“No ‘We’ Should be Taken for Granted”: Forms, Practices, and Relations of Participation in Art Projects

This thesis explores participation as a way of organizing for more just, ethical societies and organizations with the empirical case of participatory art. As a form of democratic organizing, participation promises to include formerly excluded actors in collectivities. However, while participatory practices are euphorically supported and ubiquitous in contemporary society, from urban planning initiatives and social welfare to climate activism and self-managing teams, such initiatives have also been criticized for failing their ethical promise. Many studies criticize participation for being a dusty notion and empty signifier, one that shifts responsibilities to marginalized positions, ignores unequal distribution of possibilities to participate, and exploits participants for organizations’ own agendas. Against the backdrop of this tension between the hope and critique of participation, and acknowledging these weaknesses of participation, this study carefully sides with the hope placed in these endeavors, and asks: How do participatory art projects build collectivity, and how can participatory organizing contest and survive its instrumentalization?

Reconceptualizing participation as an organizing principle, and not a mere question of providing (physical) access, this study turns to more subtle and easily overlooked dimensions that characterize participation. I contribute to two branches of literature that center participation, literature on open, fluid organizing and literature on alternative organizing, by attending to more complex, ambivalent and post-identitarian modes of organizing. The empirical core of this thesis is my multiple case study of 143 contemporary participatory art projects. The art field not only increasingly deploys participation but has also been involved in organizing practices that shift social and symbolic orders and therefore promises particular insights on how to contest the instrumentalization of participation. My three distinct papers build on a qualitative research design and draw on the theoretical lens of organizational aesthetics and ethics of care. The three distinct articles zoom in on three core dimensions of participation: representations (Article 1), practices (Article 2) and relations (Article 3).