Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Good Mourning: Existing With Loss While Living In The Anxious Now, Jeff Horwat, Geralyn Yu, Vicky J. Grube

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education

Abstract:

Absence and loss are part of what it means to be alive. While common, grief is a difficult and complex aspect of the human psyche, often producing affects that mask themselves in different forms such as anxiety, anger, despair, and isolation. Able to bring into form the unnamable affects of our psychic lives (Irwin & Springgay, 2008), arts-based research methods can be viable means to transform the grief into something generative. In this paper, each author describes a project that uses a different arts-based research approach to explore a personal experience with grief. Drawing from wordless narrative research (Author …

Sorry, Not Sorry: Activating Moments Of Slippage Through Transpedagogical Practice, Lynn Sanders-Bustle

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education

While innovative approaches to teacher preparation are implemented in teacher preparation curricula, most curricula and practicums continue to be built around expected and normative standards of teacher practice. Intended to prepare future teachers to be successful in K-12 settings burdened by the impact of a stifling audit culture, policy overreach, continued efforts are needed to prepare preservice teachers for contemporary unknowns of pedagogy through contemporary art practices.

In this article, the author/inquirer examines preservice teachers’participation in transpedagogical practice (social practice) aimed at guiding high schoolers in a 2019 social practice project designed to make change in their schools. In this …

Thinking Through Zines: A Collaborative Visual Essay Inspired By Systems Thinking, Queering The Museum, And Emergent Strategy, Dana Carlisle Kletchka

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education

In this visual essay, students enrolled in a museum education and administration specialization in the Department of Arts Administration, Education, & Policy at Ohio State responded to course readings on museum work and Emergent Strategy through journaling and ‘zine making. While the course is intended to prepare students for the political and practical realities of working in an art museum, it is structured to elicit group and individual understandings of the readings, projects, and other assignments as well as to consider the ways in which we can collectively and incrementally create museological change. Three texts—Systems Thinking in Museums: Theory …

Digital Place-Futures Outside A Colonial Metaversal Imaginary: Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley’S We Are Here Because Of Those That Are Not As Critical Digital Place-Craft, Luke A. Meeken

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education

In this piece, the author analyzes a recorded digital walk through Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley’s WE ARE HERE BECAUSE OF THOSE THAT ARE NOT, a digital archival place designed to contain, protect, and share the experiences of Black trans people. The author’s encounter with Brathwaite-Shirley’s work is contextualized and analyzed through critical and decolonial place lenses and digital materialist lenses. Particular attention is paid to the ways physical and digital places crafted in colonial contexts bodily habituate settler-colonial sensibilities. The author examines how the critical digital placemaking strategies practiced by Brathwaite-Shirley informed teacher and student place-craft within the context of a …

Our Magnitude And Bond: An Ethics Of Care For Art Museum Education, Dana Carlisle Kletchka

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education

This work responds to contemporary concerns about the future of art museum education and public practice and art museums more broadly in the wake of a global pandemic that has, at present, killed more than a million people in the United States and sickened millions more. I respond to questions posed by the board of the Journal of Social Theory in Art Education in relation to the theme of Inclusion Invasion, expand upon the relations between art museums and communities posited by a post-critical, socially responsive museological framework, and explore the potential for a feminist philosophical Ethics of Care …

Whose Art Museum? Immersive Gaming As Irruption, Jason M. Cox, Lillian Lewis

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education

This paper introduces Mantles in the Museum, an immersive game that helps ameliorate student discomfort in art museums and to support discourse in, through, and around art museums. Within the game the students take on the roles of critics who use one of five interpretive frameworks, often differing from the student’s own, to select works from a real museum to go to an international exhibition. Assuming these roles empowers students to be in the museum and to assess the works, students are given leave to engage in a vigorous critique process and to examine the art-world from a new perspective.

