirmed its commitment to help and support communities in Southampton and the surrounding region by signing the national Civic University Agreement in partnership with local authorities, communities and partner higher education institutions, pledging to form closer links with local people and organisations. Key civic initiatives the agreement will concentrate on, include:
  • The  Arts at the University of Southampton, supporting the creative and cultural life of communities through the Southampton 2025 UK City of Culture Bid, Southampton Cultural Education Partnership and Connecting Culture research programme for children and young people;
  • Responding to the challenges of Covid-19, in both public health and economic recovery: from creating innovative support technology, to local trialling of Covid-19 saliva testing with communities/ schools and supporting the development of potential vaccines, as part of the global effort;
  • Developing new ways of responding to environment and sustainability issues aligned to the Southampton Green City Charter, in order to meet zero net carbon initiatives.
• In its Strategy statement, the University also highlights the importance of EDI and the arts and culture: ‘We strive for greater inclusivity in our community, as diversity is a strength. It makes us more creative and accelerates our impact on society. Through partnership, we aim to inspire communities working with us locally and globally to change the world for the better‘.
• Exciting academics include: Professor Pathik Pathak (Professorial Fellow whose research investigates Antiracism, community development, critical race theory, action research, data equity) and Dr Naveena Prakasam (author of the important Leadership: A Diverse, Inclusive and Critical Approach, Lecturer in Human Resource Management (HRM) and Organisational Behaviour (OB), Departmental Head of Research for HRM and OB and Director for the Centre for Research on Work and Organisations (CRoWO)
• Exciting initiatives and research centres include: Centre for Music Education and Social Justice (which explores music education, de/colonisation, trauma and social justice, led by Dr Erin Johnson-Williams, Lecturer Music Education and Social Justice), John Hansard Gallery, Southampton Institute for Arts and Humanities (SIAH). Other relevant strands include WSAExchange and Public Engagement with Research (PERU).

From Winchester School of Art Rotunda:

• CONTEXTS: The Social Practices Lab has been developed in a period when the world is changing at a faster pace than ever before. Cultural exchange is a space for conflict and resolution, climate change is real, many countries are looking inward as subsequent pandemics have limited our interactions with others and the role of civil society and social justice becomes vitally important in creating a more democratic society.
• PURPOSE: The Social Practices Lab is designed to provide a focal space, resources, expertise and the networks to stimulate, promote, develop and engage in socially led research projects and practices that develop responses to current global and local challenges through creative practices and approaches.
• APPROACH: The Social Practices Lab’s approach is to work collaboratively and in partnership, across disciplines, sometimes embedded in studios, sometimes expanding working spaces through technologies and, in the main engaging publics in new ways not necessarily imagined. 
• (ARTFUL) LEADERSHIP: Those developing and leading projects through the Social Practices Lab act as cultural agents and catalysts, working to coproduce and codesign, problem-find and solve, explore and speculate through projects at different timeframes, contexts and scales. Activities and approaches range from more distributed practices engaging where the problems lies, creating agency at a local level, ensuring better understanding and better inter-local discussions/dialogues through to international cooperation working effectively at distance, sharing knowledge, skills and approaches. 
• AIMS: Importantly, the Social Practices Lab looks to
  • develop effective interventions that respond to everyday lived realities,
  • enhance communities and cohesion,
  • explore citizen participation,
  • create purpose-driven cooperation,
  • engage with social inequalities,
  • support self-organisation,
  • empower underrepresented voices,
  • create tangible impacts and
  • build capacities to respond to changing social circumstances. 
• THE ‘SOCIAL’ IN SOCIAL PRACTICE: The Social Practices Lab is people-centred, with a sense of social purpose to help drive its strategy of social impact. It empowers a range of actors including students, giving purpose as ethical and effective citizen-leaders and social change agents, while building social capital through local participant engagement in projects. The Lab recognises the valuable contribution of social engagement developing initiatives in partnership, especially through local and self-organised societies but also working closely with institutions, local government, policy makers and other researchers, practitioners and publics.

• FEBRUARY 2024: I wrote an op-ed Looking for Love as a blog post for Society for Research in Higher Education
• MARCH 2024: I shared ideas about this love-led approach at the recent CHEAD conference as a panel member responding to Decolonising Design keynote speaker Dr Dori Tunstall in Dundee V&A (and will do more through my new CHEAD trustee role).
• MAY 2024: My proposal on embodied practices with FAB PALS pilot as case study has been accepted for the First International Conference on Embodied Education at Aarhus University.
• SUMMER 2024: We are writing Legs I and II up for Journal of Visual Arts Practice (8000 words total).

