Censorship, Precarity, and Diversity: A Workshop

Over the past three decades, the adjunctification of higher education and the casualization of museum labor has led to a generalized state of precarity in the arts field. Intersecting with these conditions, we have seen increasing censorship in the wake of new governmental and institutional policies that employ rhetorics of inclusivity to shut down public discussion of the complexities of diversity, equity, accessibility, and inclusion. Yet it is explicitly through increased attention to diversity within and beyond institutional spaces that art has claimed a greater relevance to non-conventional art publics, whether by inviting new publics into museum and academic spaces or bringing art into communities that have not historically had access to cultural resources.

This intersection of precarity and censorship presents a crisis for the art field: how to continue the vital work of diversifying our field when labor and political conditions are inhospitable to open discussion. This workshop is a call for strategic connection and group thinking about the intersection of precarity and censorship in the fields represented by CAA membership: education, artistic practice, museums, non-profits, and publications. We want to hear from a range of voices about their specific experiences of how these current conditions impact our ability to address diversity in its various forms. During the workshop short presentations will be followed by a moderated public discussion toward a goal of outlining possible actions we (participants) could undertake, ideally in further collaborations beyond the workshop, to shift the state of the field.