Culturally reimagining education: Publicity, aesthetics and socially engaged art practice

Abstract

This paper sets out to reimagine education through a cultural perspective and explores education as a performative practice that establishes certain borders of ‘public’ belonging. Wide-spread debates about the public dimension of schools and universities have focused on how economic rationales need to be replaced with alternative visions of education. This paper seeks to contribute to this revisioning of the public in education by reclaiming education as a specifically cultural endeavour, one tied to practices that are at once both performative and aesthetic. To this end, I draw on theoretical notions of publicity that highlight its performative character. I then offer a reading of a socially engaged art project in order to suggest ways in which this performative character of publicity can be seen to be educational. This paper argues that education itself emerges through various cultural enactments that delineate the contours of who counts as a public and who does not.

Keywords:

• Public education
• aesthetics
• socially engaged art practice
• Paulo Freire
• Jacques Rancière
• voice

Notes

1. I want to thank Cliona Murray for her research assistance and to acknowledge the reviewers’ comments, which I found helpful in shaping this keynote presentation into a more readable article for publication.

2. Hannah Arendt (1968/1983) points to this dilemma of education exceedingly well in her ‘Crisis of Education’ essay. However, I am turning to cultural theory here in order to suggest that the dilemma is not merely concerned with removing politics from formal education, with which Arendt is ultimately concerned, but about the explicit role education plays in the formation and transformation of culture itself.