Introduction
The aim of this special issue is to bring together original contributions that explore what notions such as “engaged”, and “critical” pedagogy can or should imply in relation to specific situated challenges and contested spaces. Within this issue, the notion of pedagogy is approached in a broad sense, i.e. not only referring to schooling in formal settings but also to broader processes of knowledge production, mediation and sharing which can be found in public and cultural pedagogy at large. The aim is to understand what the role can be of (critical) art to conceptualise, contest and/ or develop an engaged and critical pedagogy and to explore how the notions of “engaged” and “critical” can emerge at the intersection of art and pedagogy.
Throughout the issue, the following non-exhaustive questions are addressed: What kind of strategies can be developed for engaged and critical pedagogy through the “detour” of art? How can art be conceptualised as a form of engaged and critical pedagogy? How can notions such as “engaged” and “critical” be rhetorically unpacked and critically assessed in relation to or starting form specific artistic practices? What do such pedagogies imply within a digital culture? What does it imply to engage critically with art institutions and cultural spaces and what can be the (critical) pedagogical role of these institutions and spaces?
As such, the theme of the special issue – engaging pedagogy through the arts – is approached within the different contributions from a broad range of interrelated perspectives: exploring an “engaged pedagogy” based on or in relation to specific artistic practices or the work of specific artists; critically “engaging” with art within pedagogy; using art as a lens to critically “engage” with pedagogy and pedagogical spaces.
The special issue brings together papers that are theoretical, methodological and/or empirical discussions of the possible intersections between (critical) art and pedagogical approaches, or that are reflections about art, artists, and artistic practices in relation to engaged and critical pedagogy.
The contributions are situated at the crossroads of cultural studies, educational studies, critical pedagogy, anthropology, and critical arts and discuss a broad range of artistic and pedagogical practices, topical debates, theoretical reflections, and within different geographical contexts. The articles throughout the special issue are deliberately not grouped thematically, or by specific theoretical or methodological approach, to emphasise the broad range of perspectives that emerge from a large group of authors reflecting on the intersections between (critical) art and (engaged) pedagogy.
Contributions
In From “The Cotton Wool” to Criticality: Unpacking FC Bergman’s The Sheep Song, Geert Vandermeersche, Elvira Crois, Line Dalile, Sara Demény, Camille Dumont, Aline Verbeke and Free De Backer collaboratively explore the relationship between the critical potential of the arts and dominant notions of criticality. The authors introduce feminist perspectives to criticise traditional notions of the public sphere and critical thinking as a central concept within education with an emphasis on a limited model of criticality that excludes affectivity. By analysing a theatre performance – FC Bergman’s The Sheep Song – they explore emergent structures of feeling that can include new critical affects. They specifically do so by building on the work of Maxine Green that addresses how aesthetic-sense making can interrupt the “cotton wool” of taken-for-granted ways of thinking and seeing. Through their analysis, the authors show how specific moments of transition between scenes and representations of disability can potentially foreground an audience’s sense – and meaning-making.
In Political Imagination and Utopian Pedagogy, Suvi Salmenniemi, Pilvi Porkola and Hanna Ylöstalo aim to contribute to the theorisation of utopian pedagogy by discussing how arts-based exercises can be used in engaged pedagogy to stimulate political imagination. The authors draw on pedagogical experiments in their sociology course to address the following questions: “How can arts-based exercises be used in engaged pedagogy to foster political imagination? What kinds of tensions or difficulties does this process involve? What kinds of conceptions of politics and social change do these exercises produce?”. Based on their pedagogical practice, the authors discuss a range of features that characterise utopian pedagogy. They conclude that utopian pedagogy can be an important tool for transformative politics because of its facilitation of political imagination and by widening the horizon of “the possible” in the context of the neoliberalisation of higher education.
In The Art of Making Public: Mapping Networks of Art Mediation, Siebren Nachtergaele, Lieze De Middeleir, Griet Verschelden and An De bisschop focus on current art mediation practices that explore experimental forms of relating art and public by navigating at the intersection of art and education in non-linear ways. They discuss what these forms of art-mediation may mean, both theoretically as well as practically by arguing how the educational turn in the arts stimulated unconventional and experimental art mediation practices. The authors explore the following questions: “What do these contemporary art mediation processes mean in terms of engaged pedagogies and politics? How can their positioning be understood in the relation between culture and democracy?” The authors develop “soft cartography” as an engaged research approach to analyse practices in urban networks and focus on the case of Park Poétik. A soft cartography, the authors contend, explores subjective motives and cultural dynamics, and focuses on the involved artists, mediators and citizens.
