In early April I was recommended by one of my lectures to take part in a debate about end racism which was hosted by the London based group The Red Room. The timing of this event was powerful because of the situation I was in at the time. After 4 weeks I felt very alienated by the initial incident and the first video I created had cause chaos, fragmentation and friction within my group which alienated me even more. I was told that there was going to be a debate organized by the uni about this topic but there was no confirmed date so it was good to know that there would be a platform in the near future to raise the issue. By the time the event had taken place in May the dynamics had changed radically. After finding out that the university debate would be under the title of “are there any limits to freedom of speech” that showed me that I needed outside voice to highlight the problems that the uni was failing to tackle. It was over that period in April that after starting to slowly understand the writings of critical pedagogy I started to see how the neoliberalism aspects art commodity and objects had filtered into education allow situations like I had experienced to happen. In my opinion I felt that the artist reputation was a major factor in her comments not being challenged during and after the talk especially at the time of the auction where her work was the headline piece. With this understanding I had found a certain sense of peace with what had happened. With this in new found knowledge I wanted to give people a chance to own their experience the past few weeks by putting an ethical weight on the whole process on sale of the painting which was for the upcoming degree show. By making a gesture of no taking the £650 which for me symbolized “commodity over student well-being” it would show that students can think for themselves and were not docile to react to acts of inequity. I created a pdf stating my reasons for boycotting the money as well as creating a petition to find out how many signatures I would get back. As well as send sending the petition out to the students I posted it out on social media sites to get as many outside voices to show the University that this issue should be treated seriously.
The garden of freedom, a group that helps campaigns by writing articles to support their causes showed me the power of the strength in weak ties. They responded to the petition by writing an article about the situation. It was from this article that I had found someone for the first time in 5 week who as well supported me took action. This was the catalyst for others to take action by sharing the article and signing the petition. Within days of the article being published the provost had contacted me to meet up about my concerns.
By the time of The R word event taking place the article had gone viral had reached the mainstream papers. This was a problem because A: they were reporting about an event that had taken place two months ago and since then I had seen from the effect of the garden of freedom article and numerous bouts of dialogue with group member who were seeing a different point people’s views and B: They were only focusing mainly on the artist comments and not the bigger picture. By doing this the papers missed the point but at the same time it was understandable because the nature of the beast of the mainstream media is to go for the eye catching headline. The R Word event was set u in the concept of artist Louis Weaver’s the Long Table format which encourages an open democratic forum for discussion and debate. Invited specialists were asked to start the discussion around 3 key questions.
The format reminded of the essence of what critical pedagogy is a space for equality.
The 2nd question focused on the no to £650 video, which raised a lot of anger when shown. It reminded me of how I felt ten weeks ago.
The event show me a different side of Ipswich that I had never seen before and side that felt very disconnected for the views of the university.
The Red Room: The R Word Ipswich logos
