Ecologies of dissemination
Editorial
This issue of PARSE Journal starts from the tangled and mesmerizing fabric of collective artistic practice, particularly from the frictions that keep coming up when sharing work that was collectively produced, or, while reusing works made by others.
You might have felt too shy to reuse existing work out of caution not to overstep cultural boundaries. You might have engaged in cultural appropriation without noticing, or maybe regretted including a fragment, image or reference but did not know how to apologize. Maybe, you have experienced a situation where collaborators expressed anxiety about not being credited adequately, or you struggled with who or what to include or exclude from a colophon. You might also have at times felt wrongly acknowledged, or not acknowledged at all.
This issue is for anyone who engages in cultural production. For those who practice through citations, appropriations, referencing, fan-fiction, piracy and other forms of reuse; for those who recognize the tensions that emerge when the conviction that cultural work is collectively produced and owned is brought in conversation with power asymmetries, inequities and appropriative moves grounded in intersecting forms of oppression, such as racism, sexism, classism, among others. As such the issue highlights the need for solidarity in sharing and reusing work, and proposes modes of reuse that strengthen collective practice. Understanding that reuse always risks to contribute to patterns of extraction, we commit to decolonial feminist practices of reuse and celebrate an ecology of dissemination that works actively against social and epistemic injustice.
On the one hand, as cultural worker you probably know that "first times do not exist". With anti-colonial feminist thinker Katherine McKittrick you might have learned that making ideas "one's own" does not mean "owning" them. You are convinced that knowledges are already shared and collective and that creative practice is deeply relational. You sense that culture is more than the result of human labor, because it involves an ecology of environments, machines, algorithms and other-than humans. You came to think of individual authorship as a painful fiction that can only exist through violent erasure of relationality. But in practice – whether due to how you are trained in (art) education insisting on individual merit, or by the way you need to survive in academia, or because of capitalist conditions tout court – you might end up practicing as if original authorship is a possibility.
Originality imagines the author creating from scratch, ex nihilo, as someone arriving first on the scene – ignoring what was there before. While working on this project, the editors, came to describe this authorial move as settler mode of authorship. This term reflects originality’s ties – via possessive individualism – to the entitlement of ownership, an entitlement only available to a sovereign subject. Such understanding of the author as self-determined subject – theorized by Denise Ferreira da Silva in her book Towards a Global Theory of Race as colonial subject – might erase modes of knowledge practice that approach cultural production in radically different ways and lead to the ongoing situation where non-privileged authorial practices struggle to find visibility, remuneration and validation.
On the other hand, the conviction that knowledges are indeed collective subsequently has led to the introduction of frameworks that promote openness and attempt to remove barriers to copying and reuse. The Free Culture movement proposes legal tools such as the Creative Commons licenses, for making content available by ensuring the right to copy, use, study and change published content after publication. PARSE platform, as an open access publication, is a good example: By choosing a Creative Commons license over conventional copyright, PARSE importantly prevents the content of the publication to be locked up in the databases of the commercial corporate academic publishing industry.
"all content is freely available without charge to the user or their institution. Users are allowed to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of the articles in this journal without asking prior permission from the publisher or the author. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License." (PARSE “Licensing”, https://parsejournal.com/contribute/)
While the licence facilitates circulation of the content, it still relies on conventional copyright, and thereby continues to normalise the position of the individual author, a position, that as we have shown above, is not sustainable. The chosen licence does not allow reusers to reuse the content of the journal in any other way than making verbatim copies ('no derivatives'), which ignores the relational and collective nature of the materials in the first place. It also does not consider who produces PARSE’s content, or under what conditions. It universalises reuse by giving a blanket permission, to any reuser, for any reuse in any context.
Similarly we find such flattening tendencies in dominant corporate and output-based approaches to Open Access publishing, that tend to build global commercial monopolies with neo-colonial Eurocentric treats. We are not alone in observing, that such open frameworks, while importantly foregrounding the collective character of creative work, often have no or little reflection on the power differences at play when sharing and reusing materials.
