User:₳(ɤ)ɠɭaḯa/P R O J E C T P R O P O S A L

From XPUB & Lens-Based wiki

* To be added references within the text *

What do you want to make?

I would like to explore the bureaucratic dramaturgies within the educational institution I am currently part as a masters student - the case of WDKA. How bureaucratic rituals change through years inside this institution and how these established or de-established rituals constitute material evidence of its transformation. The main umbrella questions that float in my head and hopefully over my research are:

1) How the educational bureaucratic apparatus as a visible - invisible infrastructure can reflect policies regarding migration filter and border control and how this is reflected partly on the documents themselves?

2) How newly established bureaucratic rituals/structures can indicate or demonstrate the corporization of the institution.

3) How a bureaucratic document can (de)-construct, classify or fragment the person and what disruption or conflict emerges when the personal story / experience / insight comes upon the artifact of a document?

I would dare to name – at the moment at least - the structure/the form of this project as a counter-archive that will hold and embrace my field research. By the entity archive I perceive the collection and concentration of the material of my research that will attempt to create a parallel and possibly confronting narrative, putting together fragmented knowledge about the institution and address hopefully the above open-ended questions. By the prefix counter I want to reverse the given meaning of the archive as a closed structure/entity of knowledge belonging to the arche (those in power) and deal with questions of openness and public. Archive as a space of appearance of marginalized knowledge that provokes the emergence of discourse within the institution.

The archive will potentially have a material form (a box/ a folder/ a holder / a shelf within the institution) and an immaterial form (a website, a wiki page, a platform).



How do you plan to make it?

My research will attempt to extract and re-create knowledge using different means, steps and tools.

1. Entering the administration's - usually inaccessible - territory with the great help of Leslie and opening the archive that holds the personal documents of students for the period 2002-2022 (until my academic year). This spying process includes the practices and actions of browsing, understanding, scanning of “interesting” cases (WHO TELLS A CASE IS INTERESTING OR NOT? more explanation should be added), comparing documents within this 20-year period, notetaking, observing.

2. I will try to create a new folder/holder of the scanned material focusing on the documents and looking more thoroughly the selected material at this stage by performing editing, highlighting, classifying and for sure censoring the “sensitive” data of the students.

3. In parallel with the document investigation I am planning to organize a series of small interviews taken from:

a. Leslie, as course coordinator and caretaker of everybody and everything

b. COIA (Center of International Affairs) employees. Since COIA in collaboration with IND constitutes the first filter in the application process and the ones who are in charge of the students’ “scanning” (term used by COIA employee during our interview). I would like to highlight the friction of this intense relation between the two different but highly interconnected institutions.

c. my peers – students of xpub and lens based media as the third part of this process. My intention at this point is to extract the intimate personal story behind the struggle of bureaucracy and talk about vulnerability and violence hidden behind the document.

4. Investigation of the organization NUFFIC (the dutch organization of internationalization of education) that started collaborating with educational institutions from 2011 and is in charge of checking the validity of the diplomas via technology during the application process. I will also browse and keep notes on the factsheets that they produce every year with statistics on higher education.

5. I will keep checking the IND website to get a taste of the state’s narrative on migration and the forms/applications that are there. Maybe too ambitious plan. However, a browsing is for sure worth trying.

6. Playing around and messing with bureaucratic aesthetics, language and forms by creating small prototypes and distribute them to my peers (xpub1, xpub2, students, tutors). Forced memory story forms, stamps, questionnaires, leeszaal docs are ongoing experiments that will be included at the archive-holder at the end of the year.

{ My candidacy and hopefully my participation in the IMR as an ongoing project that runs in parallel. Attending, taking part, observing or spying the procedures of this instrument of negotiation with the managers, as a tool provided by the institution. In case I participate or attend the IMR I will try to unpack through my lens the structure and the limitations that encloses. Maybe I can add my notes and conversations at the archive/holder at the end of the year in case a find efficient connections with the rest of the research.}


What is your timetable?

NOVEMBER 

   • reading and annotating rituals
   • browsing, scanning the archive of the students’ documents  2002-2022
   • writing thesis 
   • Leeszaal event preparation and event day 7/11/2023
   • deadline for thesis outline and project proposal
   • first meeting on November 21st , 15:00 – 17:00 INSTITUTE’S PARTICIPATION COUNCIL (IMR) and notetaking
   • Always checking if I still have a question.