In The Loneliness Room: Creative Practice as Critical Pedagogy, Sean Redmond explores the topic of loneliness as one of the most pressing issues of the contemporary age and specifically as a crisis that has been created by the unequal and alienating forces of neo-liberal capitalism. The author emphasises the importance of creative practice as a framework to access how people feel about, experience and understand loneliness and the possibilities of artistic forms to represent and embody the “pedagogy” of the everydayness of loneliness. The author discusses the loneliness room project as a four-year empirical study of loneliness with a specific focus on the creative responses and artworks by participants that represent what loneliness means to them specifically from a gendered perspective. The author argues how the creative works submitted by the participants to the loneliness project “teach” us about the role of creative imagination in understanding gendered loneliness.
In The Social Cohesion Dilemma: Theoretical Reflections on Critical Music Pedagogy, Carolin Müller reports on an ethnography of critical music pedagogy with refugee youth that emerged from an activist context in the city of Dresden to critically explore what is at stake for empowerment. The author argues that music pedagogy that aims to be critical remains a discursively shallow diversity campaign when self-representations reproduce hegemonic epistemologies of domination. The author furthermore argues that discursive products silence potential reflexivity when political goals overshadow shared learning experiences and discusses a reconceptualization of music pedagogy through the concept of lingua mundi to capture the individual transgressive acts that take place and the spaces where care work is possible, and that allows for empowering one another.
In Towards a Critical Pedagogy for Inclusion: Disability-led Arts and its Radical Promise in Singapore, Kuansong Victor Zhuang, Bella Choo and Grace Lee-Khoo discuss how the inclusion of disabled people in Singapore is gaining importance because of the dominance of transnational instruments such as the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. The authors problematise that in the absence of disability rights legislation, inclusion in Singapore has taken markedly different forms that are based on ablenationalist notions of productivity and meritocracy. Starting from such frameworks of social inclusion, the authors consider the recent emergence of disability-led arts in Singapore and analyse recent disabled-led art productions by Access Path Productions. The authors emphasise that these initiatives have engaged with existing art and cultural spaces and institutions in Singapore, transforming existing ways of doing, thinking, and knowing about disability and as such offer a critical praxis aimed at (re)educating the public on the meanings of disability.
In Uncomfortable Knowledges and Transformative Learning: Reimagining the Museum in the Art of Gustafsson&Haapoja, Heidi Kosonen, Johanna Turunen and Aino-Kaisa Koistinen interrogate the transformative potential of critically engaged art by analyzing the work of the Finnish artist duo Gustafsson&Haapoja, a collaboration between writer Laura Gustafsson and visual artist Terike Haapoja. Gustafsson&Haapoja’s work focuses, the authors contend, on the intersecting human exceptionalist, racist, imperialist, patriarchal, and capitalist histories of violence towards nonhuman animals and dehumanised humans which often provoke uncomfortable affects and can be challenging to confront. Therefore, the authors approach Gustafsson&Haapoja’s art through the idea of transformative learning, a process designed to shake established thinking and behavioural patterns. They investigate how Gustafsson&Haapoja’s art – and art in general – could function as a transformative learning resource and enable sudden ruptures in hegemonic cultural norms, privileges, and power positions.
In Unlearning Imperialism Through Artistic Remediation: A Critical Pedagogy Approach, Ana Mendes focuses on art forms that involve remediation as a strategy of the critical pedagogy of “unlearning imperialism”, a concept coined by Ariella Azoulay. The aim of this contribution is to examine the role of the adaptive process of artistic remediation in conceptualising and developing a critical and engaged approach in the classroom to the inequities in knowledge production, mediation, and sharing. The author combines the strategic approach to unlearning imperialism with Ariella Azoulay’s idea of “potential history”. These concepts frame the analysis of three artworks that are, in different ways, linked to photography, either as photography-to-painting or painting-to-photography remediations.