With this research, we propose a shift from "a one size fits all" mode of sharing and reuse to a more situated approach to openness that acknowledges that there might be ethical reasons to refrain from release and reuse. Leslie Chan and many others made very clear in the book Contextualising Openness, that “openness cannot be simply taken for granted or assumed to be universally good, as the notion can just as easily be used as a tool to dispossess others’ knowledge and to enrich those who are already powerful and well-resourced." He proposes that "openness as a concept must therefore be rooted in proper and historical and political contexts, otherwise we risk replicating the power inequality and asymmetry that we seek to challenge and replace".
Therefore, this issue Ecologies of Dissemination sets out to understand, articulate and develop tools to support the situated and relational character of creative practice. In conversation with practitioners and thinkers, collectives and individuals, currently based in Europe, US and Mexico, we continued to reflect on ways to take into account that open means different things in different contexts and that knowledge practices are situated in contingent social and historical conditions. These reflections-in-practice on how to care for the conditions of cultural production while fostering careful dissemination seem extra urgent now the rise of AI tools seems to both obliterate authorship practices as we knew them and at the same time trigger a defensive return to conventional copyright.
With this issue, we provide hands-on inputs (prompts, cases, conversations, sample documents, questions, project nodes and further references) that have been jointly developed over the last three years with a community of practice across different fields – made possible by a grant from the Swedish Research Council.
The different working materials help navigate a range of questions: How we can support relational modes of working? How to allow for discomfort, when the needs of different reusers might not align? How to make the conditions of reuse explicit and legible to others? If we let go of the idea of asking and giving "permission", could this unidirectional mode be replaced by relational practices such as reusing and being reused, or the mutuality of touching and being touched? How to reuse in solidarity, taking into account the intersectional impacts of, for example, sexism, racism and ableism on what it means to disseminate, share and reuse?
The ecologies of dissemination – to which the title of this issue refers – are at work throughout the research project. They engage in a relational form of publishing by shifting a one-directional mode of distributing out-puts, authored articles for instance, towards two-way encounters or palimpsestic layerings. In this project, therefore dissemination is considered a mutual activity of early sharing including the multifaceted collective moments, activities, methods and approaches we constructed during the research process.
Activities, Methods, Approaches
This issue builds on our work with “Collective Conditions for Reuse (CC4r, 2020)”, an attempt to address the universalising tendencies in Open Content licensing by encouraging "future reluctant authors" to take the implications of reuse into account.
CC4r is a document, collectively written by a group of people at and around Constant, Association for Art and Media in Brussels, that can be included in any publication as a way to reorient conventional copyright. The document reformulates the Free Art License as a set of conditions, aiming to break away from the simplifying binary of “open” (Free Culture, Open Access) and “closed” (Copyright) in order to create a relational and webbed understanding of authorship and to acknowledge “the persisting presence of (un)known genealogies” in knowledge practice, as Élodie Mugrefya and Femke Snelting wrote in March Magazine. After release in 2020 the CC4r has been widely used in a range of contexts: attached to self-published zines, PhD thesis, academic monographs, flyers, and webpages among many others.
After five years in use it was time to revisit this document and the decolonial feminist practices of reuse it advocates. What followed was a range of experimental, practice-based and collective research methods and activities which extended both our understanding and our practice of decolonial feminist sharing and reuse. In this issue we share these methods, the materials produced as well as sample documents and a range of questions that could be helpful for readers engaging in collective practice, next to a set of texts and podcasts for those wanting to dive deeper.
The collective rewrite of CC4r is still ongoing and without wanting to offer premature conclusions, we can say that a substantial move was made “from liability (licence) to responsibility (conditions) into practicing solidarity (commitment)”. We hope the new version provisionally titled Collective Commitments to Reuse (CC2r) will be released in temporal proximity with this PARSE issue. Please sign up to the mailinglist to keep in touch.
