In this resource we highlight the Anti-Racist Partnership Agreement developed by Jack Ky Tan, commissioned by Sheffield University's Centre for Equity and Inclusion and facilitated by project manager Alex Mason. Taking the form of a card game, this visual contract was developed following a series of workshops with postgraduate students from the global ethnic majority and the Centre partners, including art organisations.
During the workshops, participants reflected on how conventional legal language used in partnership agreements often comes across as punitive, framing partnerships between universities and partners as adversarial. As the majority of the Centre partners are from global majority heritages, participants in the workshops highlighted the way in which processes, language and tools used to defined partnerships have the potential to exacerbate inequalities.
The preamble section of the contract states: “This is a contract where visual, legal and interpretative information is set alongside each other so that different kinds of knowledges can come into play within legal relationships. This approach arose from artistic workshops commissioned by the Centre and held with diverse civil society organisations in Sheffield. Participants wanted to articulate their contractual obligations in ways that embraced more equitable and supportive values than those found in boilerplate contracts. By foregrounding the ethics and value systems from their own cultures, this visual contract aims to create more empathetic and culturally relevant legal relationships for the parties.”
The agreement also draws upon pre-colonial and the global majority practices of creating more-than-verbal legal documents or actions. Concepts, values and cosmologies from the partners' heritages are expressed with visuals integrated with accompanying text from the boilerplate contract.
According to the project page description “contractual documents or legal obligations have been expressed in image, sculpture or performance long before the advent of our modern-day contracts. For example the Babylonian Kudurru or boundary stones were legal documents containing contractual clauses or land titles with symbolic images that confer (divine) force to the legal document. Incan Quipus were lets of knotted cords that were official auditing, census or book keeping records. Also singing dispute resolution is also practiced among a number cultures for example, the Basque bertsolaritza, the Ghanaian halo, Fijian song challenges, Nigerian udje or the Sumatran didong.”
By reimagining conventional legal clauses through the lens of global majority cultures and traditions, the card games offer players the opportunity to further explore and develop the values that underpin each partnership.
“Processes aren’t value-neutral. They are an intersection of how you behave (the performative), the thing/spaces/tools You work with (the material) and the quality of engagement between the people/entities/actors involved (the relational). But the performative, the material and the relational come laden with their own history, meaning, embodied memory, custom, ideology and more” – Jack Ky Tan
You can access the Anti-Racist Partnership Agreement here: Jack Ky Tan — Welcome to my digital open studio where you can read about past and ongoing projects and ideas as they develop.