Animating Education Futures: Making Art at the End of the World

• In Event: Highlighted Session: Awakening CIE Knowledge Production: A Conversation to Revitalize the Field

Proposal

‘Why make art at the end of the world?’ In Manifesto for Research-Creation, Loveless (2019) asserts that ‘we need new pedagogical and political strategies that force us to ask new questions....in which new situated kinship ties (disciplinary, affective, social, political) are the name of the game within the bastions of knowledge we inhabit’ (p. 100). In this context, Loveless (2019) invites us to stake our lot ‘with art that works at the micropolitical level of the here and now—art with an activist impulse,’ claiming that such an art offers speculative frames through which to defamiliarize and reorganize…. to “nurture our capacities not only to reflect and analyze but to act and intervene, mobilizing research-creation as a way to develop work that is not simply on ecological topics but that takes ecological form – not just on but as” (p. 101). In this presentation, we discuss a research-creation project with youth participants from across the world that takes up Loveless’s call for creating art ‘with an activist impulse’ to explore the power of arts as a methodology for critically interrogating the dominant education paradigms and structures, including their complicity in the ecological crises. Working with artistic responses crowdsourced through the Turn It Around! (TiA) project, we aim to collectively reimagine education’s role in responding to the planetary climate crisis.

Spanning five continents and over seventy countries, TiA is a global socially engaged art initiative, which brings into focus – and into policy dialogue – youth visions of education futures through crowdsourcing artwork and text responses via social media. The goal is to mobilize the power of socially engaged art in order to ‘move’ policymakers on an affective level at a time when scientific data alone often fails to elicit adequate response. First, we will discuss how the project design –– from subverting flashcards as a common teaching tool to embracing a wide range of artistic expressions and spanning diverse cultural and linguistic landscapes – offers possibilities for reimagining education otherwise. Second, we will examine the process of working with and through arts as a methodological turn that weaves together the aesthetic and imaginative lenses of art with ecological, experiential, and empirical knowledges for the purposes of interrupting our ways of knowing grounded in colonial-modernity, while fostering new conversations and more radical imaginations. Using examples of youth-created artwork to engage the audience, we will reflect on the ways in which art can help us unlearn the taken-for-granted assumptions about the dominant forms of education and illuminate the potential of artistic engagement as one means of collectively rearticulating education futures in the face of the climate crisis.

Authors

• Dilraba Anayatova, Arizona State University

• Iveta Silova, Arizona State University

• Carrie Karsgaard, Cape Breton University