In the 1911 Festival of Empire Project Roundtable, former UAL Dean, Nicky Ryan, discusses her research into the community politics and processes surrounding Crystal Palace Park’s development, highlighting the need to address ‘social and racial exclusion’ and ‘reinstate lost and missing voices as we continue to renegotiate the identity’ of the site. When panellists were asked how curation can be decolonised to avoid reproducing colonial legacies and incorporate complex histories, Collins identifies the project roundtable itself as a way of doing this, by bringing different people together to discuss, negotiate and co-develop histories and scrutinise past/dominant narratives. The Changemakers Talks, zine 1 events and subsequent DWN panel discussions also brought different people together to share and develop (hi)stories, and in the latter, London’s colonial histories were discussed by UAL students, staff and representatives from other organisations. In Panel Discussion 2 (8 February 2022), Nadege Forde-Vidal explains how Black Chiswick through History uncovers:

‘...stories of people, places, experiences, that link to black history, black experiences, to empire and colonialism and to tell these histories through a diversity of voices and perspectives and make these stories visible’.

Following this, Keith McClelland, from University College London’s Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery, makes a call for more community engagement projects like those discussed, to build up the general network of knowledge about the impact of colonialism and slavery on people today. This speaks to CRT’s insistence on historical, contextual analysis of racism, and exposing the implicit logic of racialised systems. 

In zine 1, student Samboleap Tol (2018, p.55) provides text and photos of people gathered at ‘The Age of New Babylon’ art event. In the text, they explain how they:

‘...yearn for a safe network, holding hands with individuals who yearn for the same network for all kinds of reasons; to pass on whatever they have learnt, to expand opportunities, to feel a sense of security even if it’s abstract... to tell us stories about the revolution and how it died down. The idea of everyone who has some sort of attachment of role in their own communities, has had years of effort with the same mission under their belt, coming together to eat, dance, discuss and play seems like an absolute dream, even symbolically’.

Tol seeks community and uses their art practice to build this, and they chose to write about this for the zine: the importance of safe networks and communities for shared stories and experiences.

Delgado highlights the community building function of counter-storytelling and explains how it can heal the psyche through promoting ‘group solidarity’ as out-group members realise they are not alone (p.2438). This relates to the old adage of ‘safety in numbers’ and to other theories on community, such as Communities of Practice (CoP), initially proposed by Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger (1991). Wenger (2000) explains how belonging within communities operates through:

• ‘alignment … a mutual process of coordinating perspectives, interpretations, and actions so they realise higher goals’

• ‘imagination… constructing an image of ourselves of our communities’ 

• ‘engagement… doing things together, talking, producing artifacts’ (p.227-8).

These characteristics are exemplified in Tol’s statement above and in the three projects, in how they formed communities, physical and virtual, aligned to a higher goal of racial justice, in which members presented themselves to the wider community to be heard and seen, and engaged in the production of artifacts to document and disseminate their perspectives. As the majority of project participants were racially minoritised, this involved sharing ‘narratives recounting individual wrestlings with our racialized selves’, as described by Laughter et al, who explain that ‘without a community in which to dialogue around these issues, they remain inert and their full impact goes unspoken’ (2015), which speaks to the ‘counter’ aspect of counter-storytelling. Wenger also explains that ‘without the learning energy of those who initiate, the community becomes stagnant’ (2000, p.230), which speaks to my role as project leader, willing and able to tell my own stories while also learning from others and facilitating their storytelling with care and compassion.  

Participants and I were willing and able to tell our stories, although not everyone initially. As mentioned, the projects had a generative effect and the communities evolved and grew. The generative nature of the projects and their different modes of engagement offered people different opportunities to engage and contribute. There are many reasons, operating on political, psychological and existential levels, why out-group and in-group members (to use Delgado’s terms) might not want to engage in exchanges about racism and coloniality. As a community initiator and leader of the projects, I was mindful of this and allowed others to step in and out according to their own comfort and safety, never forcing or coercing engagement. 

