The Design Research Lab is a network of people, organisations, and non-human agents engaged at the intersection of technologies, materials, and social practices. Our aim is to design socially and ecologically sustainable tools, spaces, and knowledge that support people’s participation in a digital society – based on common principles of inclusiveness and respect for the planet. This puts the basic democratic right to take part in the digital sphere into practice. We start our research from individual lifeworlds and the needs of minoritized groups, beyond consumer majorities.
We are an interdisciplinary team of designers, researchers, tech-enthusiasts and critical thinkers from Berlin University of the Arts, German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society, as well as Einsteincenter Digital Future (ECDF).
In this week’s session of the Virtual Colloquium we will have Liene Ozolina as our guests, her talk is titled “Art and Activism for Beginners: Socially Engaged Art in Post-Socialist Neoliberalism”
In this talk I examine activist art initiatives in the context of post-socialist neoliberalism. I draw on an ethnographic study of a programme for young artists called “Art and activism for beginners” that took place in Latvia in 2021 and 2022. The programme was organised by a local arts organisation and gathered around twenty participants that were interested in creating socio-politically engaged art. Drawing on participant observations of the programme activities and on interviews with the organisers and participants, I examine, on the one hand, what it means to do activism when words like “solidarity”, “class” and “social justice” are rarely heard in the Latvian public discourse due to their echoes of the Soviet socialist past and, on the other hand, how the process of creating socio-politically engaged art is shaped by the neoliberal context within which it is taking place, as activism itself becomes a project with tight deadlines, specific expected outcomes and strictly monitored budgeting. The talk explores how imaginations of activism and resistance are shaped by memories carried in the Latvian society of the Soviet past, by contemporary neoliberal structures and political subjectivities, and by Western activist discourses of solidarity building, anti-capitalism and anti-racism.
Liene Ozoliņa holds a PhD in Sociology from the London School of Economics and Political Science (2015). Her research interests are related to the processes of neoliberalisation in post-socialist societies, post-socialist politics and culture, activist art in contemporary Latvia, as well as ethnographic methods in social sciences. Liene’s first book, entitled Politics of Waiting: Workfare, post-Soviet austerity and the ethics of freedom, was published in 2019 by the University of Manchester. Her articles have been published in British Journal of Sociology, Slavic Review, Journal of Baltic Studies and East European Politics and Societies.
For the speakers list of this semester and for information on registration, please have a look here.