Working Group 3: Evolving strategies

Advanced Practices are often relational. Rather than exemplifying and advancing established paradigms, they introduce unfamiliar perspectives, challenge conventional hierarchies, and/or shift social ‘imaginaries’ of what seems admissible, relevant, or possible. As such, they tend to elude neat descriptions — the very same descriptions that participants often need to shepherd a promising initiative.

WG3 will investigate this tension. Its goal is to conduct research (mainly archival and historical) to document the ideas and rhetoric used to describe precursors of what we now call Advanced Practices evolved, with an emphasis on discontinuity. Research efforts will focus on collaborative practitioners and how their presentations of projects and initiatives changed across time and context. The result will be a partial catalogue of strategies for explaining ‘the same’ core ideas over time and/or in ways that are meaningful or intriguing for diverse institutional and epistemological norms. The aim is not to seek out successful ‘case studies’ and extrapolate ‘best practices’ but, instead, to preserve the tensions and potentials of evolving efforts to explain potential values to disparate audiences.

WG3 objective: Assemble a ‘catalogue of strategies’ that demonstrate differences in how practitioners’ have sought to explain Advanced Practices over time and/or in various contexts.

WG3-specific activities: Develop a rich-media user-writable resource (e.g., a wiki) for maintaining iterative documentary archives linked to supporting resources, with particular emphasis on ‘locating’ materials (by institution, region, issue/subject, etc.).

WG3-specific tasks: (1) Identify relevant strategies; (2) execute basic research; (3) compile results into a ‘catalogue of strategies’; and (4) developing a public event and/or exhibition of the results.

WG3 milestones: (1) Setup of online working environments; (2) initiate research activities; (3) conclusion of research; and (4) publication of ‘catalogue of strategies’ (v 1).

WG3-specific deliverables: Catalogue of strategies of Advanced Practices