In Preparing Artists to Save the World: Community-Engaged Arts Practice as Critical Pedagogy, Sarah Peters and Tully Barnett problematize that the sustained marginalisation of creative arts in higher education in Australia risks the delivery of superficial learning experiences that are disconnected from the relationality of place, people, and histories. The authors argue that the metrics used to assess a university’s capacity to produce “job-ready graduates” does not adequately capture the success of students in the creative arts. In their contribution, the authors examine the place of community – engaged creative practice and cultural policy learning in universities to ask how tertiary educators can support students to develop industry skills while also embodying a critically engaged pedagogy to work and create in the industry in ways that prioritise relationality, context and an ethic of care. They do so by sharing two case studies of creative arts learning experiences in their university.
In Carrie Mae Weems’ Intersectional Tropes: Engaging Black Feminism Within Arts Teacher Education, Montserrat Rifà-Valls and Sara López Ruiz approach the visual tropes in Carrie Mae Weems’ bodies from an intersectional perspective through mobilising critical arts and black feminist studies for art pedagogies. The authors argue that a constant in Weems’ trajectory are the intersectional tropes that emerge in her artworks, which are, the authors contend, collapsed with bodies, defying racial, gender, age, and social class stereotypes, stratification, and oppression. Aiming to engage black feminism with pedagogies, the authors revisit a critical art project that connects different spaces: the exhibition “Carrie Mae Weems: A Great Turn in the Possible”; and, a pre-service art teacher education course – “Childhoods: Inclusive narratives through art” – in which narrative is a mode of decolonising pedagogy through contemporary art. Based on the analysis of this educational critical art project, the authors discuss how critical pedagogy merges with critical arts to train future art educators while experimenting with a black feminist curriculum.
In Shared anthropology: When anthropology meets critical public pedagogy, Arjang Omrani and Tahereh Aboofazeli explore the common ground between critical public anthropology and critical public pedagogy as critically conscious, engaged, and animating practices. These affinities are envisioned by the authors within the framework of shared anthropology, which asserts the co-authored nature of knowledge through “sharing-the-anthropology”. With this approach, the authors aim to decolonise and democratise knowledge using multimodal narratives and art as mediums; not merely as “research objects or aims”, but as methods to explore “knowing-in-practice” and as strategies for mediating knowledge. To further clarify their arguments, the authors introduce the conceptual framework of the artistic project Weaving Memories, a work-in-progress in which the authors are currently involved. Aligning with the critical principles of shared anthropology, the artistic project adopts a critical approach to problematise the subordinate condition of handmade carpet weavers within the production and distribution regime.
In “My story is not a pink story”: Enabling care in a research-creation practice with parents of a disabled child in inclusive trajectories, Silke Daelman, Inge Van de Putte and Elisabeth De Schauwer start from the growing attention to including parents and eliciting their voices in the inclusive journey of their children, to discuss a process of research-creation. The authors explore parents’ positions and development of strategies in creating inclusive childhoods for their children with disabilities by analyzing examples of parents making podcasts about meaningful moments and feltness/felting. Their study shows how storytelling workshops and podcast creation became a process of enabling care, as it created a space where parents explored possibilities, actively shaped inclusion and functioned within interconnected networks.
In Archival F(r)Ictions: A Queer Vocabulary for a Live art Pedagogy, Nashilongweshipwe Sakaria considers the global tradition of live art as a pedagogical force that draws on queer affect and resonance. The author argues that scholars of performance studies have situated live art in the field of experimental and undisciplined art but have not given enough attention to its pedagogical potential. In southern Africa, the author argues, live art has been theorised as a practice that is leaky, transgressive, and undisciplined, emphasising risk, extremity and endurance. As an African practitioner and scholar of live art with a Namibian and South African experience and training, the author draws on various experiences of performing, workshopping, curating and researching live art, offering a queer vocabulary to develop the pedagogical potential of live art. The author posits that this is a vocabulary for Archival F(r)ictions, emphasising the centrality of archival work in live artistic pedagogies.
In “Play You is [Me]!”: Third Space Rituals, Memory & the Performance of Self as Pedagogy, Deborah Lee Matthews reflects upon an in-progress, exploratory piece of digital theatre adapted from Zeno Constance’s seminal bildungsroman The Ritual. In this work, the author contends, Black women engage in a process of theorising their own liberatory practices, to (re)cognise the technologies inherent in their bodies. The author argues that an arts-based research approach is a decolonising onto-epistemological undertaking with the capacity to make Black women cognisant of, extract, and apply the knowledges held in their bodies. The author discusses how this proposed process also allows for a measured consideration of the possibilities of using ritual theatre and embodied knowledge(s) in digital space as a means of analysing lived experiences, transgenerational communication and the imaging/imagining of futurisms.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).