Happy Anniversary Critical Practice

Survival through flexibility, specifically organisational and interpersonal give and take, is something Marsha Bradfield explores as she traces the long-standing preoccupations of Critical Practice Research Cluster (London, UK). These include value beyond econometrics and other fraught abstractions, as well as histories of commoning and the ethics and aesthetics of openness. Bradfield reflects on the cluster’s self-organisation and its projects, among them the markets convened by Critical Practice to date. Here the fourth iteration, TransActing: A Market of Values, is presented as a creative experiment for reclaiming the public marketplace as an interstice where diverse values, including commercial and non-commercial ones, are produced, evaluated and re-evaluated as they jostle together. TransActing is also described as a manifestation of the cluster’s axiological heterogeneity. This and other core values are celebrated on the tenth anniversary of Critical Practice.