Below the Radar Transcript
Episode 65: Pandemic Conversations: Designing for Social Intervention 鈥� with Kenneth Bailey
Speakers: Paige Smith, Am Johal, Kenneth Bailey
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Paige Smith 0:06
Hello, everyone. Welcome to the 11th episode of our Below the Radar conversation series. Today we talk with Kenneth Bailey, the co-founder of the design studio for social intervention. With our host Am Johal, Kenneth discusses how social justice issues have been exacerbated during the pandemic and protests in support of racial justice and defunding the police. We hope you enjoy the episode.
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Am Johal 0:32
Hi, welcome, everyone to Below the Radar, really excited to have Kenny Bailey with us from the design studio for social intervention. He's joining us from Boston, Massachusetts. Welcome Kenny.
Kenneth Bailey 0:45
Good to be here Am and I miss you. I miss everybody in Vancouver.
Am Johal 0:52
Yeah, well, we totally miss you too. And hopefully, we will have a way of bringing you back here. And this is a strange, disorienting time for all of us. You're joining us via your cell phone video there. I'm wondering if you can just begin by introducing yourself a little bit Kenny?
Kenneth Bailey 1:11
Hi, everyone. I'm Kenneth Bailey. I'm one of the cofounders at the design studio for social intervention. We've been around for about 15 years. I'm also teaching right now and in an MFA program at Bennington College. I'm a teaching fellow. I'm there in Bennington, Vermont. And a lot of the work that the studio and I focus on is trying to figure out how to bring sort of what we know from future studies and design studies and socially engaged art into the mix around making the world a better place and sort of how to bring those practices to bare within the larger social justice sector and movements in the United States and abroad and everywhere and really excited to be talking to Am.
Kenneth Bailey 2:14
We've done a few projects there with 丁香园AV, we did a few talks about public kitchens, which was one of our projects where we pose the question of kitchens for public black schools or libraries. How will it make our cities and our neighborhoods more interesting, more convivial and more sustainable? How would it make them better? We've also done a bunch of talks about spatial justice there, which is one of the topics we like to think a lot about. And last when we've done a few conversations, and through 丁香园AV, again, around a social Emergency Response Center, which was another one of our projects. So I'm happy to be back in conversation.
Am Johal 2:55
Yeah, you were here at the Heart of the City Festival, in fact, a few years back. And, and one of the reasons I want to talk to you, Kenny, is because in your work with the design studio for social intervention, you're thinking about futurity, you're thinking about social justice, and in comes along something like a pandemic? And, and certainly, I'm wondering how your thinking has evolved? Or what a moment like this, when you take the pandemic, black lives matter, all of the other emergencies going on? What have you been thinking about the last few months as the world has unfolded in the strange, disorienting ways it has? In a lot of ways it's exacerbated the very things that you're working on already before. But this moment鈥檚 punctuated by the strains of authoritarianism, the American election as a backdrop, a kind of almost low grade Civil War, in some instances.
Kenneth Bailey 3:59
It's so true. I've been thinking a lot about this idea that what we're in right now is a kind of semiotic to physical sort of civil war with, you know, what people are doing when they go up to cops, or go up to people who are sort of representing the sort of militarized horizontal regime around sort of authoritarianism. And thank the cops in front of people of color or in front of black people who they might anticipate, are fighting for black lives, like these kinds of scenes, I think are sort of part of this sort of protracted social civil war that we're starting to experience all the way out to, you know, real concrete versions of direct violence like what we're seeing happening right now in Portland and all around, you know, the United States just Portland is in the immediate set of optics that come to mind, given what you see on Twitter. What we've been thinking a lot about, also reflected in our most recent book, or the only book that we just published, Ideas, Arrangements, Effects is this idea that social arrangements are actually being questioned right now. So people are questioning the arrangement of paying for housing, to landlords, or having to work for pay, or having to buy our food, like, these kinds of fundamental arrangements are actually being discussed right now. So we feel like the time is right, to actually create the conditions on our end, you know, and the arrangements of policing with the question and like the fight, right now for abolition. And what we see are opportunities to actually do what we've been calling for in the book, is to rearrange the social. And that means for us to really study how current forms of social life have been structured, and what those structures then produce, and how might we sort of look at social life and forms of what we call socialities, as products of arrangements of social situations like school, housing, credit, debt, rent, work, and the like, and look at the presuppositions that are embedded in that, like, you know, in order to live, we should work. And if you don't work, you don't deserve to live, because work is the point of living. You know, these kinds of fundamental assumptions that are sort of made in the way our lives are arranged. And we feel like right now, we have a time and a space, and a one bill that might not be open for forever, that we can actually start to look at and question and rethink, these fundamental assumptions about the operations of our social lives.