Creating Commons: Photovoice Philosophy In A Third Space, Jason M. Cox, Lynne Hamer

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education

Teach Toledo is a program that the authors co-coordinate using community assets to create a third space to confront systemic racism’s impact on teacher education programs and facilitate hybridity (Bhaba, 1994). Diverse student cohort members use their lived experience as the base for their individual and shared urban educational philosophies, coordinated in a first-year horizontally and vertically integrated curriculum including written compositions and a PhotoVoice project. “Creating commons” refers not only to provision of a third space as a common space where private experiences can be combined to create a hybrid, new understanding, but also to the creative act of …

Critical Hermeneutics And The Counter Narrative Of Ledger Art, Katie Fuller

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education

Too often historical artworks in schools, textbooks, cultural institutions, and public spaces share a narrative that bolsters white-centered histories, but when an historical artwork is studied as text it creates room for multiple perspectives (Newfield, 2011) expanding the narrative to include subjugated histories. Looking at art through the philosophy of hermeneutics opens up questions and conflicts that arise within texts based on interpretations of those texts (Leonardo, 2003). This paper will apply the philosophy of hermeneutics to critique historical memory, and it will present ledger art as a visual text and counter narrative to dominant white narratives. Ledger art emerged …

Revenge Of The Lawn, Jason James Wallin

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education

A great irony of the present moment involves the return of objects long thought rallied to the will of man. As growing consensus in climate change research submits, the world presumably given to the mastery of man today returns as an alien force of material and conceptual upheaval. It is against this backdrop of rapid ecological transformation and its cultural impacts that Revenge of the Lawn is situated. As a work of speculative philo-fiction, Revenge of the Lawn surveys the horror of being “read” from the vantage of the non-human as it exists astride and yet withdraws from human melodrama …

“Press Charges”: The Intersection Of Art Class, White Feelings, And The School-To-Prison Pipeline, Albert Stabler

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education

I reflect on the decade I spent as an art teacher in a Chicago high school where so-called "behavioral issues" are rampant, as well on my experience working with incarcerated adults, in order to explain the concept of the school-to-prison pipeline with the aid of recent research on discipline and policing. I go on to talk about a September 2019 thread in an art teacher group on Facebook. On this thread, predominantly white teachers overwhelmingly called for a teacher who was hit while breaking up a fight to press charges against the student who struck him, purportedly for the student’s …

Typographic Interventions: Disruptive Letterforms In Public Space, Clark A. Goldsberry

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education

We are surrounded by typography—on billboards, aluminum cans, pill bottles, and pixelated screens—but artists and art teachers, seeking out the materiality of their lived environments, should be able to look at text in different ways. Many artists utilize letterforms as a medium of juxtaposition and recontextualization (Gude, 2004) by placing text in places we don’t expect to see it, or they subvert the messages we expect to read. Typographic interventions can be seen everywhere, by all types of artists, makers, activists, and dissidents. These interruptions could be framed as forms of socially engaged art (Helguera, 2011; Mueller, 2020) that “suspend …

Index Of Dirt: Composing And Composting In Art And Education, Circa 2020, Carol N. Padberg

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education

This photo essay presents an abridged version of a performative lecture addressing strategies for regenerative art education and arts-based research. Using an alphabetized compilation of stories, texts, objects and lessons, the index provides examples of how embodied, field-based art education can provide appropriate learning methods for art students of the Anthropocene who bear the burden of the economic, environmental, and emotional precarities of our times.

Cissexism And Precarity Perform Trans Subjectivities, Kevin Jenkins

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education

Precarity is not experienced by all. Rather, as Judith Butler (2009) notes, it is the extreme state of precariousness—a heightened exposure to institutional and social violence imposed on marginalized populations such as people of color, non-white immigrants, people of non-Christian faiths, and LGBTQ+ people. Nor does precarity impact the people in these groups evenly.

The three digital artworks in this series highlight some of the ways in which trans people navigate precarity and are performed by it. The lifetime suicide attempt rate for trans and gender non-conforming people averages at 41% with the highest rate at 46% reported by trans …

Stickiness As Methodological Condition, Cala Coats

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education

Stickiness is introduced as a cultural concept, affective condition, and performative practice. The author suggests a process of methodological conditioning rooted in responsiveness and attunement in response to shared vulnerability embedded in precarity. Drawing from Felix Guattari’s ethico-aesthetic paradigm, new materialisms, and affect theory, the author invites readers to engage with a narrative score as an aesthetic pedagogical exercise. The score and additional provocations act as creative material for connective and collective performances tracing and creating encounters across time and space.

