PARSE

P-Reuse Prompts

Intro: Reuse Prompts

This section contains a series of provocations and questions that address universalisms in Free Culture and Open Access. How to deal with issues of cultural appropriation, power differences and the limits of conventional citation and acknowledgment? These prompts were originally commissioned for the worksession “Revisit Reuse”, then partly rewritten to make them relevant to multiple contexts. They point towards potential gaps in the ways we practice reuse and purposefully trigger the reader to consider a specific angle. The prompts in this section take many forms or shapes from questions, to games, scores, mixtapes, drawings, diagrams, collages, and letters. They invite a response, and act as a device to make something happen.

In progress

1. P-Prompt: Prepositions
   
2. P-Prompt: Do first times exist?
   
3. P-Prompt: Collective agreements
   
4. P-Prompt: Rebeing
   
5. P-Prompt: Fortune teller
   
6. P-Prompt: re:re:re:er:ri mixtape
   
7. P-Prompt: Certifying bricks
   
8. P-Prompt: Intimacy vs Property
   
9. P-Prompt: It's not a thing
   
10. P-Prompt: Real life examples
    
11. P-Prompt: Spaces for discomfort - Honesty
12. P-Prompt: Spaces for discomfort - Who will be paying the price?
    
13. P-Prompt: Spaces for discomfort - Recognition
    
14. P-Prompt: Never yours to begin with
15. P-Prompt: What could/should a license enable ​​​​​​or support?
16. P-Prompt: Residual autonomy
17. P-Prompt: Quasi licence

P-Reuse Cases

Intro: Reuse Cases

The cases narrate moments where conflicts or dissensus arises around sharing and reuse in collective practice. We have drawn them from our own experiences and contexts, some were told to us by friends and colleagues, and others we have retold from public accounts. We invite you to use these cases to bring some nuance to the often polarised extremes of “universal entitlement” (permission to appropriate freely) and “universal restrictiveness” (cultural appropriation is impermissible), a binary that gets problematised by Thi C. Nguyen, who also contributed five cases from his own context in the US.

We wrote the cases as short vignettes omitting names, institutions or places on purpose. Their specificity is without detail to allow them to trigger actions, reflections and change of perspective in different contexts. As a collection, they function as a toolbox filled with newly combinable building blocks that can contribute to the construction of more complex accounts of reuse. These collected and curated accounts of lived situations went through an iterative process of telling, re-telling, editing and re-editing. It would be counterintuitive to sign them as authors rather we see our role to take responsibility as narrators.

Reuse Case: Cultural Appropriation
Reuse Case: Conceptual Poetry
Reuse Case: Entangled Authorship
Reuse Case: Non-Promiscuous Sharing
Reuse Case: Unsolicited Collaboration
Reuse Case: Declining Responsibility
Reuse Case: Wearing au dai
Reuse Case: Kimono runway
Reuse Case: Whose authority
Reuse Case: Shallow appropriation
Reuse Case: Balancing concerns
Reuse Case: Folktales
Reuse Case: Teaching Assignments
Reuse Case: Restitution

Draft Conversation Transcripts

Intro: Draft Conversation Transcripts

The project Ecologies of dissemination was developed in ongoing conversation with a large group of thinkers and practitioners. From a shared interest in developing decolonial feminist practices of reuse, we connected across practices, fields, and vocabularies. The conversations happened through emails, video calls and in the margins of other activities. Some were structured in the form of podcasts or organised as public conversations. Many of them found their way into prompts, and you'll find fragments of transcriptions included as support material. 

In this part, we include two edited conversations, that allow for more time and space to dive into the law making practice of Séverine Dusollier, who talks about her work on critical feminist approaches to Intellectual Property and copyright. The conversation with poet and translator Jennifer Hayashida of translation as a site of reuse.

Conversation with Séverine Dusollier: Subverting the narrative of property
Conversation with Jennifer Hayashida: Translating as a site of reuse

Readings, Podcasts, References

Intro: Readings, Podcasts, References

Here we collected some key texts and podcasts for those who want to dig deeper. They are drawn from the one-year "Limits to Openness" Reading Group that explored issues of universalism related to the idea of openness, as often presented in Open Content, Free Culture and dominant Open Access publishing. Drawn from different fields, such as philosophy, black studies, free culture, critical race studies, critical IP, among others, the range of texts and podcasts approach the question of how would decolonial, feminist practices of reuse look like from different perspectives. We include here also selected texts that informed the prompts or conversations. It is by no means meant as a complete bibliography or reference list, rather a selection of resources expanding those developed in our immediate environment.

Readings, Podcasts, References

Questions (no answers)

Intro: Questions (no answers)

This set of questions can be used as a warm-up exercise for collaborative practices that are committed to decolonial, feminist practices of sharing and reuse. The questions are meant to be activated at the beginning of a collective practice, at the moment you start to get a sense of how your practice reuses and might get reused. They resonate with prompts, cases, and conversations but are different because they take your own practice as a hands-on starting point for discussing the implications of reuse. You can select a few questions that feel relevant to your context, or pick 3–5 questions randomly. Answers can be revised over time.

Questions (no answers)

Project Nodes

Intro: Project Nodes

The nodes xxxx issue ecology maps out and helps to navigate the interrelatedness between various events, people, and contexts that form the ecologies of this issue.

not just events, but also concepts Glossary

Practice Documents Examples

Intro: Practice Documents and Examples

In this section, we have brought together a set of documents that we have found helpful for navigating practices of reuse. They range from legal contracts to manifestos, from manuals to codes of conduct. Making the conditions of reuse explicit, they can be applied and adjusted to different contexts and needs. The collection includes conditional free licences, research agreements, protocols for cross-cultural sharing, and “commitments”. Most of the documents are published under Open Content licences, so you are welcome to download, copy, distribute, and rework them.

Practice documents

Biographies

Intro: Biographies

“So, I try to begin a story about myself, and I begin somewhere, marking a time, trying to begin a sequence, offering, perhaps, causal links or at least narrative structure. I narrate, and I bind myself as I narrate, give an account of myself, offer an account to an other in the form of a story that might well work to summarize how and why I am. But my effort at self-summarization fails, and fails necessarily, when the “I” who is introduced in the opening line as a narrative voice cannot give an account of how it became an “I” who might narrate itself of this story in particular.” 

Judith Butler. Giving an account of Oneself. Fordham University Press, New York, 2005

Biographies in publications are often structured to credit individual achievements. For PARSE we experimented with replacing this individualising approach to cultural practice by narrating the relationships and histories that connect the contributors. In the end, it became apparent that this relational approach to draw a map of affinities rather than achievements would place us, the editors, at the centre of the mapped ecologies. Therefore, we settled, until we find a better way, with the conventional self-narrated biographies as provided by the individuals and collectives involved.

What is more? We suggested replacing the normalised descriptor “author” with “reuser” in an attempt to account for the entangled understanding of authorship that is at the very centre of the entire project.

Biographies