Am Johal 7:19
Yeah, just, you know, a few months ago, where, you know, progressive economists were talking about printing money and not borrowing money from the banks, but from central banks, all of these things that were viewed as outside of the realm of possibility have all become possible. And being enacted in the matter of a few months. And so these moments of emergency can bring about this idea of possibility. But of course, in the in the back rooms, where people are imagining stimulus funding and other things. We're not in those back rooms Kenny. So there's another world being imagined. That is sort of like the world we had a few months ago. And so I guess, one of the questions I'd have is how to scale up these conversations in such a way that they enter into the realm of political possibility. And this other question, you bring up around work as well. It's also an attempt maybe or a time to reimagine what uselessness might be and uselessness I mean, in a good way, in a good sense in terms of time and leisure and, and a right to define life as something outside of work.
Kenneth Bailey 8:35
Exactly. Have you heard of Erin Manning's book Towards the Pragmatics of the Useless?
Am Johal 8:41
No, I have not.
Kenneth Bailey 8:42
You should definitely check that out. Because that's a lot of sort of the kind of thinking that she's doing in that book. Um, and, and I think this question around bringing things to scale is exactly what we're struggling with, we're, you know, having a hard time, you know, literally building the architectures to even make these conversations available across, you know, the population of the city. Nevertheless, to make that available across populations of multiple cities, and I think that's one of the problems we're facing right now is one, how do we build these architectures for these conversations to actually come to scale? And how do we hold them in ways that make them translatable into concrete propositions that communities can enact? While we fight for them at both the local, regional and national and often international levels? It's something that we're struggling with ourselves, and we need all the help we can get. And in terms of finding likely partners, like universities or cities or networks of grassroots organizations to really help us build to scale in order to actually enact the kinds of conversations we feel like we're ready for.
Am Johal 10:05
Now, Kenny, I know you're a really social guy, because when you were visiting Vancouver, we could barely walk a block in Chinatown without you hugging two grandmothers. So I'm wondering how social distancing has affected your social life, but also your social practice as an artist? How have you had to adjust to the time? How are you finding that you've had to alter or rearrange the way that you work and are in the world?
Kenneth Bailey 10:36
It's been a real struggle for how we proceed in terms of our practice at the studio, because so much of how we think about engaging in the world assumes an outside, it assumes building platforms for people to come together in open space. And so we're really, we're kind of excited about these opportunities to sort of rethink open space, in ways that make it make more sense for the communities that we're talking about. But for us, it's been really, really hard to sort of wrap our minds around the prospects of not getting to work outside for a long time, we were like moving our work so far in that direction. And now we're just trying to figure out how to, how to do it, how to do work in public, that still takes into account this choreography of distance of being six feet apart. And, one of the other things we're excited about is that the COVID has sort of brought to bear the arrangements of body and space in a way that now we're able to sort of talk about choreographies and the processions of everyday life, and frameworks around racism and racial justice. So it's, it's afforded us a lot of new conversations. But it's also been very difficult for us as a team that really practices our, our practice in open space.
Am Johal 12:20
What are some of the projects you're going to be taking on in the coming months as we head towards November? And I guess, you know, the present emergency will likely go on for several months, at least, if not longer. And I'm wondering how you're thinking through that and who you're collaborating with?
Kenneth Bailey 12:43
We're trying to, again, build these conversations around rethinking life. The framework we're using right now, or the placeholder we're using right now around these conversations we're calling Lifelab. And in it, we're sort of proposing a problem that for lots, lots of us, many of us in the cities that we live in, we've organized life in ways that have made it untenable. And I know you all know that very well, in Vancouver, so much of the discourse around everyday life is framed around the impossibilities of living in Vancouver, given the market rate of housing situation. And we're really interested in trying to put a larger frame around these kinds of problems to say that your problems are interrelated between work, home, credit, debt, health, food, things like public life, leisure, culture, and the like to say that now we have an opportunity to propose new ways to live together. So that's the primary sort of aim of work that we're trying to really get up and off the ground. Another thing we're doing inside of this project called Lifelab, is a smaller project that is looking to propose new ways to conceive of work. Saying what if jobs were organized like adventures instead of jobs being organized like jobs.