Precarity In Feminism And Feminist Art Education: Decentering Whiteness Through Reproductive Justice Activism, Michelle Bae-Dimitriadis, Olga Ivashkevich

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education

The article addresses precarity in mainstream feminism and feminist art education as a systemic dismissal and exclusion of the critical concerns and voices by disenfranchised women of color from its narratives and agendas. It draws on a case of the reproductive justice feminist activism to illustrate how the mainstream pro-choice feminist movement neglected the urgent and often life threatening reproductive concerns by Black, Brown, Indigenous and immigrant women, which led to an establishment of the reproductive justice coalitions by activists of color. The reproductive justice movement is an important call to action to challenge and decenter Whiteness in mainstream feminism …

The Art History Canon And The Art History Survey Course: Subverting The Western Narrative., Kimberly Becker Mast

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education

Art History enrollments at the college level are declining as students flock to STEM majors and perceive Art History as dated and of little use in today’s modern, scientific world. Yet Art History classes can teach valuable skills. When taught in a broad context, the objects art history studies engage critical thinking and can generate new forms of knowledge. However, the pedagogical structure and content of introductory art history survey course does not always offer students the creative leeway to make these connections. Instructors at the college level often retreat to the methods and content that have been a part …

Misplaced Walls, Christopher Lynn

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education

Misplaced Wall is an art project consisting of a modular series of cardboard boxes painted to look like cartoonish and colorful brick walls. These walls appear in desert landscapes, suburban homes, and basketball courts as an awkward and obtrusive guest, but one that will inevitably fall and be placed, or rather misplaced, elsewhere. The impermanent artwork is a response to the current political calls for the building of and tearing down of walls—where one wall or border may fall, another is identified or built based on ever-shifting ideologies. It is also an analogy for a sort of itinerant practice that …

Troubling The “We” In Art Education: Slam Poetry As Subversive Duoethnography, Gloria J. Wilson, Sara Scott Shields

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education

Scholarly dialogues are filled with discussions of teacher’s personal perspectives, experiences, and challenges - but rarely do these dialogues include the narratives that lie beneath the surface. The subversive tales confronting stories of microagressions, alternate histories, and institutionalized norms that shape the educational landscape we navigate daily. This paper is focused on bringing to the surface a call and response lament of two social justice-oriented art educators--one Black, the other White. Using the dialogic methodology of duoethnography and the performative aspects of slam poetry, we share our racialized-teaching accounts as a multisensory experience, where text and performative orality share a …

Public School Art Teacher Autonomy In A Segregated City: Affordances And Contradictions, Albert Stabler, Jorge R. Lucero

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education

Over the past two decades, the Chicago Public Schools have seen a lot of change. First there was the opening of magnet schools, and other gestures at reform, followed by school closures and the flourishing of charter schools. In this essay, two former Chicago art teachers, one who taught in a prominent college prep magnet high school on the north side, and one who taught in an under-resourced neighborhood high school on the south side, examine the commonalities of their otherwise divergent experiences, particularly with regard to the freedom allotted to both them and their students by the administrative affordances …

Earthquakes + Tsunamis (A Poetic Diptych), Mindi Rhoades

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education

What follows is pair of found poems created by the practice of mining the writings of other authors to form a new work, a piece of language art. This process shares similarities with postmodern artistic practices including collage, appropriation, sampling, remixing, and repurposing. Source materials for found poems can include other poems, novels, newspaper articles, magazine stories, obituaries, letters—almost anything.

For these particular poems, the source materials are academic educational research articles about geological fault zones and earthquakes. The majority of the text in these poems is taken ver- batim from their original articles and used in the order of …

Compost Rich Of Resistance: Wayfinding In Tel Aviv And Jerusalem, Taylor K. Miller

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education

It is not common to travel to a region searching for what is wrong and askew. But this is precisely how I move through greater Palestine-Israel each time I visit. Explosions and incessant pummeling have forced the sidewalks and retaining walls to heave–Styrofoam slabs serve as an equally hasty and hideous shim. But in this, there is hope. Even where the sidewalk momentarily ends–likely that in just a few months a new road, deeper into the West Bank will be built–it is glaring that these foundations are laid at an unsustainable pace. In a land where the forest often obscures …

