Last updated on 18 oct. 2023
"Sharing subaltern knowledge through international cultural collaborations" (SHAKIN') is a European collaboration supported by the EU's Erasmus+ program: Strategic Higher Education Partnerships for Innovation.

The project brings together six partners from four countries (France, Germany, Serbia, Sweden): three universities (University Lumière Lyon 2, Bauhaus-University Weimar, University of Arts Belgrade) and three cultural organizations (Association Independent Cultural Scene Serbia, Stockholm Museum of Women’s History, le LABA), all of them being internationally recognised in their domain of activity.
The partners joined their expertise to find new ways to think, work and collaborate that address crucial contemporary challenges affecting European culture fields in order to provide students with adequate professional ethos for the jobs of tomorrow.

Visit the website of the project: shakinproject.eu

News

Context

Market logic, populist policies, migrations and globalization, ecological transition or digital technologies affected the contexts of culture management, policy, research, and teaching in various tectonic ways over the last decades. But teaching and training in culture fields have largely maintained narrowly professional, nation-based assumptions of culture, politics, participation and education. As a result, learning processes are not just ill-fitting to provide relevant knowledge and “well-equipped” professionals, but are insensitive to excluded, marginalised and oppressed voices and life experiences of today.

Objectives

SHAKIN’ pursued three interrelated objectives:

  • Connecting academic and subaltern knowledges through sharing research methodologies in innovative forms of thinking, learning and teaching. We advocate for the constant imbrication of academic, artistic and subaltern knowledge, for the activation of critical theories in professional environments and the implementation of subaltern knowledge within academia. We impacted our existing curricula and developed training models for other institutions.
 
  • Professionalising (post-graduate) students with new forms of cultural consciousness, nurtured by theoretical tools and endorsed by practical skills. We empowered all the participants and participating organisations by giving them action research skills and by supporting innovative ways of working with others, based on the idea of collective creativity.
 
  • Supporting international cooperation through projects including subaltern perspectives. Culture professionals are growingly required to “go international”, at the risk of exoticism, depoliticization, standardization. We conversely promoted meaningful international projects that rely on mutual understanding, situatedness, specific expertise.
Productions

The project resulted in four outputs:

1. WHO KNOWS?, an in-process digital handbook aiming to disseminate subaltern methodologies. The collected entries are structured through keywords and five “paths”:
(Un)framing knowledge, Inquiring, Cooperating with(in) arts and culture, Learning / Education from below, Remembering

2. SHAKIN’ THE CLASSROOM, a toolbox aiming to innovate the learning and teaching practice. The collected methods are sorted in nine ways of sharing knowledge: ludic, collective, poetic, processual, contextual, communing, experience-based, corporeal, othering

3. WORK ON THE WILD SIDE!, a platform that supports (young) professionals engaged in international projects with subaltern perspectives. We identified four primary needs (confidence, fragility, networking, solidarity) resulting in a set of resources, a mentoring guide, and the frame for an international mentoring program.

4. UNLEARN & RELEARN, an extra-curricular seminar bringing subaltern knowledge and cross-disciplinary themes absent from mainstream cultural management
programmes. The curriculum offers not only a possible frame for multi-topic seminar, but also guidelines for a meaningful implementation in various contexts.

During the three years of the project, we implemented various intertwined activities:
- Eight Transnational meetings
- Four Multiplier Events in Weimar, Germany (July 2022), Lyon, France (March 2023), Stockholm, Sweden (May 2023) and Belgrade, Serbia (June 2023), gathering more than 350 participants in total, and presenting all the outputs to a local and international audience of (young) professionals, students, academics, activists, artists
- Learning, training and teaching activities: Two groups of about forty participants attended in two editions (2021-2022 & 2022-2023) an international workshop (Belgrade, October 2021; Weimar, October 2022) and then an international Winter School (Lyon, March 2022 and March 2023)
- Four Intellectual Outputs in open access: a handbook, a toolbox, a platform and a curriculum (see above)
Impact

The processes, experience, relationships and insights developed, tested and disseminated throughout the project have contributed to

  • the inclusion of subaltern knowledge in our academic, cultural, and teaching environments
  • the diversification of knowledge sources and ways of working together
  • the spreading of more open, inclusive and reflexive working environments in the culture and academic fields
  • an increased awareness of difficulties and challenges of working in intercultural groups and methods to facilitate this kind of cooperation
SHAKIN' had an impact on participants, participating organisations and stakeholders on different levels:

Participants
  • Professionalising (post-graduate) students by giving them action research skills and by supporting innovative ways of working with others, based on the idea of collective creativity
  • Increase of job opportunities
  • Improvement of the participants’ language skills (English)
Participating organisations
  • Innovation of our existing curricula and development of training models for other institutions
  • Solidification of the SHAKIN’ partnership as well as deeper and more frequent international collaborations between partners
  • Cross-fertilisation of local and European projects
Stakeholders
  • Raising awareness of more in-depth ecological, political, social and technological perspectives
  • Identification of the needs, political commitments and expectations that students or young professionals have from their sector and the inclusion of current phenomena in their professional activity
  • Creation of a space for reflection on the political dimensions of work in arts and culture

Erasmus Programme of the European Union

University of Arts in Belgrade

LABA

Independant Culture Scene of Serbia

Stockholms Kvinnohistoriska

Bahaus-Universität Weimar