Reframing the Class Divide: Art that Challenges Poverty and Economic Injustice

Reframing the Class Divide: Art that Challenges Poverty and Economic Injustice is a practice based PhD, that investigates if it’s possible to use attentive and political practices of listening to successfully challenge contemporary arts exclusion of working class subjects, audiences and experiences, and if so, with what social and political effects.

I base my practice as research (PaR) on recent evidence that illustrates the scale of the exclusion of working-class people from the cultural industries in the UK (Brook, O’Brien, Taylor, 2018). In particular, I’m interested in attentive listening as a means of political enablement for those excluded from the social turn, and art world at large. By attentive listening, I refer to Jean Luc Nancy’s distinction between listening and hearing (Nancy, 2007, p. 6). For Nancy, listening is a process of inter-subjective interpretation, as a pose to a straightforward auditory transfer of information. Through my research and artistic practice, I explore how listening might be deployed as an encounter that gives voice to people from low-income backgrounds; a demographic frequently excluded and misrepresented by those working in the social and relational turn, and the art world at large (Brook, O’Brien, Taylor, 2018; Davis, 2012).

Central to this study are two key terms; relational aesthetics and political aes- thetics (Bourriaud, 1998, p. 113). I use relational aesthetics as a framework to examine a particular subset of the social turn, and explore its limitations, in particular its failure to define and differentiate the type of inter-class relationships produced by relational art. I use political aesthetics to refer to the work of French philosopher Jacques Ranciere who argues the interconnectedness of the domains of aesthetics and politics. For Ranciere, art is inherently political as it affects what can be sensed; felt, heard, seen and smelt, which in turns shapes the possibility of thought and associated political action within art as a catalyst to think outside the box (Ranciere, 2004).