Battling The Big One: Lgbtq Inclusive Art Education During The Trump Era, Mark J. Villalpando

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education

Recently, because of our new political atmosphere, there have been many attacks on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer, or LGBTQ+, individuals and communities. Even though there have been positive developments in the past few years, homophobia is still a major concern for many people in the Unit- ed States. These issues often manifest themselves to a greater degree within the microcosm of public schools where LGBTQ+ students are forced to deal with hateful speech, heteronorma- tive environments, and rampant homophobia. These strugglescan have harmful e ects on the social and emotional develop- ment of queer youth. Progressive and inclusive …

Materialized Practices Of Food As Borderlands Performing As Pedagogy, Christen Sperry García

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education

In this paper, I examine the interrelationship between borderlands, food, and ways in which they perform as pedagogy. First, I define borderlands in relation to art. Second, I discuss food and borderlands as authenticity, hybridity, and race/body. Lastly, I examine various fields of pedagogy including public, border, and food pedagogy and consider how they relate to food. I suggest that the interrelationship between borderlands and food can be used as a pedagogical tool to teach and learn about liminality, tension, contradiction, and hybridity. The hybrid spaces of consumable borderlands challenge food purity and yield unexpected foods such as carne asada …

F-Word Fun Home, Kim Cosier

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education

Growing up fundamentalist can be challenging for any child, but when you do not fit within the confines of traditional gender norms, when you are masculine, female-bodied or feminine, male-bodied, navigating identity can make you feel like a foreigner within your own family. Certain forms of feminism, too, can feel alienating. In this article, I share personal experiences with both social constructions of feminism and fundamentalism. Borrowing from queer theories, I wrestle with ways of doing, undoing, and redoing religion and gender that may have implications for teaching in a more inclusive and expansive manner.

Fictive Kinship In The Aspirations, Agency, And (Im)Possible Selves Of The Black American Art Teacher, Gloria Wilson

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education

In this paper, I explore the pairing of the concepts of fictive kinship and agency in order to explore racial identity narratives of the Black American art teacher. Expanding on the anthropological concept of fictive kinship, where bonds of connectedness between people help to shape selfhood, I consider the powerful impact that visual culture has on shaping identity narratives and the professional aspirations of Black American art teachers. I identify fictive kinship connections as salient in creating spaces which affect agency in the conceptualization and achievement of the self as an artist. I further use the concept of fictive kinship …

#Mobilephotonow: Two Art Worlds, One Hashtag, Jodi Kushins

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education

In the winter of 2015, the Columbus Museum of Art (CMA) co-curated an exhibition with the loose-knit mobile photography collective known as JJ Community. #MobilePhotoNow included images created in response to a series of prompts and shared on the photo sharing and social networking application Instagram®. The exhibition reflected a community-based curatorial practice (Keys & Ballengee-Morris, 2001) demonstrating new possibilities for participatory art and culture in the age of social media. This portrait of how the project came to be is presented as an example of how art world factions might be brought together, in both virtual and real spaces, …

All The F Words We Used To Know, Mindi J. Rhoades

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education

Photos of handwritten list of the 2,000+ F words listed in the 1996 version of Webster’s Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language (Deluxe Edition), published by Gramercy Books of Random House Press in Avenal, New Jersey. Verb tense conjugations and plural nouns are omitted.

An analysis briefly contextualizes this artwork in relation to semiotic theory, contemporary text-based and word-based art and arts practices, social theory, and art education.

Desirable Difficulties: Toward A Critical Postmodern Arts-Based Practice, Gloria J. Wilson, Sara Scott Shields, Kelly W. Guyotte, Brooke A. Hofsess

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education

Prior scholarship on collaborative writing projects by women in the academy acknowledges sustained attempts of intraracial and interracial collaboration/divides. Interracial collaborative scholarship, while noble in effort, may result in unacknowledged tensions surrounding racial identity politics. In these collaborative environments the problematics of race cannot be denied, with Black women often drawing upon their racialized identities, while White women emphasize their gendered identities. An unawareness and/or invisibility of Whiteness as a racial construct of privilege further problematizes feminist postmodern discourse. This polyvocal text focuses on responding to and working within the tensions of identity politics encountered in interracial scholarship among four …