Wednesday, September 27, 2017
Definitions of Social Practice
These are our initial provisional definitions of social practice - we will all be adding to them and editing them in our minds throughout the term. One of the great things about attempting to make definitions is how many issues and questions they bring to the surface for us to think about. Let's all add our definitions below as comments!!! (Thanks Eric for getting us organized to do it this way.)
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Social practice is an interweaving of life and art together. It focuses on engagement, co-creation, human relationships, and the process as the work itself. Its goal is to catalyze change through shared experience.
ReplyDeleteOur group began with an exploration of ideas that when I was confronted with a request to share my definition. I begrudgingly shared I was insisting on owning it as: Social practice is anything that is not not social practice.
ReplyDeleteI shard this definition because I had been getting the impression that it was common for discussions about social practice to involve claiming things that were not created to be social practice as social practice. This is often accompanied by instances where some things claimed to be social practice, or not, would intentionally be rejected as being social practice. Which lead me to a definition that worked well for my understanding.
Further discussion yielded specifications such as engaging the difference between interesting social practice and uninteresting social practice.
And then finally I shared that a definition of social practice is an individual, or group's manifesto of how they view social practice and not a totalitarian declaration of what it is beyond the ranges in which it applies. Followed by my insisting that I not lead the thoughts on the matter.
All this caused Katie to say something really interesting that we filtered into a definition more valuable to the group, and here it is:
"Social practice is art that engages, collaborates with, and mirrors the ever expansive cultural context in which it is being generated."
Social practice invites public collaboration in processes/activities that reframe/intervene within the established infrastructures that impact human experience. Some examples of those infrastructures include human-created geographies, language, customs and behaviors and the power relationships built into all of those things.
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