Cooperative Narratives
How can we overcome the limits of academic narrative to create truly shared knowledge? A concrete experience of collective writing devices that restore narrative power to participants.
The form of narrative as epistemological matrix
In her enlightening article (attached) published in the journal Culture et Recherche No. 148, Dr. Mélodie Faury, a communication researcher, aptly theorizes an idea that is very important to me: “participatory sciences and research are not limited to producing knowledge; they weave links, transform relationships and the arrangements they explore.” This observation resonates deeply with my practice of accompanying participatory and cooperative projects. As she affirms, “the way of writing is part of the elaboration of our knowledge and our relationship to the world”, a conviction that structures my entire approach.
The central problem that Mélodie Faury raises is that of the inadequacy between the richness of participatory experiences and the relative poverty of traditional academic formats. The scientific article, with its academic norms, operates as a reductive filter that “leaves certain modes of existence at the margins in its restitutions”. This reduction is not trivial: it constitutes a form of epistemological violence that erases voices, attachments, and lived transformations.
Faced with the same observation, I have long developed a practical approach that I believe responds quite well to the problems raised by Mélodie Faury for “relational, ethical, sensitive narratives that open the possibility of allowing ourselves to be touched, grasped and collectively transformed by what is being woven”. My cooperative narrative device seeks precisely to create the material and symbolic conditions for this type of narration to emerge and endure.
A distributed narrative production device
My method consists of orchestrating collective experiences followed by a three-stage writing process. After each moment of exploratory work, participants are invited to produce three distinct types of writing: a personal synthesis of what they have received, the expression of any disagreements, and additional contributions. This tripartition is not arbitrary, it responds to what Bruno Latour would call “matters of concern”: recognizing that knowledge is never univocal but always crossed by productive tensions.
- The first component, the synthesis, reveals an impressive dimension of collective knowledge. Each participant produces their own cognitive cartography of the lived experience, and the set of these syntheses forms what I call “choral knowledge.” This epistemological polyphony echoes what Donna Haraway calls “situated knowledges” (1988), knowledge that assumes its anchoring in particular bodies, experiences, and perspectives. The juxtaposition of these syntheses creates a stereoscopic effect: knowledge gains in content, depth, and relief through the multiplication of viewpoints.
- The second component, that of disagreements, institutes what Jacques Rancière might call a “space of dissensus”. By giving a structural place to controversy, the device recognizes that “the inquiry extends into and through writing: together they name, recognize and give meaning to what is being woven” (Mélodie Faury). Disagreements are no longer obstacles to overcome but generators of complexity and nuance. They maintain knowledge in a state of productive tension, resisting premature closure of meaning.
- The third component concerns additional contributions: ideas, leads, or knowledge that have not been addressed but that the participant considers relevant, thereby enriching the common corpus. This is the “master’s place” offered to each participant; because the “master” is only a role, but in no way a superiority, as everyone has knowledge to contribute. It is very important to open this space so that knowledge can fully emanate from the collective.
The materiality of sharing: infrastructures of collective memory
The technical innovation of my device lies in its material and technological dimension. I have developed a technology and method: participants photograph their handwritten texts and upload them to a shared web space accessible via a simple QR code with their phone. This apparently mundane gesture contains considerable symbolic and practical significance. First, it preserves the graphic singularity of each contribution; handwriting carries traces of the body, emotion, and spontaneity that standardized digital transcription would neutralize.
Furthermore, the technical autonomy of participants in the online publishing process constitutes an act of epistemological empowerment. As Isabelle Stengers emphasizes, “tell me how you tell, I’ll tell you what construction you’re participating in.” (2009) By giving participants direct control over the publication of their knowledge, the device institutes them as legitimate authors rather than mere sources of information for a researcher who would synthesize it.
The permanence of this digital space, which I guarantee independently of any commercial platform, responds to what Mélodie Faury calls the necessity to “bear witness to existences, absences, to recognize interdependencies”. This living library becomes a “place of memory” in Pierre Nora’s sense (1984), but an open, evolving place where everyone can return to draw or simply note that their knowledge exists somewhere, available to others.
The ethics of accompaniment: holding space without colonizing it
My role as facilitator in this device deserves particular reflection. I am neither the depositary nor the interpreter of the knowledge produced, but rather what Tim Ingold would call a “correspondent”, someone who enters into correspondence with other participants while maintaining the conditions of possibility for their autonomous expression. This posture echoes “writing as extension of inquiry” where the researcher is no longer overarching but immersed in the collective process.
