What Does Social Engagement Mean and What Should Art Education Do About It?

To engage is to employ someone. To engage is to provoke new and prolonged interest and participation. To engage is to be involved and to interact with other people, events, and expectations.

In some respects, the call for this special issue was imagined as a wide-open and inclusive invitation. The call sought to explore relationships among social practice, social justice, and social engagement. Followed by a set of provocative questions, the call was comprised of a brief musing quoted in full here:

In the last 20 years, universities have allocated resources and established new initiatives to promote civic responsibility and positive change as forms of scholarship and community collaboration. Framed as engaged scholarship, these initiatives seek to position academic educational experiences in collaboration with local and global communities to foster democratic forms of research, teaching, and service. As an educational project, engaged scholarship seeks to promote civic responsibility. Social engagement in art education might include programming and initiatives known as outreach, service learning, or community-based education. These and other approaches might engage learners in responding to social issues through contemporary art practice. Art theorists, art museum educators, and artists such as Claire Bishop, Grant Kester, Pablo Helguera, and Nicolas Lampert have drawn attention to a range of contemporary art practices such as socially engaged art, social practice, and art at the pedagogical turn, which do not uniformly embrace the same ideologies or methodologies. These modes of contemporary art practice blur boundaries among conceptual art, performance art, social action, and education. These approaches to art practice and art education afford possibilities for interdisciplinary and collaborative responses as explorations of contemporary social issues through research, pedagogy, and practice. While social engagement is often theorized within a framework of social justice, its relationship to social practice is emergent, complex, and dependent on the particulars of specific issues, communities, and participants.

Neither the call nor the content of this issue offers a single definition or preferred interpretation of the phrase “social engagement.” Rather, that work is left up to the artists and scholars, the theorizing they enact, and the readers, viewers, and participants who engage with this work. Synonyms of engagement suggest interactions of some sort that require an exchange of something—labor, work, resistance, movement, conflict, learning, curiosity, attention. Most authors considered the call to imply a focus on social practice or socially engaged art that emphasizes engagement of one form or another.

Like a growing number of students, scholars, artists, critics, and historians of art, over the past 10 years or so, I have attempted to prod questions that reside at the intersection of art, education, and social engagement. I do not claim to have my head around what social engagement means nor what social engagement does within contemporary art education. That work is ongoing for me and many other people. Any definitive encapsulation of art education at the socially engaged turn has yet to be decided. This issue of Studies in Art Education is but an utterance in a much larger discordant conversation about what art, education, and social engagement do and mean. I agree with artist, educator, and theorist Pablo Helguera (2011), who claims socially engaged art is an actual rather than a symbolic response to provocations such as xenophobic and bigoted dictators, oppressive political moments, inhumane practices, and unjust social conditions.

There were far more manuscripts submitted in response to the call than could be published in a single issue of this journal. The range of submissions was impressive in quantity as well as in the span of approaches adopted by the authors. I hope that what has emerged in this sampler of scholarship reflects the range of submissions rather than a collection of scholarship crowded into a particular corner of an argument or theoretical space. In my mind, I imagine this issue might function as an abbreviated reader on social engagement and art education. There are similarities and agreements among some of the submissions—placing two examples of art in conversation with each other grounded in theory; commentaries on social engagement derived from personal and professional experiences. Of course, there are differences, contradictions, and overlaps, too.

Should citizenship be questioned? To what extent is citizenship a constituent if not essential component of an art practice grounded in social engagement? Charles R. Garoian argues citizenship is socially constructed by employing two different works of art in conversation, each grounded in its own conceptual, symbolic, and social concerns, in efforts to challenge dominant ideologies. Danne Ojeda places into conversation the work of two artists whose practice challenges engagements with social, political, economic, and global spheres. Pamela Harris Lawton questions how art education might be re-imagined in response to community and social engagement. Ryan Shin and Jaehan Bae consider possibilities of socially engaged food pedagogy as suggested in their examinations of Conflict Kitchen and Enemy Kitchen. Lynn Sanders-Bustle calls for innovations in preservice education informed by socially engaged art practice and participatory research methodologies through an imperfect proposition for preservice teaching practicum experiences. By way of a media review, Sunny Spillane presents a critical reading of Art as Social Action: An Introduction to the Principles and Practices of Teaching Social Practice Art by Gregory Sholette, Cloe Bass, and Social Practice Queens (2018). In the guise of an antagonistic researcher, Allison Rowe makes a case for confrontational socially engaged arts-based research. A firsthand account by Kim Cosier articulates what art and art education can do in the face of social and political injustice.

This compilation resists a single historical narrative and instead offers different histories of social engagement and art practice in relation to art education. Similarly, art education scholar Ross Schlemmer (2017) “(re)frame[s] the discourse as Socially Engaged Art Education (SEAE) to emphasize a new terrain of consciousness that is socially responsible and ethically sound and goes beyond mere promotion of aesthetic quality to contribute to improved quality of life” (p. 1). This work is about ethics and reciprocity. The urgency of this work is not new. This work is timely and necessary. This work is often grounded in community. This work is not always ethical and is often confrontational. This work is social. This work is engaging.

At the risk of simplification, the range of this work might be found in the commentaries by Kim Cosier, a veteran scholar, and Allison Rowe, a self-described emerging scholar. These authors offer two conversations in a much larger discussion on social engagement, art-based practices, and community-based possibilities for art education. I am fond of such conversations. Cosier asks what art and art education might do in confrontation with injustice. By drawing on scholarship and art practice past and present, Cosier shines light on terms, concepts, and approaches such as “disobedient objects” and “laboratory of resistance” to get at what Helguera (2011) claimed is a goal of socially engaged art: “to provoke reflection” (p. 35). Rowe encourages the use of “antagonistic arts-based research.” I see Rowe’s account of arts-based research compatible with Helguera’s (2011) justification of socially engaged art as a means by which “to discover something in the process” (p. 34). Both commentaries put forth the idea of a current political and social moment in need of care and empathy of the sort artists and art educators might be able to provide, or at least find agency to foster and promote.