Wenger advises that ‘reflective periods that activate imagination or boundary interactions that require alignment with other practices around a shared goal could be used to counteract the possible narrowness of engagement’ (2000, p.229). Such ‘reflective periods’ were offered to participants through the duration and succession of the projects, giving them time to read, listen, observe and gauge before engaging or contributing. The ‘boundary interactions’ Wenger mentions not only existed in the projects between student and staff, but between disciplines, departments and colleges, especially the zine 1 caravan, which moved across sites and between liminal spaces. The projects also facilitated interactions between institutional administrative functions with students involved in quality assurance processes, and interactions between UAL, other universities and cultural institutions. The ‘alignment with other practices around a shared goal’ (p.229) is exemplified in the exchanges between LCC and Sao Paulo changemakers, Decolonising Wikipedia members and London museum representatives, UAL and South London Gallery Art Assassins.

The CoP characteristics of alignment, imagination and engagement are all exemplified in the projects, but how does community counter-storytelling relate to curriculum reform? Linet Arthur (2016) looks at CoP specifically within HE and adopts Wenger’s definition of a CoP as a ‘mutual engagement in a joint enterprise with a shared repertoire’ to examine the experience of one academic. Arthur offers three conceptions of ‘practice’ in this academic’s experience, including the practice of university lecturing and development of curricula and teaching materials. This relates to my zine 1 contribution ‘Confessions of a Colonial Lecturer’ (Panesar, 2018, pp.42-43), in which I reflect on my use of teaching materials maintaining cominant colonial ideology. I became more conscious of this through writing the piece and sharing it with the zine 1 community, my knowledge developing in line with the practice research principle of 'knowing-through' and ‘knowing-with’. My approach to counter-storytelling in this also relates to Delgado’s description of insinuative counter-stories with ‘explanatory power’ (1989, p.2345).

DWN was a CoP with members aligned to the shared goal of increasing and improving the representation of underrepresented people and topics. As Wikipedia editors, we became vehicles for (hi)stories untold and we developed knowledge of the untold counter-stories that archival materials and databases told us, about individuals and British history more generally, as DWN Panel Discussion 2 speaker Forde-Vidal says, ‘transforming the way that people see the history of the country’ (2022). All three projects created opportunities and support for people to tell their stories and change existing (hi)stories and knowledge. LCC Changemakers were a counter-storytelling CoP aligned to the shared goal of developing anti-racist, decolonised curricula, working together with staff via quality assurance processes. Through doing this, Changemakers co-produced curriculum development artifacts, including annotated course documents, curriculum audits and recommendation reports (not included in my portfolio) that were insinuative but not too frontal and with degrees of explanatory power. The Changemakers Talk events generated audio-visual artifacts for the public domain in which the possibility of a racially just, decolonised curricula is imagined.

Arthur (2016) offers four typologies and corresponding recommendations depending on whether a CoP is ‘traditional’, ‘emerging’, ‘distributed’ or ‘challenged’, and depending on the balance and relationship between so called ‘old-timers’ and ‘newcomers’ in these. Within the three projects, each CoP started out as ‘emerging’, with participants feeling like ‘newcomers’, including myself as the leader, entering new territory for UAL knowledge decolonisation. Arthur explains how the relationship between old-timers and newcomers in universities differs to other industries, in that academic newcomers often bring with them high levels of pre-existing knowledge, which universities count on for developing departmental or institutional expertise. Student participants with lived experience of racialisation and racism and the ability to share this through creative methods, might also count as old-timers within the project communities, in the recognition of alternative forms of cultural capital and ways of knowing/being/sensing. Although my colonial confession was a new thing to share, it wasn’t novel for me to write about myself critically; this is something I’ve practiced as an artist and educational developer. In this sense, while some of us might have felt like newcomers in the emerging project CoP, by telling certain stories in certain spaces, our experiences in creative practice made counter-storytelling feel more familiar, aligned to old-time art school traditions.

Reflecting further on Arthur’s CoP typologies and how the projects involved many contributors offering counter-stories across different spaces and through different media, the project CoP could also be seen as ‘distributed’, rather than concentrated. And in their distribution, the project CoP crossed boundaries while keeping roots in different camps, as suggested in my discussion of boundary interactions above. In this way the community building function of the projects enabled many counter-stories to expose patterns in the impact of racism, racialisation and colonisation upon a significant number of people, strengthening the case for institutional and curriculum reform.