Having reflected on the community building function of counter-storytelling within the projects, I reflect here on how counter-storytelling created and/or happened within ‘site[s] of radical possibility’ and ‘space[s] of resistance’ (bell hooks cited in Solorzano and Yosso, 2002, p.36-37). What sites and spaces did the three projects create and/or occupy? And what theories and methods underpin the radical, decolonising nature of these spaces?

In the zine 1 foreword, Singh explains that decolonisation is about ‘the opening up of creative spaces to facilitate the production of culture informed by indigenous thinking and doing’ (2018, p.1). He wrote this to describe what he saw zine 1 to be doing: opening creative space for cultural production informed by the thinking and doing, not necessarily of indigenous but racially minoritised subjects of European colonisation residing in London, the melting pot of British imperialism. Zine 1 initially created a material space for counter-stories to be shared, aligning to the counter-culture origins and associations of the ‘zine’, with content extending beyond the written word. 

In ‘Zine Pedagogies: Students as Critical Makers’, Scheper explains how zines create ‘spaces and tools for cultural revolt and imagining different futures’ (2023, p.22) and she describes a ‘robust tradition of “resistance to white dominance in the zine community” by people of color’ (p.21). She also explains that through zine-making, marginalised communities are ‘claiming for themselves the space of thinking, connecting, and critical-making outside both the frameworks that mandate university learning’ (2023, p.22), frameworks like academic writing and peer review. In ‘Zine-making for anti-racist learning and action: Building the Anti-Racist Classroom’, Brewis et al explain that print-based zines represent ‘the most un-mediated, personal, medium for people of colour to communicate the truth of their experiences’ and are ‘an important resource in anti-racist pedagogy’ (2020, p.53). Additionally, Scheper highlights the community activism strengths of zines and how they create ‘rich spaces for resistance and connection between outlaw and outsider subjects’, often in less or non-hierarchical ways, and ‘embrace the possibilities of scripting new worlds and futures’ (2023, p.22). This is what zine 1 sought to do for racially marginalised students and staff, and through doing so, to shift:

‘...the relationality between teacher/student towards a radical version of pedagogy understood as mutual learning, cooperative skill-sharing, and a dialogic process that students, librarians, archivists, and professors enter together with both seriousness and joy’ (Scheper, 2023, p.24).

Zine 1 initially did this as a printed publication, but student and staff contributors continued to come together for the cross-college exhibitions and events, which in Scheper’s words were ‘gathering spots, the watering hole, the underground railroad, the temporary autonomous zones’ (2023, p30). The continued telling of staff and student counter-stories in these zine 1 spaces generated evidence of systemic racism and racial inequalities in the curriculum and broader academic experience, in line with CRT principles. Scheper speaks to this when she describes how zines produce evidence through an ‘accumulation of quotidian experiences of discrimination’ that are otherwise ‘benign when viewed as isolated incidents’ (2023, p.30).

While the printed zine created a permanent site for counter-stories to come together, the zine 1 exhibitions and events created temporary, embodied and experiential spaces for sharing perspectives on decolonising the arts curriculum, facilitating diverse ways of knowing, sensing and being, as well as resistance and collective visions for arts HE, with little to no dependence on the written word. The multimodality across the zine 1 project supported the expression of emotion and ‘pluriversal imagination’ (Escobar, 2020 in Ortiz, 2023) and the cultivation of empathy and live expression at the events was elevated and amplified with soapbox stages, microphones and speakers. Microphones also amplified expression and conveyed emotion in the other projects and took on new significance in the digital spaces the projects occupied following the Covid-19 pandemic, where the phrase ‘you need to unmute’ entered daily parlance. Prior to the pandemic, a preference for physical, tangible, embodied outputs and an aversion to digital remoteness was common in art schools. The pandemic forced us to use remote technologies and occupy digital spaces and this presented new opportunities for counter-storytelling communities to form and be heard while highlighting the value of online platforms for radical activism generally.   

Scheper describes zines as a form of ‘participatory community-building across time and space that millennials and Generation Z associate with digital social media platforms’ and other ‘media for digital storytelling such as podcasts’ (2023, p.21). In the ‘Podcast as Powerful Pedagogy’, Memon et al explain how podcasts offers accessibility, agency and the ability to:

'...document and share thoughts and experiences concerning contemporary forms of racism at university, in a timely and relatively immediate way which can bring attention to issues as they unfold’ (2020, p.90).

