The Habitus of Artless Knowledge and the Future Inhabitable

• In Event: 60.016 - Mobilizing Canadian Curriculum Research as Counterpointed Breakthroughs

Abstract

In the neoliberal subject, how is it that the playful, creative, analytical, and inquiring processes central to the arts have been separated from knowledge creation? Parading as innovation, how might decisions that are limited to an artless knowledge produce a world that is unfit for human habitation? In the Canadian Association of Curriculum Studies, arts scholars face a definitional challenge that is an urgent political challenge. Irwin, for example, in advancing a/r/tography, is elaborating the economic and political implications of a robust arts education. A/r/tography inspires groups or individuals to inquire collaboratively, underscoring the multiplicity, interconnectedness, and self-replicating nature of experiential investigation within a community (Bickel, 2005; Carter, 2014; 2013; Gouzouasis, 2011; Irwin & de Cosson, 2004; Knowles & Cole, 2007; Springgay, Irwin, Leggo, & Gouzouasis, 2008). Recently, with O’Donoghue (2012), Irwin has theorized that a/r/tography can “reveal the hidden labour of pedagogy” (p. 224) because it is a practice that “invents, produces or reconfigures social relations between individuals, groups and communities” (p. 231).
Along similar flights of thinking, Gaztambide-Fernandez (2013) argues that the arts need not do anything: Artificially linking the arts with economic outputs—“whether [to] transform consciousness, inspire beauty, or raise test scores,” he says, “[is] impossible to substantiate without imposing someone’s definition of what constitutes the arts and what experiences they (should) produce” (p. 219). This critical argument for arts scholars in curriculum means that our attentions should instead be on “forms and practices...[that are] processes of cultural production”(p. 226). Recent examples of this critical work have contested normative forms and practices in assessment (Norris, 2011), data generation (Walsh), and developing scholarly-community partnerships (Conrad & Sinner, in press).

Author

• Sean P. Wiebe, University of Prince Edward Island