Aesthetic Wit(h)nessing and the Political Ethics of Care: Generating Solidarity and Trust in Pedagogical Encounters

• In Event: Posthuman and Care Ethics for Re-Imagining Higher Education Pedagogies

Abstract

Objectives or purposes
In the context of increasing polarisation within institutions of higher education in South Africa, this paper explores art history pedagogical encounters that build trust and solidarity between student participants as well as between students and myself, as lecturer. Particular attention is given to how educators and students address and navigate difference(s) in the classroom in order to critique unequal power relations, embrace difference(s), and model compassionate behaviors that promote social justice.

Perspective(s) or theoretical framework
The paper examines how the intra-action between Joan Tronto’s (2013) notion of 'caring with' and Bracha Ettinger’s (2009) 'matrixial wit[h]nessing’ generates new possibilities for building trust and solidarity within pedagogical praxis. Proposing care as a relational practice, Tronto offers the moral element of ‘caring with’ to highlight how caregivers and care-receivers are mutually, albeit asymmetrically implicated. The notion of ‘caring with’ resonates with artist/theorist Ettinger’s concept of aesthetic wit[h]nessing that emerges out of her matrixial theory of trauma, aesthetics and sexual difference (Pollock, 2010). Ettinger proposes wit[h]nessing as a ‘being with’ and bearing witness to the trauma of the other, without engulfing the other. Instead it offers compassionate response-ability that risks vulnerability yet does not give way to assimilation with the other (Ettinger, 2009; 2005)(Pollock, 2010). Given South Africa’s traumatic past, this theory offers helpful insights for pedagogical praxis in which response-ability becomes key to building trust and solidarity within the learning environment.

Methods, techniques, or modes of inquiry
Following Barbara Bolt's (2007) claims that that we come to know the world through handling it, the paper is in/formed by practice-led research that utilizes post-qualitative diffractive methodology across various disciplines that include history of art and design praxes, psychoanalysis and feminist new materialisms.

Data sources, evidence, objects, or materials
In keeping with the relationality of empirical research, the presentation draws on students’ visual and written narratives, reflections and insights as well as my own. Within this frame, the performative function of artworks as co-creators of knowledge and the process of art-making have ontological effects on students and my own becoming-with encounters with others (Haraway, 2016).

Results and/or substantiated conclusions or warrants for arguments/point of view
The entanglement between arts-based practices, care ethics and matrixial aesthetic wit[h]nessing, offer new possibilities for arts based pedagogies that are in/formed by solidarity and trust.

Scientific or scholarly significance of the study or work
Following Barad's (2007) assertion that ‘our responsibility is greater than it would be if it were ours alone’ and Haraway’s (2016) campaign of ‘staying with the trouble’, the paper expands the conversations about caring practices in the field of higher education that call on students and teachers to recuperate ambiguous pasts that continue to in/form the present and have ongoing consequences for the future.

Author

• Nike Irene Romano, Cape Peninsula University of Technology