The creative research project draws on and extends methods and findings from multiple strands of my work since 2002. They include:

• 2002-2005: ISLANDHOPPING, a massive body of film, laptop orchestral performances, installation, creative interventions as well as psycho-geographical framework drawing on the Japanese concept of ‘ma’ or in between, which activates the ‘island’ as a creative jumping board, while I lived in and travelled all over the archipelago of Japan. Collaborators include legendary Fluxus artist Iimura Takahiko, avant garde chreographer Kawaguchi Takao, Videoart Centre Tokyo, and musician and academic Professor Christophe Charles. Variations have been exhibited at House of World Cultures, MOMA (New York), ICA London, and curated by Rirkrit Tiravanija, Ong Keng Sen and billed alongside Ruangrupa, Yayoi Kusama and more (2002-2005);
• SINCE 2016: Speed-dating across divides with members of other species to co-create better, collective futures (since 2016, seen most recently at Winchester Gallery as an installation, performance and podcast, November 2023);
• SINCE 2016: Hand-in-Hand, an embodied relational approach commissioned for a street festival in Grenoble, France, and since shared with nurses, psychiatrists and philosophers, doctors and asylum-seekers at the University Oxford, Manchester Whitworth, and London (since the referendum vote in 2016);
• 2017-2019: You can also watch this film or read this page to see another example of a project I did previously with clinicians and children, to learn about how our minds wander; 
• 2020: With 11 partner institutions, I co-curated a festival to celebrate Black History Month 2020 which reached 18.2 million people, and was picked up by BBC Radio 4 as a story;
• SINCE 2021: Tentacular Pedagogy, a joined up teaching and (un-)learning approach, which is the basis of my Principal Fellowship of Advance Higher Education PFHEA, and which critiques the insular, elitist and oppressive structures of Higher Education and the creative arts subjects within it, and proposes three hearts and nine arms prioritising civic consciousness, the under-commons and more (since 2020);
• 2024: My new book, Neuro-Futurism and Re-Imagining Leadership: An A-Z Towards Collective Liberation which re-claims leadership as a decolonised, creative mobilities and neuro-queered toolkit (Palgrave Macmillan 2024);
• 2009: A 9-minute film on a love-hate relationship with technology Monster, 2009).

I am in the process of applying for external research grants (Summer-Fall), and can include you in my bids. Please do also include us in your bids. We’re stronger together 🙂 I seek to find funding to do more exciting, longer term activities and co-create systems and mechanisms together that we can embed within our respective structures. Funding can ensure that we can get the resources required to create sustainable, longer term structures and mechanisms to work together. We can also make films together about the future. We can help make stronger connections with other communities in Hampshire, and even internationally. We will also enrich, add our stories to, and publish the map, so that everyone can use it. We can also share the organisations’ stories and ambitions, so that more people can support your work. In the scaled-up version, we can work with:    

• You / your organisation: If we find that we like working with each other (and I hope we do!), or if you’re thinking ‘Why hasn’t she asked us’, get in touch!
• Other academics, programmes and students of WSA and the University of Southampton: There are so many exciting initiatives and research groups/centres and people to work with.
• Other external UK partners: There are several UK bodies that I already work with – many more I haven’t and this can be a wonderful opportunity to be connected. Examples:
  • Hear Me Out Music (a charity set up in 2006 that brings music-making into immigration detention centres and hotels for asylum seekers and refugees, for which I was Trustee Fall 2019- Fall 2024, during when I played a key role in the areas of co-creation, equity and inclusion, leading to outcomes including the appointment of its first, black neurodivergent female Artistic Director in 2023)
  • Anti-Racism Reading Group with the brilliant Manchester Poetry Library since 2020: A legacy of the my contribution to Black History Month 2020.
  • Council for Higher Education
• International partners: They will be a key part of this discussion, to bridge and trespass and transcend the boundaries of the local-global and geopolitics. Every-thing and every-body is absolutely connected.

• FAB PALS is a key component of LOOKING FOR LOVE, which is my 5-year planned research programme (2024-2029) to decolonise leadership studies and practice prioritising visual arts and EDI.
• Comprising fundamental research and embodied/participatory action research, potential impacts include theory-building and agenda-setting for an arts-led leadership knowledge-system , and methodological innovation by trespassing geopolitical/disciplinary boundaries.
• Also part of LOOKING FOR LOVE is a 24-month project, Artist-Lovers: Re-Claiming Leadership Studies with Visual Arts and Cultural Justice (hereafter Artist-Lovers), which is a psycho-geographical/intellectual quest and 70,000-word monograph (under contract with Asia-Europe-US publisher World Scientific).