Collectively revisiting reuse
In May 2024 the editors organised a three-day work session ”Revisit Reuse” in Brussels to re-open Collective Conditions for Reuse (CC4r) together with practitioners and thinkers – concerned with reuse from a mix of perspectives: queer, trans*feminist, intersectional, decolonial; some with and many without familiarity with the geneologies and practices of Free Culture. Currently based in Europe, they are involved in art and design collectives, grass roots organisations, went through academia/art school or are still studying or teaching. Participants worked for three days in varying constellations on a rewrite of CC4r – supported by 17 prompts addressing potential frictions and gaps to be considered alongside a collection of "cases", a range of conversations and a library of publications CC4r in use.
Prompting
To ask a range of practitioners and scholars invested in practices of reuse for prompts was a way to draw on different entry points, addressing gaps, concerns and contradictions. Originally commissioned to support the work session Revisit Reuse, the prompts were partly rewritten for this publication 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, to scores, mixtapes, drawings, diagrams, collages, and letters. They invite a response, and act as a device to make something happen.
Andrea Francke argues in Intimacy vs Property against “the infectious concepts of property” and calls for the courage to pay attention to the ways we actually exist with each other and the world, what she calls “the intimacy of interdependency”. In Collective agreements, Gary Hall compares the Open Content licence Creative Commons (CC) with Collective Conditions for Reuse (CC4r) and argues that both propositions might put too much agency with sovereign individual (human) users, and therefore contribute to individuating processes rather than advocating for collective agreements and foster reuse as a relational practice. Stephen Wright prompts the reader with a playful practical exercise in psycholexicography Rebeing, accompanied by a short text “Re:Re:Re:Re:Re:Re:Re:Re:Ontology”. In search of a different mode of address to licencing and contracting, Cathryn Klasto, developed a Fortune teller device to find out whether “CC4r is for you”. Erri Ammonita share four stories printed in a booklet in dialogue with a re:re:re:er:ri mixtape addressing ethics and politics of re-use, through music. C. Thi Nguyen's prompt Real life examples vibrates the polarised thinking of "universal entitlement" and "universal restrictiveness" when it comes to dealing with cultural appropriation. To do this, he provides a set of entangled real live examples that we also added to the section “cases” in this issue. Queer and feminist legal scholar Séverine Dusollier contributed two prompts, What could/should a license enable or support?, making the reader think about the function of a licence and Prepositions, an interactive format on language prepositions making the reader reconsider the situatedness and relationalities of creative works. Marloes de Valk addresses in Never yours to begin with CC4r’s universal claim of disappropriation, that risks creating the same ‘terra nullius’ as universal openness does. She prompts the reader with a visual collage and the question “How can we grow stronger together while surviving within late capitalist economies?" The prompt Residual autonomy has been contributed by Nicolas Malevé who reflects the precarious and rather partial process of making sense of the residual dilemmas involved in arts' autonomy. A group of prompts are addressing spaces of discomfort. One of them, Winnie Soon’s Spaces for discomfort – Honesty asks the reader to acknowledge the power imbalance in free and open source culture, that might produce different understanding of extractive use.
Being in Conversation
In the public conversation First time do not exist at Göteborg Literaturhouse, we invited decolonial translator Jen Hayashida and curator Nkule Mabaso to speak about their practices of translation and citation. In the transcribed conversation “Translating as a site of reuse” Jen Hayshida proposes to treat the claims of a text - and language more generally – with a transhistorical awareness. That is with a recognition that you are never the first one on the scene. Nkule Mbaso enters the topic of “first times” from a different position stating that first times might not exist, but that there is always a first time for you. This friction forms part of the prompt “Do first times exist?”.
