Who: Helen Reed, Rachel Gurstein and 8 collaborators

When: May 6th – June 24th (Sunday afternoons from 12pm – 3pm)

Where: Classes will be split between Bike Pirates at 457 Bathurst St, and various places around the city.

Contact: generositiesproject@anarchistu.org

Background:

We see generosity as something that is widely valued, while being vaguely and subjectively defined. As individuals, we often congratulate ourselves for behaving generously when we give some of our hard-earned change to someone less fortunate on the street, or when we give our time volunteering with charitable organizations. More abstractly, we might consider our state to be a generous one, providing a social 'safety net' to those who have fallen on hard times. From our small, personal gestures to the deeply embedded structural formations of the welfare state, the enactment of generosity factors into our sense of self and our sense of who we want to be as a society.

As celebrated as this pervasive feeling of being generous might be, we would like to suggest that it also represents a conflicting value. This is because our ideals are disconnected from and rarely reflect the reality of our personal, social and political experience. This class aims to explore the ways the appropriation of generous practice by the state has helped to diffuse and redirect our ability to act generously (in the infinite variety of forms these acts can take), and how deference to centrally planned institutional solutions to local deficits serves to effectively absolve us of our responsibility to consider the ways we can act generously in our communities. Simultaneously, the state regularly fails to live up to its 'generous' reputation, with the result that many of our most vulnerable neighbours fall through the gaping fissure created by mutually reinforcing state ineffectiveness and individual apathy.

But all is not lost! This class is also about identifying and celebrating the many ways generosity is manifest in our communities. To do this we will look at the ways generosity is explored through contemporary art practice, and how this reflects the ways we behave as political beings. We wonder if we can talk about a politics of generosity, and if so, what that would look like? Through this class, we want to enact these questions (and many, many others) through a personal, embodied practice of generosity.

Methodology:

Underpinning our motivation to propose this course is our common interest in exploring ideas of agency and the ability of individuals to behave autonomously and collectively (in autonomous collectives?) in generous ways in our culture/society/cities. Connected to this is our commitment to collaborative learning processes, which we see as being practical and appropriate ways to explore these ideas. We in no way see ourselves as teachers or instructors as we readily admit to knowing very little about the subject we propose to study. Instead, we see our roles as being those of motivator and facilitator and would ask our collaborators to be ready and willing to share the responsibility with us for providing content for the class. That said, we are also committed to bringing together a theory and a practice of generosity. As such, we are proposing to structure the course around four 'models' of generosity. The exploration of each model will include reading and discussing various theoretical texts and case studies, as well as witnessing and/or participating in local examples of these models. This will mean a series of “field trips”, which we plan to negotiate and organize collectively. We hope this approach will allow us to gain a better understanding of what generosity is/ what it means to be generous, and we also hope that it will be a lot of fun!

Prologue

In the weeks leading up to the first class we hope to have had some contact with participants either through email or by phone. We would like to distribute introductory readings to be discussed during the first week. These readings will be short and light, and will serve to get us thinking about definitions of generosity. We will also ask people to prepare something to bring to the first class that could serve as an example of what they think generosity means. These examples could be drawn from the media, a gift they have received, or a story they would like to relate about how they have experienced generosity.

Week 1 (May 6th): Introduction, (or, cookies and compliments)

The first part of the class will consist of introductions and going over the course outline, with the intention of soliciting input on the content and structure from our new collaborators. During the second part of the class we will draw on the readings and the things people have brought in to begin the process of defining generosity, personally and collectively. We ask the question “what does generosity mean to you?” and “how is this similar or different from other definitions of generosity?” and also, “can we speak of 'generosities'?”

Readings:

Purves, Ted "Blows Against the Empire"

Location: Bike Pirates

Week 2 (May 13th): Why is the world the way it is?

We will use this week to explore some of the ways generosity has been explained by rational choice theory. We will think about the effects this has had on the ways we enact our generous intentions both at the individual and collective levels, including an examination of the current prevalence of corporate philanthropy. We will also spend some time thinking about various critiques of rational choice (and its manifestation in neoliberalism), as well as examining alternate explanations of social interaction, like mutual aid. We ask the questions “how does rational choice explain generous practices, and are these explanations satisfactory?”, “how do our understandings of 'advanced capitalism' or 'neoliberalism' influence our theories and practices of generosity?” and “are theories and practices of mutual aid useful in exploring ideas of generosity in society?”

Readings:

Mauss, Marcel. “The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies”

Serwer, Andy. “The Legend of Robin Hood”

Location: Bike Pirates

Week 3 (May 20th): How is generosity institutionalised?

Following from our general discussion on generosity and society (broadly defined), this week we will start exploring our four proposed 'models' of generosity.

Model 1: Generosity, the Voluntary Sector, and the State

Through this model we are interested in exploring the ways in which generosity might be understood to be institutionalized through voluntary organizations (like the church - shelters, soup kitchens, after school programs, etc.), and/or the state (welfare, EI, social housing, etc.). Particularly, we wonder what effect this institutionalization has on the experience of generosity by both the individual/agent doing the giving (social worker?) and the one receiving (welfare recipient?). We also question the ideas of responsibility, reciprocity, and dependency and how these would interact with generosity in an institutional setting.

Readings:

Probably something by Foucault, but haven't decided what yet.

Location: TBA

Action: We will try to arrange for the class to go volunteer somewhere institutional.

Week 4 (May 27th): How can we be non-institutionally generous?

Model 2: Free Beer!

This week we would like to think about ways generosity happens outside of institutional settings, or, closer to the lived experience of people. We will look at examples of gift economies and non-monetary exchange systems. We would also like to introduce the idea of generosity as art practice. We wonder about the place of reciprocity in this model as well.

Readings:

Location: TBA

Action: Find/make free stores/ free boxes

Week 5 (June 3rd): How can we be generous with/in space?

Model 3: Toronto, the (un)generous city

Is it possible to consider cities (or spaces within cities) as generous? If so, what would some of these spaces look like? These questions and others will direct our exploration of generosity within the urban world we occupy. We will consider things like the effects of planning and zoning on creating (or blocking) generous possibilities. We will also think about who are the likely beneficiaries of spatial generosity, who tends to be excluded (and how), and how this might affect practices of citizenship.

Readings: TBA

Location: TBA

Action: Bike ride! We will travel around the city looking for examples of Toronto's generosity. (we can scrounge up bikes for people without)

Week 6 (June 10th): Generosity and conflict

Model 4: Taking back Robin Hood

How can we understand the place of generosity (if there is a place at all) within struggles for social change? Are there instances when acts of generosity transgress societal norms? This week will be spent questioning the relationship between generosity and direct action in both its potentially violent and non-violent forms. We will look at how the generous act can be the means of social protest, as well as the ways guerrilla forms of redistribution are generous in their ends.

Readings:

Self, Robert. “To plan our liberation: Black Power and the politics of place in Oakland, California 1965 – 1977”

Location: TBA

Action: TBA

Week 7 (June 17th): Designing a Generous Intervention

Planning a generous act based on the things we have thought about and done over the previous 6 weeks.

Readings: None

Location: TBA

Week 8 (June 24th): The Generous Act!

Taking generosity to the city of Toronto

Location: TBA

Epilogue (July 1st)

We would like to spend our final meeting hanging out, talking about our experiences of the previous week's generous intervention while eating and drinking and making merry, picnic potluck styles. The more the merrier!

Location: TBA (probably a local park)