Other popular, user-generated platforms like YouTube and Wikipedia offer similar levels of accessibility, agency and immediacy, hence them being deployed for project 2 and 3. In project 3: DWN Panel Discussion 1 (2 November 2021), Nevell explains how QRpedia enables people to access (hi)stories on Wikipedia related to public sites and objects, and I encourage people to edit Wikipedia on the go using mobile devices, to make immediate responses at historical sites.

While Wikipedia was set up to be the encyclopedia “anyone can edit” (Reagle, 2010, p.8), YouTube’s founding aim was ‘to allow anyone to upload, share, and browse this content’ (Burgess and Green, 2018, p.15). Both are examples of Participatory Culture, a theory developed:

‘...in the 2000s to talk about the apparent link between more accessible digital technologies, user-created content, and shifts in the power relations between media industries and their consumers…’ (Burgess and Green, 2018, p.24).

As such, both YouTube and Wikipedia have become sites that are both celebrated and feared for allowing diverse perspectives to be shared, counter-stories to be told and communities of practice and resistance to form. YouTube and Wikipedia are associated more with popular culture than ‘high’ culture and, because of this, they are seen as potential sites ‘of symbolic struggle, empowerment, or self-expression’ (Burgess and Green, 2018, p.24), the kind rarely seen in academia but increasingly in HE providers with bold civic missions and widening participation goals. As part of this, universities are capturing student voice and encouraging counter-stories through projects and practices like those reflected upon here, aligned to the knowledge democratisation principles of sites like Wikipedia and YouTube, which could also be framed as decolonial expressions of epistemic disobedience (Mignolo, 2009).  

Additionally, YouTube is seen to offer ‘genuinely empathetic spaces for identity based communities’ and ‘increased public discourse about formerly uncomfortable, distasteful, or difficult topics in ways that other media and other methods have not’ (Burgess and Green, 2018, p.98), which directly relates to recommendations for HE and public sector development to make underrepresented voices and histories more visible. In DWN Panel Discussion 2 (8 February 2022), Claire Titley talks about the London Metropolitan Archives project ‘Switching the Lens - Rediscovering Londoners of African, Caribbean, Asian and Indigenous Heritage, 1561 to 1840’ and explains how:

'London has long been home to a very diverse population, a fact often obscured by mainstream British history which traditionally excludes the histories of people of colour, centres ‘whiteness’ and upholds narratives constructed by colonialism’.

Titley explains how the LMA project proactively highlights ‘the variety and breadth of the contribution made by Londoners from many diverse communities’ mainly drawing upon London parish records, ‘rare sources that record a person's ethnicity’ dating back to 1538. She talks through the project’s digital database and artifacts that tell stories of individuals, highlighting how technological improvements have enabled this information to be organised and shared more accessibly. She also explains how the 2020 lockdown and BLM movement gave LMA staff the time and impetus to add wider social context around the archival items, framing them to make the implicit racialised, colonial logic more visible. 

In the same panel, there is further discussion about the accessibility of digital archive databases, biases influencing how data is coded and tagged, affecting searchability and discoverability, and ultimately how humans and technological spaces influence how (hi)stories are seen and heard. These issues are also discussed in relation to Wikipedia by UAL MSc Data Science students in DWN Panel Discussion 3 (10 May 2022), while panellists from the SLG project Places Never Seen discuss how free open-source 3D modelling sites enabled them to create 1911 Festival of Empire counter-stories with distinct graphic qualities and imagination and little reliance on the written word. Places Never Seen participant Sam Baraitser-Smith talks through the virtual landscape the group created for the project, describing it as a ‘counter exhibition’ that appropriates artifacts from the original festival and recontextualises it from diverse, contemporary perspectives. Although the term counter-storytelling is not mentioned in these Decolonising Wikipedia events, our discussions highlight the power of such digital spaces for decolonial counter-storytelling, by enabling complex colonial (hi)stories to be democratically presented and accessed, in contextualised, multi-modal and, multi-layered ways by a wider range of people. And while counter-storytelling was not a term explicitly used for the Decolonising the Arts Curriculum zine and LCC Changemakers, these projects created multi-modal sites and spaces of resistance and radical possibility, the kind Solorzano and Yosso describe.