In the conversation with Jen we spotted another prompt titled Spaces for discomfort - Who will be paying the price?. Together with colleague and peer Ram Krishna Ranjan, they address the uncomfortable dilemma that copyright is a construct historically linked to colonialism, Empire and racial capital. Understanding that the legal framework of copyright is still informed by colonial practices, the struggle for people in marginal spaces means to fight that framework while also having a recourse in it since it provides some sort of legal protection in the face, as Jen says, “of a machine that eats everything”. The resulting prompt asks consequently, “how to build solidarity around dismantling colonial frameworks such as copyright?” Another prompt results from this afternoon, Spaces for discomfort – Recognition Nkule Mbaso claims the importance to sit with possible tensions and discomfort emerging in practices of reuse in order to be able to address their complexities rather than looking for quick transactional (legal) solutions.
The conversation with afro-futurist editor and pedagogue Peggy Pierrot leads to the prompt "It’s not a thing”, about the tensions that emerge when translating values of Free Culture to the context of Martinique. And Mexican feminist scholar Gabriela Méndez Cota stressed in the prompt “Quasi licence”, that we don’t need more licences but instead need to better articulate, for each specific project, the power dynamics that escape any licence. Last not least, the podcast style conversation “Subverting the narrative of property” dives into the experimental practice of queer and feminist legal scholar Séverine Dusollier’s work on inclusivity in property. The conversation with architect Dubravka Sekulić revolves around certification processes of recycling materials and led to the prompt Certifying bricks asking what kind of relations does the reuse of certified bricks set up and/or transform.
Mapping cases
The cases narrate moments where conflicts or dissensus arise 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 binary of "universal entitlement", referring to a blanc permission to appropriate freely and "universal restrictiveness", a concept that claims that cultural appropriation is impermissible. These terms and the helpful articulation of the binary which often makes cross-cultural exchanges impossible are borrowed from Thi C. Nguyens and Matthew Strohl’s text ‘Cultural Appropriation and the Intimacy of Groups’. Thi also contributed five cases from his US context as prompts for "Revisit Reuse", Real life examples.
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 with combinatory building blocks that we hope can contribute to the construction of more complex accounts of reuse.
Preparing the grounds: questions
The questions can be used to warm up a collaborative practice that is committed to decolonial and feminist practices of sharing and reuse. The questions are meant to be activated at the beginning of a collective project, when you start getting a sense of how your practice might reuse and get reused. They resonate with the prompts, cases, and conversations but are different since they take your own practice as a starting point for a discussion of the implications of reuse. You can select the questions that feel relevant to your context, or pick a few of them randomly. Answers can be revised over time.
In this section, we have brought together a set of documents that we 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, meaning you are welcome to download, copy, distribute, and rework them.
Keeping the edges porous: reading group
The monthly online reading group “Limits to Openness” was one way to keep the edges of our research path porous. It invites others to enter, to populate us, to think with us, and to test or destabilize our assumptions.
Based on this reading group, we edited a collection of key texts and podcasts for those who want to dig deeper into issues of universalism and the concept of openness. We selected these resources, drawn from different fields, including philosophy, Black studies, Free Culture, critical race studies, and critical IP, and approached each resource with specific questions.
Situating biographies
Since biographies in publications are often structured to credit individual achievements and normalise assumptions of original authorship, we experimented for PARSE with narrating the relationships and histories that connect the contributors instead. Some of these narrations you can find in the introductory paragraphs to each prompt. In the end, it became apparent that this relational approach of drawing a map of affinities would, of course, 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.
And perhaps you have already spotted it? In an attempt to account for the entangled understanding of authorship that is at the very centre of the entire project we we suggested to PARSE replacing the predefined and normalised role of the “author” with “reuser”. This change now applies to the predefined roles and categories on the PARSE platform.
