What I am referring to as the showing of the seams of one’s pedagogy is the laying bare of the here and now of pedagogy, which has everything to do with promise, possibility, and potentiality (not inevitability) of failure.
--José Esteban Muñoz
My current book project, Scenes of Pedagogy: Art and the Politics of Possibility, examines the “promises” of art and pedagogy in enacting institutional critique and possibility. This project grows out of collective conversations within and beyond the field of art and design in the recent turn towards social equity and inclusion and responds to national reckonings on race and identitarian politics in the post-Obama era. Primarily through ethnographic research in several art and design colleges across the United States, Scenes of Pedagogy tracks activities in unmaking and remaking hegemonic institutional learning spaces. In the last decade, students across campuses in the United States and elsewhere have demanded racial, social, and climate equity, bringing institutions of higher learning to crisis under heightened media scrutiny. I examine how artists, art educators, and art schools have participated in this movement and the broader implications of such activism in a field that has historically been depoliticized and traditionalist in its adherence to Euroamerican canons and epistemes.
I look at the dynamics of student activism, institutional initiatives, and curricular projects that function as flashpoints in the recent politicization of discourses and critiques of entrenched art institutional practices. Within these dynamics, race, and embodiment play significant roles as subjects that have historically been excluded from these spaces and thus expose the failures of the institution to practice equity, inclusion, and justice. Furthermore, this labor often falls upon students and faculty of color to transform the institutions they inhabit as they exercise their democratic right to “equal access” to artistic expression and aesthetic education. As a student of color remarked, “If you are the one to name the problem, you are tasked with fixing it,” at the service of the institution and the expense of their own educational investment. My dissertation provides insights into the role of activism, education, and pedagogy in practices of cultural and knowledge production and how they shape and inform the “field imaginary” of art and design.
I argue that the “scenes of pedagogy” I examine mark both an epistemic and cultural shift in contemporary art education. It is important to mark that these practices do not only seek representation or inclusion. However, it is about constructing a more multivalent and multidimensional response to the conditions we navigate and utilizing the resources at hand to do urgent work. In these ways, I argue that these practices not only reclaim historically exclusionary spaces but “disclose options and alternatives for transformative praxis,” always with a “skeptical eye…on enclosure…or rigid conclusions.”* I am interested in how artists, students, and educators critique the limits of the institution and challenge the structures in which they exist. I look for what I call the politics of possibility in the ways that artists create and imagine alternatives and create relationships that work toward social and structural change.
*West, Cornell. “The New Cultural Politics of Difference,” October. 53 (Summer 1990), 93-109.