The guarantee of permanence I offer for the digital space constitutes a form of “infrastructural care”. Maria Puig de la Bellacasa speaks of “matters of care” (2017) as what must be cared for to maintain habitable worlds. By ensuring the technical maintenance and continuous availability of this knowledge, I participate in ensuring that these experiences are not simply “extracted” to feed my own academic production, but that they continue to exist for and by those who produced them.
This approach brings, I hope, perspectives for rethinking participatory sciences more broadly. If, as Mélodie Faury affirms, “our way of writing is part of the elaboration of our knowledge and our relationship to the world”, then transforming our narrative devices amounts to transforming our collective capacity to inhabit the world in a more just and living way. Cooperative narratives are not just an alternative method; they are an ethical and political proposition for a science that fully assumes its relational and transformative dimension.
Some examples of collaborative stories led by Benoît Labourdette
The “cultural rights”, which derive from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, are a concept developed and defended by researchers, sociologists, philosophers, political leaders and actors of the cultural world. Present in a certain number of articles of law since 2001, the cultural rights aim at highlighting and formalizing, in order to be able to make them operative, the principles of a “cultural democracy”. To summarize it quickly, it is a question of each person being able to give value to his or her personal culture, in order to be able to exercise his or her citizenship: to express himself or herself, to defend his or her point of view, to create, to develop his or her practices, to have access to a cultural diversity, etc. Cultural rights operate in a much wider field than that of the strict cultural sector.
The notion of “cultural rights” is present in France in the laws NOTRe (2015) and LCAP (2016). It is carried by a delegation of the Ministry of Culture (General Delegation for transmission, territories, since January 1, 2021).
Paradoxically, cultural rights are difficult to implement in the cultural sector, which is traditionally rather attached to “cultural democratization”: one often defends the idea of the transmission to the public of works of art of the best possible quality, according to a principle of hierarchy of “cultural values”. Thus, the cultural rights can be lived by certain professionals of the culture as a dangerous dynamics for the Art, a tendency towards the amateur practices, which is not the case.
In my point of view, which is that of a practitioner/researcher in the cultural field, cultural rights are above all a practice, an exercise of democracy in the very methods of organization of the work, of the relation to the other and of the place of each one, the choices of programming, the methods of mediation and animation of workshops, the mode of territorial inscription of the cultural policy, etc.
I propose in this section concrete working methods for good practices of implementation of cultural rights, based on my field experiences, as well as a sharing of more theoretical reflections, in the framework of my own research on cultural rights.
I place myself in the filiation of thinkers like John Dewey. But cultural rights cannot be presented without mentioning Patrice Meyer-Bisch, Jean-Michel Lucas, Christelle Blouët, the “Fribourg Declaration”, etc.
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Transmitting cultural rights: a question of coherence
What facilitation methods reveal about our relationship with people.
How can we talk about cultural democracy within an authoritarian framework? How can we defend respect for each person’s culture while imposing a (…) -
The political dimension of organisational frameworks
When forms contradict intentions: organising cultural democracy.
We talk about cultural democracy, horizontality, cultural rights. But the concrete frameworks we put in place often tell a very different story. (…) -
Will Heritage Still Be Part of Our Lives in 2045?
Digitising collections is not enough: the challenge is to enable their appropriation by citizens.
Cultural practices in 2045 will be as different from ours as ours are from those of 2005. At that time, YouTube did not exist, no one had a (…) -
The Representation of One’s Cultural Role
What the Association of French Mayors survey reveals about the cultural imaginary of local authorities.
What do we presuppose when we speak of “audiences distant from culture”? The AMF survey, read as an anthropological document, unveils the (…) -
Algorithms and Cultural Rights
How algorithms, far from confining us, implement cultural rights through democratic discoverability based on metadata.
Algorithms are regularly criticized as tools that supposedly lock us into “filter bubbles.” We must free ourselves from them, we are told. Yet (…) -
Domination at the Heart of Culture
How laudatory terms mask power relations in the cultural sector.
The praise we bestow upon “great artists” reveals, beneath its flattering appearances, a structure of domination. Behind admiration lies the (…) -
Making Room for Adolescents: Rethinking Our Approaches in Cultural Action
From democratisation to cultural democracy.
