Bruised Hearts, Black Feathers, and Freedom Flags: Making With the Trouble in a New Curriculum Landscape

• In Event: The Belly of the Beast: Resisting Racial, Gendered, and Sexual Oppressions Through the Power of Performance

Abstract

Objective: This multi-media performance explores what else school-based relationships and sexuality education (RSE) research can become when diversity, rights, and explicit commitments to decolonisation and LGBTQ+ inclusivity are embedded in a national curriculum and governmental social policy agenda. We offer a glimpse into the artful praxis of a research-engagement project that invited young people to ‘unbox’ school-based relationships and sexuality education (RSE) through the visual arts. It is a praxis developed over 10 years in a semi-rural Welsh (UK) valleys town, where the aftermath of industrialisation echoes down the centuries as hauntings of past lifeworlds.

Theoretics: The Unboxing RSE project is inspired by the artful queering of trans*disciplinary feminist ‘new’ materialist theory-doings in educational research (see phematerisalisms.org). It is a project that attunes (Stewart 2010, Stern 2010) to the messiness of how lived experience always exceeds the disciplinary cages and classifications society uses to render life’s intelligibility (Halberstam 2020). Our use of the concept of ‘unboxing' embraces the ontological indeterminacy or "radical openness" (Barad 2003) of life. Our placement of the asterisk in ‘trans*disciplinary’ also foregrounds this indeterminacy and operates as a political wild card (Halberstam 2017) that registers the creative ecologies (Harris 2016) of how life comes to matter (Barad 2011). We draw on the term "dartaphact" (Author 2018) - a post-qualitative concept that combines the words "data," "art," and "act/ivism" to register the matter-realist agency of arts-based data.

Method: The unboxing RSE project team included two researchers, an artist-in-residence teacher, a film-maker and a composer. Together, we generated arts-based data with a diverse group of 11 young people (age 13-14) to unbox a living curriculum of what mattered to them over 10 two-hour sessions in an arts classroom. The art room became what Manning (2009, p.30) writes about as a relational “contact zone” where young people began “improvising with the already-felts” on matters close to their hearts. Over time, each ‘dartaphact’ (Author 2018) was re-composed with sound, re-oriented with inspirational quotes and re-animated through film. Collectively, the dartaphacts surface the time-space-matterings of local and global contracting and expanding racist, queer phobic, ableist norms that criss-cross young people’s worlds with trembling un/certainty (Glissant, cited in Preciado 2019).

Results: We speculate how the co-produced ethical-relational space of the art classroom enables young people to cultivate a collective posthuman voice that provided glimpses of ‘multiple futures popping in and out of possibility’ (Tsing, 2015, viii). Come along and meet the making of the Bruised Heart that wants to speak out about the silencing of young people calling out ‘rape, racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia’. Intra-act with the masks and pins that hold, hide and punctuate an emergent racialised queer life in Underneath the Black Feathers and the waves of rage released in the making of a local and global mattering Palestinian Freedom? flag. Wonder with us as we explore the twists and turns of how making with the trouble might continue to affect the mattering of what matters across a mercurial policy and practice assemblage.

Author

• EJ Renold, Cardiff University