The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge
The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge is a serial broadsheet publication produced by the Blackwood, University of Toronto Mississauga. Initiated in conjunction with The Work of Wind: Air, Land, Sea in 2018–19 to expand perspectives on environmental violence through artistic practices, cultural inquiry, and political mobilization, the SDUK continues as a signature triannual Blackwood publishing initiative in 2022.
Reflecting the Blackwood’s ongoing commitment to activating open-ended conversations with diverse publics beyond the gallery space, the SDUK serves as a platform for varied forms of circulation, dispersal, and diffusion. The series shares interdisciplinary knowledges; terminologies; modes of visual, cultural, and scientific literacy; strategies for thought and action; resources; and points of connection between local and international practices—artistic, activist, scholarly, and otherwise—during a time increasingly marked by alienation and isolation. Distributed freely as a print publication, and available through a dedicated reading platform on the Blackwood website and as a downloadable PDF, the SDUK engages a diffuse network of readers and contributors.
Series Titles
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The SDUK broadsheet series takes aim at a broad range of concerns—and this issue, GRAFTING, explores how we come to know, define, and interact with nature, where we see its boundaries and identify its needs, and how we understand its entanglement with culture. Following on the origins of The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, and in the spirit of publishing, questioning, and problematizing “useful knowledge,” we recognize our readers as curious people who may pick up this publication with certain questions already in mind. Perhaps you are asking, “Where do nature and the city intersect? What does this mean ... -
This SDUK broadsheet takes COMMUTING as its theme. Alongside the most familiar usage of “commuting” (moving to and from work), the contributions in this issue touch on many aspects of circulation, migration, and change that are flowing across and rumbling below the surface of the Earth. As this publication platform traces the diffusion of knowledge, this issue in particular explores the shifts, displacements, and movements we must consider in an age of rapid global change in order to commute the Earth’s death sentence. We know you open this broadsheet with many questions, interests, and curiosities already formed, so here are ... -
This SDUK broadsheet is the first to follow The Work of Wind: Air, Land, Sea, a ten-day contemporary art festival engaging with climate change, environmental crisis, and resilience which took place in Mississauga’s Southdown Industrial Area in September 2018. Taking BEARING as its theme, this issue turns our attention to alienation, affect, anxiety, and questions of responsibility and resilience. For curious readers of all persuasions—those new to the project and those who have been following its year-long unfurling—here are some places to begin: If you are wondering how can we enact responsibility to humans and nonhumans in bleak political and ecological ... -
This fourth broadsheet in the SDUK series is themed SHORING—a concept that touches on both literal shores (representing the meeting—or separation— of land and water), and broader representations of terraforming, resource extraction, data visualization, interdisciplinary research, and the many other supports that have held up existing infrastructures, exploitations, and innovations. A few questions might guide your encounter with this issue: Repeat readers of the broadsheet series may note that this issue in particular is saturated with images, and thus ask, how can we read images of our world through the lens of environmental justice? Projects in this issue demonstrate the ability ... -
This fifth SDUK broadsheet examines the multifaceted meanings of ACCOUNTING in the age of climate change. This issue considers accounting in its colloquial sense, pertaining to investment and economics, but also moves beyond the ledger book to consider what remains uncounted, and what is consciously left out. Throughout this issue, we find slippery concepts, things, and actors that pose a challenge to accounting as a means of representation and understanding. Beginning with economics, one might ask: What are the basic tools and assumptions on which accounting is based? In his ongoing unsettling of fundamental economic concepts, D.T. Cochrane looks at how ... -
This sixth broadsheet in the SDUK series rounds out a sustained engagement with climate change, environmental crisis, and resilience that has taken place across multiple sites in Mississauga throughout 2018- 19. Concluding this series, though by no means ceasing the Blackwood’s work on climate justice, this issue reflects on how to reckon with, and move forward, in an age of ecological anxiety and accumulating destruction—with hope, but also with urgency. As in the return of fire to land scape conservation documented in Zackery Hobler’s cover image, FORGING looks to artistic, poetic, political, and scientific catalysts to re-enliven suppressed or way ... -
On March 23, the Blackwood put forward a call for submissions, in response to the irrefutably global provocation of COVID-19 currently reconfiguring nearly every aspect of life on Earth. The call recognized that these uncertain socio-political circumstances demand agile, dynamic, and multifaceted responses. In their recent book Now, the agents of The Invisible Committee call for us to generate desirable social and political worlds through an improvisatory tilt: strategic action that cuts transversally across vertical hierarchies and horizontal networks—privileging neither, in favour of an “intelligence of the situation.” With decisive actions implemented by individuals, organizations, businesses, and governments, the Blackwood, ... -
