My positionality at UAL is informed by my experience as a white, queer and trans, precariously employed AL. As a member of the LGBTQ+ community, I have first hand experience of the importance of community solidarity as a bulwark against the hostility of institutions, the media and the state. So as an AL, I am keenly aware of how little time and energy have been put in to including ALs at UAL. I have been working at Camberwell for four years and every term my contract has been up for question. This is not only a nightmare for scheduling and budgeting as a freelance artist, it also creates a gulf between me, the permanent staff and the institution. I have never had an induction to UAL and even my managers are unsure of my rights to sick pay and parental leave. This lack of belonging in the workplace makes me a less effective teacher: if I don’t feel included how can I make my students feel like they belong?
My initial intervention plan was to create a resource for ALs clarifying their workplace rights, as a start to building a community of solidarity. In my peer feedback session, my colleagues were excited by the idea and gave me many more examples of times they had felt excluded as ALs:
- Not being included in meetings or email chains
- Never being invited to staff parties
- Expected to help to create curriculum and to mark assessments without being paid
- The idea that ALs are here for a short time and not worth investing in, when many ALs work at UAL for decades
- The lack of induction for ALs and general confusion about their workplace rights.
Most of the conversation can be summed up by one colleague saying: “We’re not really heard” which reminded me of the opening line in Sarah Ahmed’s Complaint!: “To be heard as complaining is not to be heard.” 1. The institutional deafness felt overwhelming, there was obviously a need for an intervention or several but I wasn’t really sure how to approach it.
Then my course leader was off sick and I was asked to oversee the MA Illustration show in her absence. Over the course of the week we spent installing, I was shocked by the lack of community and shared purpose among my students. The curation group had not made any decisions because “we can’t speak the same language” despite being on a visual communication course! Home students suggested doing a shop that excluded international students, as visa requirements complicated the system. Students put up their work and disappeared, without contributing to the communal beautification of the space. Students suggested individually printing name labels. Students had tantrums about the space assigned to them, and refused to engage with the bigger curatorial picture. Students were regularly rude and demanding towards technicians and lecturers who were trying to help. (In all fairness, this was during a heat wave and the studios were baking, so no one was their best self.)
Noticing this fragmentation, I realised I could have more impact by shifting my community building intervention from ALs to students. I decided on a day-long workshop based on principles of mutual aid giving students the tools to create a community of practice. I want this to not only spark a sense of belonging and solidarity among students, but also be a touch point for tutors to call back to if we see students bedding down into individualist silos. The aim of the workshop is to encourage greater collaboration and cooperation between students, across boundaries of language, not just for the final show but through the course and beyond. Speaking to my tutor Amberlee, I realised that this interventions is very much aligned with my artistic practice: making collaborative work that link different generations and communities; creating space for “chaotic fertility and collective brilliance”2.
In planning my intervention, I leaned heavily on two books: Mutual Aid by Dean Spade and Do Your Own Thing by Richard Phoenix both, in part, manuals for building and sustaining communities of practice. The workshop will start with a reflection question “Why work in a group? What can we gain from this way of working?” in the context of these two quotes:
“Do your own thing has been an important space for me, it doesn’t exhaust me like the rest of the world sometimes can, and I feel like I’m able to act like myself more than I ever can outside of it. It’s a space where I’ve realised my own differences and the way my mind works. I’ve learned so much about the way I want to approach making art and music and how I myself can do my own thing.”3
“Most people work or go to school inside hierarchies where disobedience leads to punishment or exclusion. […] But collective spaces, like mutual aid organising can give us opportunities to unlearn conditioning and build new skills and capacities. By participating in groups in new ways and practicing new ways of being together, we are both building the world we want and becoming the kind of people who could live in such a world together.”4
I would highlight the way these authors argue for both the personal and practical gains of working collaboratively.
The workshop would then be divided into three sessions: People, Culture and Practicalities.
- Session 1: People – How can we meet individual needs in our group?
Activity: Each student writes their own access rider with a template of questions and shares it with one other person.
“We can acknowledge differences in our capacities, talents, desire and difficulties and still aim to create a culture where we support each other in the work, learn new skills and are connected and kind to each other.” 5
- Session 2: Culture – How can we nurture a culture of compassion?
