Social Making 2024 ended yesterday afternoon at Bricks, St Anne’s House in Bristol. Now that I am back at my desk, I have a moment to reflect and gather my impressions or sense of the two days. As I mentioned at the close of the event, this was Social Making’s first foray out of Plymouth. The intention was to get closer to other communities and practitioners and makers, to situate the symposium in another city with a different context and history. Bristol has a long history of activism, of alternative thinking, of trying to do things in a different way that works better for people. Future iterations of Social Making will happen in other places, so that the event remains mobile, responsive, engaged. This is about extending and continuing and developing conversations and interactions, about building networks and validating and affirming the work being done in other communities, by other organisations. Take A Part want to share good ways of doing things, and to support others in this. I hope the ideas and exchanges that were shared and happened over the two days at Bricks, will carry on in various ways over the coming weeks or months.
In the presentations and workshops at Social Making, from the first morning to the afternoon of Friday, questions of economics, of access and of agency were raised, care and risk were reconsidered. Anarupa Roy told how the mask or the puppet head allowed for a different experience of risk, of participation, where the distance or gap the papier mâché persona offered allowed performers to enter spaces and engage in activity that might be dangerous or threatening for an individual. In a parallel way, acting as part of a collective, being a member of a group, such as in protests organised by the Right to Roam movement, or in the 1932 Kinder Scout Trespass, as Nadia Shaikh discussed, gives an individual agency alongside a sense of belonging. This can support action that would feel too dangerous or culturally uncomfortable for some people. In her talk on Company Drinks, Kathrin Böhm described different economic models, and reminded us that we all carry financial knowledge, that the management of a household budget, or decisions on how to spend pocket money require economic skill. In different ways each of these presenters reminded me how institutions and structures and systems operate to divide, to separate, and through this to limit and control behaviour and activity. How they reduce and restrict our lives and living.
In the workshops we were sometimes shown or encouraged to test other ways of acting and being. Citizens in Power got groups of us to wrestle with the complexities of establishing a Citizens Assembly, practically demonstrating how conflictual debating models of decision-making exclude voices and restrict participation. In Megan Clark-Bagnall’s Blue-Sky Thinking workshop, we dissolved concerns and played with shades of blue to imagine better futures, arriving at clouds of sweet possibility as we shared our hopes for humans and the planet. Dais Hale’s workshop on tools for intersectional working got me reflecting on my everyday practice as a teacher, resolving to bring some new caring and careful elements into the teaching space. Each of the delegates and presenters and team at Social Making will have had a different experience as we met different people through the days, did different activities together, ate our food at different tables. I hope that for each person there was some moment of spark, of realisation that I can take this away with me, I can use this, or I can connect with this person again.
Looking across the programme, and considering the intentions of Social Making 2024, I sense the wish to offer alternatives, to prompt other ways to do things. If establishment models of discourse function to set up conflict, or depend on oppositional debating modes, can we adopt deliberate discussion in the spaces we work in, and for the tasks we are addressing? Capitalist models of ownership focus on extraction, on consumption, on framing individuals as consumers, separated in their individual satisfactions. Mainstream media and social media platforms denigrate collective, common, regenerative approaches to decision-making, to creation, to living. Can the suggestions and encounters at Social Making nudge us toward responses that resist these pressures to isolate, atomise and separate? These pressures stop us being people that can live and work together; this is something we need to find ways to do. My hope is that we continue the conversations begun in Bristol, that we seek out these other models, ways of being in common, of distributing agency, to keep some of the energy generated in these two days as we return to our ongoing work.