DECEMBER 

   • reading and annotating rituals
   • browsing, scanning the archive of the students’ documents  2002-2022 (!finish the browsing before  Christmas vacation)
   • (IMR meetings and notes)
   • writing thesis 
   • deadline for assessment
   • fake assesement 
   • real assessment 11/12/2023
   • Always checking if I still have a question.
   • Happy New Year

JANUARY 

   • reading and annotating rituals
   • Keep writing
   • Keep attending IMR and notetaking. 
   • transcription and edit of the the interview with COIA administrator
   • prepare and structure my interview with Leslie
   • Always checking if I still have a question.

FEBRUARY 

   • reading and annotating rituals
   • Keep writing. More intense writing
   • Keep attending IMR and notetaking. 
   • do the interview with Leslie and transcribe
   • Start looking more thoroughly the filtered material that you gained form the investigation on the students’ docs archive. Start the classification, comparison, annotation. Include your observations in the thesis (2nd chapter).
   • Start organising during the winter break your loose interviews/conversations with tour peers.

MARCH 

   • reading and annotating rituals
   • Keep writing. Even more intense writing
   • Do some small interviews/ conversations with your peers. See if this material is fruitful to include it in your thesis (3rd chapter)
   • Writiiingggg AAAAA
   • Check if the question is in your text or start feel desperate and small
   • somewhere close the thesis draft

APRIL 

   • deliver the final text
   • less reading rituals
   • start the production/ making mode
   • see the material you have so far and start figure out ways of organising, classifying, editing 
   • start thinking of the time and space of appearance, the receivers of this information. The opening of the archive moment
   • keep messing around with bureaucratic forms. Keeip being annoying by making people to fill the forms
   • start thinking on the ARCHIVE HOLDER, deposit of past, present, future (How do I invite people for potential extension of the research?)

MAY 

   • less reading rituals
   • continue with production/ making mode
   • maybe continue with some conversations on the intimate stories to enrich your archive
   • keep messing around with bureaucratic forms. Make people to fill the forms
   • design the archive holder and materialise

JUNE 

   • design your thesis booklet and print
   • concentrate everything and finalize the material of the holder itself
   • graduation show preparations
   • collective publication preparations
   • assessment preparation
   • release of the forced memory story form. Make the book and give it as gift to your peers (fun project/experiment in parallel)
   • graduation


* This three last questions are deeply inter-connected for me but I will do my best to untangle them and structure a bit my chaotic thinking *


Why do you want to make it?

One of my drives to start shifting (from the larger context I was interested in question 7) and focusing on my personal experience of studying in WDKA where conversations that I had with people regarding the way matter is addressed and put into discourse. From the first moment I came to Netherlands I noticed that within WDKA and other educational and cultural institutions, there was a profound circulation of ideas and radical (political) terms which seemed at the beginning exciting and very intriguing. However, as I was unpacking my short experience and keeping disguising on how politics and publics are produced in education, I realized that despite the radicality of the reproduced narratives, there was a lack in how somebody questions the structure. The structure allows you to talk but in shallow level while at the same time does not allow you to question or even intervene in (infra)-structures and policies and create transformative possibilities.

My intention through this project is to make a situated research about the institution and within the institution and attempt to unfold or highlight or just start observing the way things are given and how we can deal with the given (often naturalized) matters (maybe this is not a good word).

Conversations I had with xpub friends about our experiences, the different pathways we have been through, our different cultural backgrounds and sometimes disproportionate struggles in comparison with others were crucial and a starting point for my first thinkings on this project .

I would like to highlight, unfold or just open a conversation within an educational structure on how the education in a European country can reflect policies around migration, border control, in a less profound way. How education can filter and distinguish, how it can reproduce efficiently itself and how we can disrupt even instantly the continuity of these up-bottom processes by start putting things on the table.


Who can help you and how?

• Leslie the gatekeeper of knowledge and the caretaker that gives access and her priceless insight , experience and information

• Manetta, Marloes, Joseph to provide their knowledge, feedback and some fertile ground to my flying seed-ideas • My beloved xpub2 peers with their patience filling my forms and provide me with feedback, support, care and their personal documents

• xpub3s (<3) and potentially xpub1s sharing their bureaucracy struggles and stories

• COIA administrators/officers

• IMR (and CMR like Lila) members for gossiping and criticizing the procedures and take notes on them

• maybe some other people that I am not able to name at this point


Relation to previous practice

** maybe this part should be smaller **

Coming from a spatial architectural background, I have been cultivating a interest and trying to incorporate in my work the site-specificity as a perspective take as a starting point my surroundings in order to perform practices of counter-archiving, counter-memory, mapping.