Thank you
We would like to thank our advisory board, Elodie Mugrefya, Severine Dusollier, Gary Hall, Abigail De Koster, Mick Wilson, Janneke Adema for their ongoing commitment and support. We are grateful for their comments and suggestions as part of the peer-review process, alongside Angela Okune. Also, Parse issue 17, "Citation" edited by Cathryn Klasto and Marie-Luise Richards that was launched while we were setting the framework for "Ecologies of Dissemination"; it has been an important reference. Thank you PARSE team, Rose and Jessica for your openness to new approaches to journal publishing. Gerrie van Noord for your meticulous and inspiring edits, Ren Britton for pointing us to ways that queer and trans communities are challenging authorship and of course all prompters, conversation partners and participants in Revisit Reuse: Flo*Souad Benaddi, Clara Bougon, Castillo, Sarah Magnan, Gabriela Méndez Cota, Chae Kim, Cathryn Klasto, Gerrie van Noord, Litó Walkey, Erri Ammonita, Bye Bye Binary, Séverine Dusollier, Andrea Francke, Gary Hall, Jennifer Hayashida, Cathryn Klasto, Nkule Mabaso, Nicolas Malevé, Dubravka Sekulić, Winnie Soon, Christopher Ba Thi Nguyen, Peggy Pierrot, Marloes de Valk and Stephen Wright: see you at the next annual reusers gathering!
Contents
The contents of this issue are a set of interlinked palimpsestic provocations. They are as wild as cultural practice itself: not conclusive and contradictory. They do both enlarge the questions and zoom in to details of collective practice. We invite reusers to orientate and find a way within this thicket by moving around and trigger positions, reflections, and collective conversations.
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.
Prompt: Prepositions
Prompt: Do first times exist?
Prompt: Collective agreements
Prompt: Rebeing
Prompt: Fortune teller
Prompt: re:re:re:er:ri mixtape
Prompt: Certifying bricks
Prompt: Intimacy vs Property
Prompt: It's not a thing
Prompt: Real life examples
Prompt: Spaces for discomfort - Honesty
Prompt: Spaces for discomfort - Who will be paying the price?
Prompt: Spaces for discomfort - Recognition
Prompt: Never yours to begin with
Prompt: What could/should a license enable or support?
Prompt: Residual autonomy
Prompt: Quasi licence
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: Non-Promiscuous Sharing
Reuse Case: Unsolicited Collaboration
Reuse Case: Declining Responsibility
Reuse Case: Shared Practice
Reuse Case: Wearing au dai
Reuse Case: Kimono runway
Reuse Case: Whose authority
Reuse Case: Time and quality
Reuse Case: Shallow appropriation
Reuse Case: Balancing concerns
Reuse Case: Folktales
Reuse Case: Teaching Assignments
Reuse Case: Restitution
Conversation Transcripts
Intro: 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 second conversation introduces the decolonial practice of poet and translator Jennifer Hayashida who proposes to think of translation as a site of reuse. She reminds us to treat the claims of a text – and language more generally – with a transhistorical awareness.
→ Conversation with Séverine Dusollier: Subverting the narrative of property
→ Conversation with Jennifer Hayashida: Translating as a site of reuse
Digging Deeper
Intro: Digging Deeper
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. An index or reference list can be found under Reused Resources.
Questions (no answers)
Intro: Questions (no answers)
The questions we have put together can be used to warm up a collaborative practice that is committed to decolonial, feminist practices of sharing and reuse. They 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 might reuse materials and get reused itself. They resonate with the prompts, cases, and conversations published in this issue but are different because they take your own practice as a starting point for a hands-on discussion on the implications of reuse. As such, they are meant to trigger reflection, to help you to articulate relationships, assumptions and needs.
You are invited to select a few questions that feel relevant to your context, or pick 3–5 questions randomly. Answers can be revised over time.
Project Nodes
Intro: Project Nodes
The Project node-section helps to navigate the layered map of multiple interrelated relationships and affinities between events, people, and concepts that form the ecologies for this issue.
Practice Documents
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.
Reuser Biographies
Intro: Reuser Biographies
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.
Reused Resources
An alphabetic index of all articles, books, documents, podcasts appearing in this issue of PARSE.