Discussion: Share the Bare Minimum Collective Principles and discuss in small groups. Which do we agree with? Which challenge us?
Activity: In small groups, students illustrate what they like best about the groups they are a part of (friendship groups, families, sports teams, workplaces). They consolidate these into 5 to 10 key principles. Two groups join together and consolidate their principles. The groups keep joining together and getting bigger until we have one set of principles for the whole cohort. Go back to original groups, and each group takes one principle to write up and illustrate together on a large pieces of paper.
Spade argues:
“There is no one correct or perfect group culture. […] Ideally we want a group culture that supports participants in doing the work they came together to do, to be well and to build generative relationships.” 6
Reinforce to students that each of these last points in bold (emphasis mine) are equally as important as each other, the work, our mental and physical health and our relationships all need to be held in balance when building community.
- Session 3: Practicalities – How do we make decisions and divide labour?
Discussion: Talk about the beliefs and values we are bringing into the space, as Spade argues:
“Reflecting deeply about our own orientations toward work – what it feels like to participate in groups, what ideas we are carrying around about leadership and productivity – is crucial to building a practice of working from a place of connection, inspiration and joy.”7
Activity: Using the World Cafe method8: a simple flexible format for hosting large group dialogues. Groups of students will carousel around a number of different scenarios. The scenarios would illustrate the following questions:
- How can we work together with language differences?
- How can we work together with clashing schedules?
- What are some ways we deal with conflict?
- How can we hold each other accountable?
I originally had these as direct questions for students to discuss but after talking to my colleague Jhinuk Sarkar, she suggested changing it to scenarios as this might make it easier for students coming from cultures that are less accustomed to non hierarchical decision making. She also suggested finding a way for this to be done visually or through acting the scenes out, rather than verbal discussion. It was a good reminder that despite the seriousness of some of these topics, silliness and play is a huge part of my practice and I want this workshop to be enjoyable rather than didactic. Perhaps props and wigs could be involved?
How will I know if this intervention has worked?
It will take more than one workshop to change the culture of not just the course but the entirety of individualist late stage capitalism in which we are steeped. However, my hope is that having this workshop right at the top of the academic year will plant the following seeds in students minds:
- I know my peers’ access needs and will try my best to meet them
- I can think of many ways to communicate across language barriers
- I am part of a peer group who have my back
- My ideas are stronger when I collaborate with others
- My work shines as part of a collective
Throughout the year, I will check in with students about these questions and how they are feeling about the cohort. I will make myself available to mediate when students encounter collaboration challenges and conflicts. I hope in this way to evaluate the impact of the workshop and to use my findings to refine it for the following year.
Describing the teaching community she wants to create bell hooks argues:
“If we really want to create a cultural climate where biases can be challenged and changed, all border crossings must be seen as valid and legitimate.”9
I think crossing these borders will challenge many students, but I also believe that we must push ourselves and our students into community, as alone there can be no hope for change.
- Ahmed, S. (2021), Complaint!. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ↩︎
- brown, a.m. (2017), Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds. Chico, CA: AK Press ↩︎
- Phoenix, R. (2023), Do Your Own Thing. London: Rough Trade Books, p.164 ↩︎
- Spade, D. (2020), Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next). London: Verso, p.17 ↩︎
- Spade, 2020, p.74 ↩︎
- Spade, 2020, p.71 ↩︎
- Spade, 2020, p.12 ↩︎
- The World Café Community Foundation (n.d.) World Café Method. Available at: https://theworldcafe.com/key-concepts-resources/world-cafe-method/ (Accessed: 14 July 2026) ↩︎
- hooks, b. (1994) Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge. ↩︎
Bibilography:
- Ahmed, S. (2021), Complaint!. Durham, NC: Duke University Press
- Herrero, E. (2023) ‘“Were they nice people? Were they asking good questions?”: Searching for an ethics of love in the history of communication research’, European Journal of Cultural Studies, 26(5), pp. 644–659. https://doi.org/10.1177/13675494231187599
- Spade, D. (2020), Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next). London: Verso
- Phoenix, R. (2023), Do Your Own Thing. London: Rough Trade Books
- brown, a.m. (2017), Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds. Chico, CA: AK Press