Ecologies of dissemination

Editorial

This issue of PARSE Journal starts from the complexities of collective artistic practices, particularly from the frictions that keep coming up when sharing work that was collectively produced, or, when reusing works made by others.

You might have felt too shy to reuse existing work out of caution to not overstep cultural boundaries. You might have engaged in cultural appropriation without noticing, or regretted to have included a fragment, image or reference without asking? Maybe, you have experienced cases 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 those who recognize the tensions and difficulties that emerge when the assumption that cultural work is always already collectively produced and owned intersect with power assymmetries resulting from colonial structures. As such this issue highlights the need for solidarity in sharing and reusing work. This means to take into account the social and epistemic inequalities resulting from extractive and appropriative practices.

On the one hand, we know as cultural workers that "first times do not exist". With decolonial and feminist thinkers we have learned that knowledges are already shared and collective and that creative practice is deeply relational. Individual authorship is a painful fiction that can only exist through violent erasure of this relationality. But in practice – whether due to how we are trained in (art) education with its insistence on individual merit, or by the way we need to survive in academia, or because of capitalist conditions tout court – we often end up practicing as if originality is a possibility.

Originality imagines the author creating ex nihilo, as someone arriving first on the scene and asserting ownership – no matter what was before. We came to describe this authorial move as settler mode of authorship. Such Modernist understanding of the author as a self-determined individual subject – theorised as colonial subject by Denis Ferreira da Silva in her book Towards a Global Idea of Race – 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 much needed 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. One example is Free Culture, a movement that offers concrete legal tools 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 an open access license over conventional copyright, PARSE importantly contributes to a knowledge commons and prevents the content of the publication to be locked up in the databases of the commercial academic publishing industry. But the selected Creative Commons licence flattens any consideration of who produces PARSE’s content, under what conditions, and normalises therefore the position of the individual author:

"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/)

We find such universalising tendencies also in current funder-, and policy-driven approaches to Open Access publishing. We observe, that such 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. Both movements could be critiqued as showing Eurocentric characteristics as well as limiting knowledge practices with their focus on output based approaches. With this research, we propose a shift from "a one size fits all" mode of sharing and reuse to a more situated approach that acknowledges that there might be ethical reasons to refrain from release and re-use. Therefore, this issue Ecologies of Dissemination sets out to understand, articulate and develop tools to support the relational character of creative practice while addressing concerns that come with universalist approaches such as Free Culture and open access.

This issue continues our work with the “Collective Conditions for Reuse (CC4r)”, an "experimental licence" which addresses the universalising tendencies in Open Content licensing and encourages "future reluctant authors" to pay attention to the implications of reuse. In conversation with practitioners and thinkers, collectives and individuals, 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. Parse issue 17, Citation edited by Cathryn Klasto and Marie-Luise Richards has also been an important reference.

With this issue, we provide hands-on inputs (prompts, cases, conversations, useful sample documents and project nodes) 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 "permitting", could this unidirectional mode be replaced by relational practices such as reusing and being reused, 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. It is a relational mode of publishing which expands a one-directional approach based on out-puts, for example, authored articles. In this project, dissemination is considered as a two-way movement that happens through early sharing and the multifaceted moments and collective activities we constructed during the research process. These include the 3-day work session Revisit Reuse in Brussels in May 2024 Revisit Reuse, the reading group Limits to Openness, and in the informal and public conversation we sought with peers.

Contents

Each category of contents in this issue is introduced by a short summary giving context and information how it could be applied and used:

Prompts: The prompts are a series of provocations to practices of reuse that address universalisms in Free Culture and open access publishing. They speak to questions of cultural appropriation, power differences and the limits of conventional citation and acknowledgment practices. Originally commissioned for the work session Revisit Reuse Revisit Reuse in Brussels, they 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.

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’ (2019). Thi also contributed five cases from his US context as prompt 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 can contribute to the construction of more complex accounts of reuse.

Conversations: 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, videocalls 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 decided to include two edited conversations. One dives into the experimental practice of queer and feminist legal scholar Séverine Dusollier who proposes to change the narrative of property. The second introduces you to the decolonial practice of poet and translator Jennifer Hayashida who proposes to think of translation as a site of reuse and reminds us to treat the claims of a text – and language more generally – with a transhistorical awareness.

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 hands-on 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.

Practice Documents: 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.

Readings, Podcasts, References: We also share a collection of key texts and podcasts for those who want to dig deeper. The resources 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.

We selected these texts, drawn from different fields, including philosophy, black studies, free culture, critical race studies, and critical IP, and approached them always with specific questions – contextualised through what the conveners and the participants wanted to figure out,

In that way, the reading group is 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.

We include here also selected texts that informed the prompts or conversations, and some articles and works that have been developed collaboratively or individually in relation to this research. 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.

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.

Reuser 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.

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.

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

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)

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.

→ Questions (no answers)

Project Nodes

Intro: Project Nodes

This section presents the different nodes of the research project. This mapping might help the reader to navigate the interrelatedness between various events, people, concepts, and contexts that form the ecologies of this issue.

→ Project Nodes

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.

→ Practice documents

Biographies

Intro: 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.

→ Biographies

Ecologies of dissemination

Contents

Editorial

Reuse Prompts

Reuse Cases

Conversation Transcripts

Readings, Podcasts, References

Questions (no answers)

Project Nodes

Practice Documents

Biographies

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