Cultural action and mediation with adolescents challenge the foundations of our practices: between framework and transgression, between physical (…) -
Symbolization as a tool for mobilization
When the collective and digital traces build cultural engagement.
Faced with an abundance of digital cultural practices, cultural venues struggle to mobilize “audiences.” I argue here that this difficulty does (…) -
Legitimate participation as the horizon of cultural events
From legitimacy to participate: how cultural rights transform our practices.
Cultural rights are often misunderstood. Their strength lies in their capacity to transform our practices: moving from a top-down programming (…) -
The Accelerated Eye
Manifesto for a new ecology of the gaze.
What if speed were not the enemy of culture, but the instrument of a new form of sensitive intelligence? A radical reappropriation of our right to (…) -
Authorizing Creation
For a radical democratization of the creative act.
How can artistic creation become a political act of collective emancipation? By carrying within itself, in its form and process, the authorization (…) -
Creative Freedom and Cultural Rights
A dialectic at the heart of cultural policies.
French cultural policy today finds itself at the crossroads of two fundamental principles, both enshrined in law: creative freedom and cultural (…) -
Cultural Rights in Light of Personal History
At the beginning of my journey as an engaged cultural actor.
The question of cultural rights has long shaped my commitment, well before the term came to light. Through my story, I attempt to show how a (…) -
Cooperative Narratives
Creating polyphonic narrative devices to transform academic knowledge into living and operative knowledge.
How can we overcome the limits of academic narrative to create truly shared knowledge? A concrete experience of collective writing devices that (…) -
The myth of recognition through cultural democratization
Rethinking artistic value beyond systems of domination.
Artistic recognition is less about talent than about a social game that some refuse to participate in. A reflection on alternative paths to (…) -
Cultural Rights and Digital Discoverability
For a cultural policy adapted to digital spaces.
Faced with the failure of many institutional digital cultural strategies, cultural rights and its corollary cultural democracy seem to me to be (…) -
Freedom and Cultural Rights
A renewed approach to democratic dignity, through the contribution of two new rights.
Cultural rights, seemingly guarantors of human dignity, are emptied of their meaning when they fail to forcefully articulate the question of (…) -
Cultural Rights and Digital Technology
Rethinking digital tools in service of cultural democracy.
How can digital technology become a lever for cultural emancipation rather than an instrument of dependence? I propose a digital implementation of (…) -
The specter of the other
From anxious dehumanization to confident recognition.
How can the other, a subject of rights, become a threatening figure? A reflection born from a confrontation with reality, beyond the fantasies and (…) -
Cultural data and cultural rights
For an inclusive heritage democracy in the digital age.
Citizen cultural data is tomorrow’s heritage. Their recognition and preservation constitute a major democratic challenge for building a (…) -
Corporate memory at the service of cultural rights
Rethinking the relationship between cultural venues and people.
Cultural institutions, through their failure to collect and care for data, forget those they welcome, denying their dignity. This amnesia (…) -
Cultural rights and preservation of digital heritage
Bernard Stiegler’s technical philosophy sheds political light.
Have you ever tried to find a video you loved on YouTube from ten years ago? A blog post that made an impression on you? Your friends’ photos on (…) -
Artistic Legitimization, Cultural Rights, and Construction of the Individual
Between horizontality and the need for recognition.
Artistic legitimization, between traditional hierarchies and new digital forms, questions individual and collective recognition. By intersecting (…) -
Cultural rights and the “fight” against the far right
How to rebuild democracy in our cultural spaces.
How the discourse of “fighting against the far right” stigmatizes voters, compromises democratic dialogue and becomes hate speech. It would be (…) -
Architecture of artistic venues and cultural rights
The impact of location on social roles.
The architecture of cultural venues shapes roles and often limits participation. An approach inspired by digital spaces would enable cultural (…) -
Strategy, design and technical implementation of the “Azimut” platform
The resource portal for artistic practices.
I am supporting and leading, on behalf of the MPAA, in its current phase, the strategy, design, and technical implementation of this platform, (…) -
Synthesis of the seminar: “What pedagogy by and for cultural rights?”
Organized by UFISC, Opale, Réseau Culture 21, Observatoire des politiques culturelles, Laboratoire des droits culturels and Ligue de l’enseignement (February 6, 2025).
