Reuse Cases

Ecologies of dissemination: 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.