Learning to Do "Aesthetics From Below": Critical Aesthetics Research as Undergraduate Pedagogy

• In Event: 35.081 - Roundtable Session 13
  In Roundtable Session: 35.081-14 - Critical Aesthetics, Critical Autoethnography, and Researching Self: Critical Areas of Research

Abstract

Aesthetic education, writes Gayatri Spivak (2012), is the preparation of imagination for epistemological work that emerges in its postcolonial form when you study aesthetics from below. I understand this as a potentially limitless study of art in and community that occurs at the crossroads of perception, signification, technique, power (culture, institutions, politics), creativity/innovation, self, subject, and community. This very dense knot illustrates that 'aesthetics from below' may be three word manifesto for arts educators willing to take up the epistemological and pedagogical challenges. And nowhere is this more necessary than in schools.

Author

• Michael B. MacDonald, Grant MacEwan University