In my diploma thesis Counter-monument for the self settled Afghan camp in Agyia of Patras” a counter-monument was created on the currently vacant site of the former self-organized refugee camp in Patras that hosted Afghan populations and was demolished by the Greek State in 2009 as part of anti-immigration state policies, also related with the unfolding of gentrification processes in the broader area. The research was mainly archaeological and involved collecting “traces” regarding everyday life in the camp. Data were collected through digital ethnographic methods, comprising of refugees-generated representations in the form of online posts in platforms and social media, providing invaluable insights of the camp’s everyday social reproduction. Subsequently, we produced an archive of audio excerpts and lists of objects that reconstruct instant moments of everyday life experiences within the camp.

I consider counter-memory as the strategy towards reconstructing a series of stories, narratives and even the very existence of the marginalized others. The strategy of a counter-monument challenges dominant contemporary representations of the site’s history, along with the mechanisms through which such representations are institutionalized and disseminated, while activating memories and narratives that have been concealed and displaced.

My research thesis, titled “Five experiential reconstructions of Piraiki Patraiki’s occupation” was developed around the production of an archive concerning the reconstruction of narratives related to a factory’s premises in Patras, occupied by the factory’s workers for three months in 1991. Through a qualitative research approach and the conduct of interviews with individuals who participated in the occupation, we created a series of five experiential maps, one for each participant. Of particular interest for our study were the hierarchical relationships between the people involved in the occupation as they were re-constructed by the participants 28 years after the occupation period.

Through the aforemetioned work, I perceive archive as a public artistic practice and as an act of emancipation that enables the deconstruction of identities, concepts and groups from naturalized ideological images and confer meaning in words, concepts, terms which have been emptied of meaning.

The project How do we library that? or alternatively Garden Leeszaal was crucial in diving into the structure of libraries as systems of producing knowledge and unpacking classification as a process that (un)names, distinguishes, excludes, displaces, organizes life. It was crucial for me in order to start understanding the notion of infra-structure . Libraries as complex social infrastructures. From the library to the section to the shelf to the book to the page to the text. The zooming in and zooming out process. The library as a plain text. During the collective moment in Leeszaal was really moving seeing people literally diving into recycle bins, grab books, tear pages apart, drawing, pen plotting, weaving words together, cutting words, removing words, overwriting, printing, scanning. It was kind of magic having an object in the end. A whole book made by all of them in the evening. Having them creating the object. Stations, machines, a cloud of cards. A sleeve that warms up THE BOOK.

"to change the physical form of artifacts is to change the act of reading, but profoundly to transform the metaphoric network structuring the relation of world to world. To change the material artifacts is to transform the context and circumstances for interacting with the words, which inevitably change the meaning of the word as well. This transformation of meaning is especially potent when the words reflexively interact with the inscription technologies that produce them. "

This experience is gonna be enlightening in the ways I will manipulate the document at the second stage of the project.

My involvement in intersectional political groups and actions related to migration, feminism, environment, labour is always an experience and a lens through which I see and practice things. Overlapping spheres of doing, talking, practicing, existing. +++


Relation to a larger context

The last many years I have developed an interest in the notion of border. How a border is defined, how as an entity defines (territories, places, people, etc) and how is performed. I used to think of borders in a material concrete way, coming from a country of European South that constitutes a rigid/strict/violent border – the European border – that repulses and kills thousands of migrants and refugees from Asia and Africa.

One of the main topics emerged from the perspective of migrants and refugees was the state of being un-documented. What it means to be documented and what inefficiently documented within a territory?

My identity as a privileged migrant coming from the South Europe to the North for studies did not allow me to understand entirely the precarity and the violence of being in the marginal state of existing and non existing in the eyes of state. I started perceiving bureaucratic apparatus as an omnipresent immaterial border, a ghost infrastructure that you always encounter but don’t really see, an infrastructure that lays in between the cold grey zone of visibility and invisibility. How bureaucracy makes us stupid and vulnerable in front of it? We rarely question it but we always have to perform it efficiently in order to exist properly.

Although, these thoughts were (and still are) flying aggressively inside my head, I decided to zoom in and take advantage of my current situation as a master student in Netherlands starting my small situated (maybe ethnographical) research within the dutch institution that hosts me.

References (current and potential)

Books:

  • Bourdieu, P. (1984). *Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste*. Harvard University Press.
  • Graeber, D. (2015). The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy. Melville House Publishing.
  • Katherine Hayles, Lunenfeld, P., Burdick, A., and MIT Press (2005). *Writing Machines*. Cambridge; London: MIT Press.
  • Khosravi, S. (2021). *Waiting - A Project in Conversation*. Bielefeld Transcript.
  • Le Guin, U.K. (1999). The Dispossessed. Turtleback Books.
  • Samellas, A. (2020). "(Forced) Movement". kyklada.press


Journals


Videos


Websites

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