Workshop to find out what stage the partners had reached in their work on the “cultural rights” certification referential project in the context (…) -
Conference: “EAC and cultural rights: convergences to be identified and implemented”
Dans le cadre des Rencontres territoriales “Artistic and cultural education & Territorial cultural projects” (Foix, February 5, 2025).
How can cultural rights be a tool for better implementation of artistic and cultural education projects? And how we can identify convergences (…) -
Cultural rights and professional postures
Tools for the concrete implementation of cultural rights.
Cultural rights, stemming from the Fribourg Declaration (2007), represent a major advancement for cultural democracy. However, their practical (…) -
“Cultural rights” creative writing seminar
Master Arts du Spectacle, université de Caen Normandie 2021-2022-2023-2024.
A practical seminar on digital writing, with the theme of cultural rights. Students approach writing in the contemporary sense of the term, (…) -
“On the ineffectiveness of our works in real life”.
Commentary on the text by Eva Doumbia & Kader Attia (2023).
In July 2023, visual artist Kader Attia and director Eva Doumba published a text (in Analyse Opinion Critique) in response to the youth “riots” (…) -
Artistic creation in a digital environment
Commentary on the report commissioned by DRAC Bretagne (August 2023).
A study on the subject of digital and artistic creation reveals, through its unquestioned biases, the unconscious desire not to move the lines of (…) -
Digital technology, a tool for mediation and cultural democracy
Webinar on Monday, October 9, 2023 from 10am to 1pm.
Restitution of the “Digital Workshops” project by Cultures du Cœur and Benoît Labourdette Production, offered as part of the Été culturel program (…) -
Itinéraire bis, the path of cultural rights
Action research conducted by the MPAA (Paris).
Accompaniment in the animation, production of traces and fabrication of the web platform resources of the research-action “Itinéraire bis, chemin (…) -
Raising awareness of cultural rights - Nantes métropole (September 30, 2022)
Co-design and co-hosting of a one-day event for Nantes’ cultural players.
Taking ownership of cultural rights concepts and approaches through cooperative creativityA small group of cultural players from Nantes, led (…) -
Analyze your project using the Fribourg Declaration
Working method
How to set in motion an approach open to cultural rights, that is to say, to put more democracy in the projects and the relationship with the (…) -
John Dewey : an inspirer of cultural rights?
Sharing my interest in an inspiring personality.
The notion of “cultural rights” is increasingly present in the debates within the cultural sector. They are seen by many as being at the heart of (…) -
Professional meeting “Public participation”: presentation by Benoît Labourdette
Interview of Benoît Labourdette by Jean-Yves de Lépinay (11’37s, 2020).
Sharing examples of audiovisual creation workshops conducted in the spirit of cultural rights: moving from “participation” to “interaction.” (…) -
“Cultural participation”: interview with Benoît Labourdette.
Interview with Benoît Labourdette (4’39s, 2020).
Video presentation of Benoît Labourdette’s approach to the democratic dimension of cultural action. -
Research-action “Image Education 2.1”
Collaborative action-research project led by Benoît Labourdette production in 2018 and 2019, to develop the synergy between teenage cinema (…)
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“Territorial approach, participation, youth and digital technology”: interview of Benoît Labourdette by Serge Saada (52’, 2021) Observatory of cultural mediation in the social field.
As part of the Observatory of cultural mediation in the social field, Serge Saada interviewed Benoît Labourdette on the impact of the (…) -
The Périfééries project’s heritage council of influence Facilitating collective intelligence in a short space of time.
As part of Saint-Denis’s bid to become European Capital of Culture 2028, I led a collective intelligence session to collect proposals on the (…) -
Cultural venues and social networks How to turn audiences into ambassadors rather than chasing followers.
Cultural venues are on social media out of obligation, without a clear strategy or convincing results. We need to rethink their presence: no (…) -
Towards a distributed cultural sector Hypotheses on the commons and digital diversity.
What if digital cultures showed us how to build the commons through distribution rather than centralization? This hypothesis invites us to rethink (…) -
Cultural Rights and Digital Technology Rethinking digital tools in service of cultural democracy.
How can digital technology become a lever for cultural emancipation rather than an instrument of dependence? I propose a digital implementation of (…)