Kenneth Bailey 14:20
And in that sort of proposition, we're trying to organize a series of adventures, that would be useful to grassroots organizing groups, social justice groups, environmental justice groups, but also potentially fun for college students, high school students who may not be going completely back to campus life but are looking for things to do that could potentially earn them things, or maybe earn them money. We haven't decided on all the incentives yet. So we're trying to start to create the conditions for people to engage in what we're calling sort of propositional politics where they actually start to test and imagine alternatives.
Kenneth Bailey 15:12
And at the same time advocate for them through the act of enacting it, as well as sort of more traditional advocacy at the scale of cities, and often through cities, you know, states and national advocacy as well. So maybe you all can, we can figure out a way to try to do some versions of Lifelab in Vancouver, with you all as partners, if it's possible.
Am Johal 15:41
Interestingly, in BC here, the lab that does blood testing is called LifeLabs. So we might get sued, but we can figure out a way to get around that.
Kenneth Bailey 15:51
Yeah, we don't have to call it that, it's just a placeholder inside the organization, but we, you know, different places might call them different things.
Am Johal 16:00
Yeah, and what's your read of the situation in Massachusetts, Kenny, where you're, you're based in Boston?
Kenneth Bailey 16:10
In what sense?
Am Johal 16:11
Just in terms of how COVID is being handled by the state, but also, Black Lives Matters. In Massachusetts, how it's playing out there on the ground?
Kenneth Bailey 16:25
Well, I was before I was in a month ago, I was in LA and the difference between sort of California and LA and Boston has been stark. Boston people are pretty at home, like I would say, people are really, you know, sort of engaged in social distance, maybe it's because it's New England, maybe there's something about the culture here that was, it was predisposed to sort of staying in, but I think people are being pretty distant here. Where, you know, California is so warm, and it's so, it was, like people were, it was, I think it was much harder for people to, you know, really just stay in. It's just, you know, runs counter to public culture. So, it's been funny going back. And in Massachusetts, where I feel like, you know, you know, people pretty much are at home. That's sort of my personal take. And in terms of, you know, questions around abolition and black lives matter. You know, I, I wasn't here, when a lot of this stuff happened here locally in Boston, I was in California, and now you know, things are kind of sliding down. And you see a lot more action, like, in other cities, but we are seeing, you know, the Mayor start to build a task force to actually try to tackle racism in cities. And then we'll see what happens with that work. And what else? Yeah, I think we were seeing moments right now of inflection that we potentially can take advantage of, to try to move brand new conversations about how cities imagine the good life.
Kenneth Bailey 18:31
Because I think so, one of the presuppositions that people in power hold is that we all kind of want the same goal in life, and that is, one we're maximizing our market value, and we're not useless. And, you know, we're making enough money to pay for everything. And that's not the only way we can organize lives. It's there are a lot of assumptions in those ideas about what makes for good lives, that then create arrangements that for a lot of us have very little social wound for how we are, or how we want to be in the world, like we aren't, aren't like some of us might value or uselessness more than we value our market ability in a sense, but that way of being isn't sort of there is a need for that way of being such that one can survive in the current arrangements, where one's marketability drives everything. And you know, you're trying to maximize your, the market itself. So I feel like we're at an inflection point where these kinds of assumptions about the arrangements of life are really, really able to be raised. The question then comes back to doing it and getting those questions raised to scale such that we can actually do something concrete about it.
Am Johal 19:55
Kenny, thank you so much for joining us on Below the Radar and we're gonna link to your book in the bio when this comes out and look forward to seeing you in Vancouver.
Kenneth Bailey 20:07
The book is out!
Am Johal 20:07
Yeah, the book is out, the name again Kenny?
Kenneth Bailey 20:10
Ideas, Arrangements, Effects.
Am Johal 20:12
Okay, thank you so much for joining us on Below the Radar.
Kenneth Bailey 20:17
I hope it sounded good. Thank you so much for having me Am.
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Paige Smith 20:24
Thanks again to Kenneth Bailey for joining us on this episode of our Below the Radar conversation series. Below the Radar is created by 丁香园AV's Vancity Office of Community Engagement and is recorded on the territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. As always, thank you to the team that puts this podcast together, including myself, Paige Smith, Fiorella Pinillos, Kathy Feng, and Jackie Obungah. David Steele is the composer of our theme music, and we thank you for listening. Tune in next time for a brand new episode of Below the Radar.
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