Arts & International Affairs: Vol. 3, No.3/Vol. 4, No. 1, Winter 2018/2019 | Page 8

INTRODUCTION: UNDERSTANDING MULTIMODALITIES
IN ARTS AND SOCIAL SCIENCES
ter all. The accompanying photographs blend seamlessly with the discussion to create a
richly affective account of a timely and important topic.
The second is an interview between Brandon Bauer and artist Oliver Ressler on the latter’s
U.S.-based exhibition Catastrophe Bonds, which explores emerging forms of democracy
and grassroots initiatives in the face of multiple threats against democratic institutions.
The films and photographs that frame the interview provide the necessary context
for the exhibition but also constitute an inspirational and diverse collection of activist
and participatory practices in their own right. Here, multimodality takes on a life of its
own and becomes a journey in everyday politics across borders.
Primoz Kovacic’s “real” job is meaning-making through maps. In the photo essay in this
volume, he provides a different modal map, through photographs, to suggest meanings
about Nairobi and the space of Mathare within it. Taking vulnerability as his theme,
he explores the interstices of everyday life in Nairobi’s neighborhoods where showing
weakness could determine the boundary between life and death.
Ronald Gratz declarative speech is a different mode altogether. As a policymaker and
practitioner, he refracts current political and cultural anxieties through a historical and
spatial lens to propose a vocabulary of cosmopolitan responsibilities. Going beyond
the obsolete concept of a nation state, Gratz describes the contours of a new vision for
Europe�a Europe of cultures in which the various modalities comprising it exist in
harmony.
Participatory Practices
Participatory practices have destabilized the imagination and power that produced
the authoritative gaze, or the act of observation and subject positions in the arts
(Foucault 2012). The control and subordination of the Orient in Edward Said’s Orientalism
(1979) arises from the knowledge of the subject being the exclusive preserve
of a few in the occident: “knowledge of the Orient, because generated out of strength,
in a sense creates the Orient, the Oriental, and his world” (ibid.:40). The application of
Said’s ideas to knowledge production practices beyond that of the Orientalism have led
to an examination of the object–subject position in which knowledge results from the
authoritative gaze.
Participatory action research (PAR) unsettles the relationship between theory and practice,
and the privileged position of the researcher in the production of knowledge (Huesca
2003). Most of the essays in this multimodal issue address PAR implicitly in destabilizing
the author/subject position. Even Ronald Grätz’s speech exhorts Europeans, not
just intellectuals, toward finding an ethic to overcome current practices of populism and
nationalism. Educationist Paulo Freire’s pedagogy, that informs PAR, articulates a world
in which the meaning of existence, that of humans and their surroundings, arises from
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