About Beyond Social

Beyond Social is a collaborative research and publishing platform for students, faculty, and friends of the WdKA Social Practices department. It is a platform for trial and error, for sharing knowledge, research, sketches, and failures.

Beyond Social connects contributors through a wiki. It is an open and collaborative platform. Anyone may contribute by commenting on existing articles, adding new articles and events, adding items to our Frictionary, and proposing other forms of wiki gardening and collaboration.

Background

Social Practices The Social Practices is an interdisciplinary graduation profile at WdKA that offers four courses: Cultural Diversity, New Earth, Performative Action, and Powerplay.

Currently

Beyond Social is in the process of understanding how it functions as a collectively built research repository. As an archive of academic work carried out by teachers and students of the WdKA Social Practices department, Beyond Social is thinking about how:

1) To complexify the issue of Common knowledge without assuming that free access guarantees equal access, or that collective authorship guarantees equitable redis(at)tribution.
2) Can canons of categorization be extruded, exploded, and, most importantly, rebuilt. Categories must be questioned, but the tyranny of structurelessness must be resisted.
3) To make visible the work of the department in a way that is sensitive to the tensions of ownership vs coauthorship vs credit vs agency vs commoning vs copyother vs copyleft vs the right to copy vs [this canonical list of non-binary vs-es is unfinished and can be added to at length].

Beyond Social has many contributors, none of whom claim authorship over a platform that is built in common. It currently has no editorial board, as anyone can upload material without the need for editorial permission or review. It does however have two dedicated custodians: Alice Strete and Angeliki Diakrousi.

History

Beyond Social began as an initiative from Iris Schutten, Program Leader Social Practices WdKA (2013-2017), in collaboration with Kimmy Spreeuwenberg, Teacher and Coordinator of Hybrid Publishing at Willem de Kooning Academy (WdKA), University of Applied Sciences in Rotterdam. Right from the start Beyond Social aimed at being a platform for a wider community than WdKA

It was built by André Castro and Manetta Berends, media artists and researchers who teach/have also taught at the Experimental Publishing master's of Piet Zwart Institute. Currently, they participate in the running of Varia, a space for developing collective approaches to everyday technology.

Previous Editorial Board

• Iris Schutten, Lead Editor (2014–2018)
• Gaspard Bos (2017–2018)
• Bruno Setola (2017–2018)
• Teana Boston-Mammah (2017–2018)
• Karlijn Souren (2017–2018)

Visual Design and Web Development

• Angeliki Diakrousi (2019–Present)
• Alice Strete (2019–Present)
• Manetta Berends www.manettaberends.nl (2017–2019)
• André Castro

Code Repository

Git repository for the wiki skin: https://github.com/wdka-publicationSt/BeyondSocial-wiki/tree/unfolding (2017 and onwards)

Archive

Wiki2Web (2014 - 2016)

Initially, Beyond Social was partly an experiment to allow users to create their own issues, which were linked to Beyond Social events. These issues are included below for archival reference.

#1 - Redesigning Business (February 2015)

#2 - Education (July 2016)

#3 - Radical Reframing (December 2016)

Initiative 2014

Beyond Social is an initiative from Iris Schutten, Program Leader Social Practices WdKA (2013-2017), in collaboration with Hybrid Publishing Practices WdKA.

Lead Editor first editions

• Iris Schutten (2014 and onwards)

Editorial Board first editions

• Sikko Cleveringa (2017)
• Deanna Herst (2014-2015)
• Tabo Goudswaard (2014-2015)

Visual Design first editions

• Marlon Harder & Lasse van den Bosch Christensen, Template (2014-2016)

Web Development first editions

• André Castro, Publication Station WdKA (2014-2016)

Git repository for the previous wiki2web publishing workflow: https://github.com/wdka-publicationSt/BeyondSocial )2014-2016)