Lauren Wetmore <████████████████████████████████ >
To: Josh Schwebel <privatejosh@gmail.com>
Cc: Michelle Lacombe <█████████████████ >
Dear Michelle,
I'm excited to be sending you the transcript of our conversation (link).
Both Josh and I were so blown away by the richness of your insights, the range of topics you covered, and your ability to mix policy analysis with lived experience. Unsurprisingly the transcript is extensive, and we've tried to come back to you with two strategies to assist you in distilling it.
Josh has gone through the text in great detail, suggesting redactions and highlighting portions of importance and eloquence. I've provided the list below of themes that arose through the text that feel extremely pertinent to the book – worth preserving and/or expanding on as you write back into the text.
Of course, there is a lot more material here than a 3000-word essay can hold, but the important thing will be for you to feel out what you feel strongest about articulating in this context.
For me, the strongest goal I can articulate for your text comes when you say, "I feel like with newer generations as they come in, we also have a lack of historical knowledge and transition in these spaces is often quite violent and incomplete and traumatic. So it’s hard with that lack of institutional memory.” And for Josh your focus on how the shifts in funding priorities / increase in admin work has reduced the autonomy of the sector to determine its own priorities are a paramount theme.
I'm looking forward to hearing your further thoughts and happy to strategize together with how to move the text forward.
Warmly,
Lauren
- Michelle’s
history and evolving position/identification in the sector
- How labour is quantified vs. how labour is
experienced
- How the perception of the CCA process affects
funding raising practices and experiences
- Myth of bureaucracy leading to change
- Distribution of resources and false scarcity
- Shifting waves of funding policy in Quebec
- Project funding / Operational funding
- Administration-turn in the work of “cultural
workers” pushing artists out of ARCs
- Results of artist-fee reform on cultural-worker
labour conditions and ARC funding strategies (The Employee as a literal
illustration of this)
- Cultural workers as public servants
- Necessity of pan-sector reform
- Loss of human relationships with the CCA agents
(micro-shifts and erosions)
- Politics of “development" grants
- Lack of institutional memory
- Revisioning of CARFAC fees for performance as an
illustration of timeline of institutional change
- Metrics of evaluation
- How funding timelines influence creative
thinking and output
- Non-artists making decisions and structures for
artists
- Covid, CERB, experience of burnout as emotional