On March 23, the Blackwood put forward a call for submissions, in response to the irrefutably global provocation of COVID-19 currently reconfiguring nearly every aspect of life on Earth. The call recognized that these uncertain socio-political circumstances demand agile, dynamic, and multifaceted responses. In their recent book Now, the agents of The Invisible Committee call for us to generate desirable social and political worlds through an improvisatory tilt: strategic action that cuts transversally across vertical hierarchies and horizontal networks—privileging neither, in favour of an “intelligence of the situation.” With decisive actions implemented by individuals, organizations, businesses, and governments, the Blackwood, ... -
This eighth SDUK broadsheet takes MEDIATING as its theme, in parallel with the Blackwood’s virtual program Running with Concepts: The Mediatic Edition, to consider sites and practices of mediation in culture, technology, and media. Following SDUK07: TILTING (an urgent 2-part issue in response to the first wave of COVID-19), the series returns in 2021—albeit in a form that continues to be shaped by the effects of the pandemic—and launches simultaneously on the Blackwood website. For those who wonder, how are mediated circumstances changing our ways of relating and predicting?, excerpts from Tommy Pico’s book-length poem Junk (p. 18) offer a riotous ... -
This ninth SDUK broadsheet openly engages the nineteenth-century society from which the series takes its name, by considering DIFFUSING: how circulation, dissemination, opacity, transparency, and anonymity shape the way knowledges, materials, and media are transferred. Whereas the original Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge circulated its publications through largely one-way and top-down means, contributors to this issue explore knowledge-sharing as a more open, non-hierarchical practice. One might be prompted by physical processes of diffusion to wonder: How does matter move through bodies, across borders, and into inter-relations? Sophia Jaworski and Zoë Wool (p. 8) offer a reappraisal of the 1979 ... -
This tenth SDUK broadsheet takes up PRONOUNCING: how speech, performance, language, and poetry shape sociopolitical discourse. In parallel with Artists-in-Presidents: Transmissions to Power, a series of leadership portraits and audio addresses from artists-as-leaders, the Blackwood engages discourses of speech and power throughout 2021. Constance Hockaday’s introduction to Artists-in-Presidents outlines the project’s central conceit: What forms of leadership do we need now? In a roundtable discussion in this issue (p. 19), panelists reflect on their changing roles as public figures in and adjacent to healthcare amid the pressures of the COVID-19 pandemic, under-resourced mental health and addiction services, and intergenerational legacies of ... -
Themes of movement, memory, histories, and archives animate this eleventh SDUK broadsheet, PACING. In the first issue of 2022, contributors amplify and expand on themes found throughout Blackwood programs here engaging the pace of reading and writing that is unique to publishing. Through a range of forms, contributors to this issue speculate on publications, archives, and file repositories as means for building collective memory. Given the often violent and colonial origins of these forms, how are Black culture workers navigating archives and collections? In a roundtable discussion, Cleopatria Peterson and Adwoa Afful discuss how the respective print and digital platforms they ... -
This twelfth SDUK broadsheet examines the diverse means by which individuals and communities build lasting or fleeting bonds. Coinciding with the conclusion of Crossings: Itineraries of Encounter, the Blackwood’s 2021–22 lightbox series, this issue, BONDING, echoes themes seen throughout Crossings: migration, diaspora, borders, and archives. Where the lightbox exhibitions examine image-making practices, this SDUK issue engages print culture in new and recurring formats including visual storytelling, poetry, a letter exchange, and a recipe. Food is the source of many enduring cultural bonds, and thus one might be tempted to start from the gut: See Diasporic Dumplings (p. 27) for a site-responsive ... -
Our thirteenth SDUK broadsheet dives into approaches for navigating social and ecological crises. WADING complements the Blackwood’s summer and fall presentation of Lyfeboat prototype and event series, Nearshore Gatherings—both platforms for community engagement with ecology and environmental activism. This issue traverses further from the shoreline into the vast oceans of inquiry on land-based education, institutional critique, biocultural diversity, food and land sovereignty, and equity in the outdoors. Education is crucial in addressing the climate crisis; at its best, it can provide the knowledge, skills, and values to shape agents of change. Departing from the human-centric discourse of the Anthropocene, Fikile Nxumalo’s essay asks: How might centering the more-than-human ... -
Our fourteenth SDUK broadsheet, LINGERING, follows and complements WISH YOU WERE HERE, WISH HERE WAS BETTER, a mobile public event series presented by the Blackwood that made space “for people impacted by the ongoing overdose crisis—and its cascading systemic issues of precarity, houselessness, and criminalization—to mourn, while providing opportunities to imagine and work towards a more just future.” Throughout this broadsheet, contributors linger with these sociopolitical issues, among others. They navigate complex emotions like grief, joy, and mourning while developing vital forms of activism; celebrating disability and queerness; shaping institutions; or finding poetry in everyday life. But how do we “work ...
