In the Company of Dada is a research project and interdisciplinary collaboration, which brings together a corporate law researcher, an architect, and a writer, director, and performer.

The project has legal and political economy origins, reflecting frustrations with the pace of political-economic responsiveness to the climate crisis, mass extinctions, and inequality. Policy makers’ insistence on maintaining growth and business principles, which promise certainty to business and the minimization of liability or “risk” as a priority, still, signpost dominance of “business as usual” approaches throughout sustainability forums, despite dramatically rising levels of existential threat.

The project links these limitations to specific frustrations with corporate law and corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices - the principal investigator’s area of expertise. It, then, extends an invitation to collaborators from the arts and humanities to explore this high-level sticking point. Which the group broadly relates to difficulties with affect-sensibility and experience in economic reason and logic, and the (predominantly) textual concourses of economic law, parliament, public policy, corporate governance, and (capital) markets.

The collaboration goes on to explore in a critical but open-minded way what it might mean to unsettle “business as usual” commands in political economy, using documentary methods and approaches inspired by the “Dadaist” (anti)-tradition in art. Souvenirs of “real-world” business impacts, interactions, and relationships are collected, sorted, and re-presented in pilot academic (journal article) and non-academic outputs (performance).

The project aims at developing, among audiences, a realistic or even skeptical attitude towards commercial rationality and intention, highlighting the limited imaginations that still reign in corporate law, governance, and public policy circles regarding sustainability. It realizes ISRF goals by theorizing, writing, actualizing, and performing demands to move on from “business as usual”, countering the association of accumulative harms with corporate capitalism “one fresh gulp of air” at a time.