Journal of Public Pedagogies

Sensing Sideway

Thu, 26 Oct 2023 20:06:09 -0700

Disrupting Artistic Terra Nullius

Paola Balla — Wed, 25 Oct 2023 21:23:10 -0700

Ghost Weaving, survivance, disruption, artistic repair, sovereignty

Embodied Futurities

Jill J Tan — Tue, 07 Nov 2023 00:00:00 -0800

This article began as a critical essay of the same title, Embodied Futurities, commissioned to accompany the exhibition of the performance project and video installation Between Earth and Sky (2018-) by Singaporean artist and cultural worker Alecia Neo. Working with a community of caregivers of persons with mental illness and degenerative disease in Singapore, Neo’s work and this article connect the physicality of care work and carer-choreographed movements as forms of embodied praxis. This article focuses on the co-created work by Neo, the Caregivers Alliance (CAL) caregivers, and the movement artists, as guided by Neo's commitment to socially-oriented art, a school of practice that seeks to problematise traditional models of authorship or creatorship through dialogic or collaborative processes. Neo’s socially engaged artworks are situated in this article as forms of public pedagogy.
Embodied Futurities engages participatory ethnographic methods to develop a critical arts writing model which advocates for enhancing polyvocality in both art-making and critical discourse around work. Exploring art-making; movement as autopoiesis (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994); living with mental illness and degenerative disease; the act and arc of caregiving; and the everyday choreography of survival (Cox, 2015), this article’s focal points are drawn from the perspectives voiced by caregivers.
Embodied Futurities explores how Between Earth and Sky posits and reorients the body as a site for expression rather than maintenance, re-envisions the potential of community support networks, and considers the possibilities of self-care for carers for whom mutuality may seem remote.

Caring with Computers

Computational Mama, Diwas Raja Kc — Thu, 09 Nov 2023 15:28:11 -0800

Computational Mama met with Diwas Raja Kc for an online conversation about her practice in relation
to artist-led public pedagogies. Computational Mama’s work explores live coding and computational
thinking as forms of friendship and care. She currently lives in Udaipur, India, in a multi-generational
household of all women and her 5-year-old son. In this rich exchange ranging from feminist theorists,
artists, and coders, they discuss how she chose this moniker as care-giving and motherhood
increasingly impact her practice and strategies of creative facilitation with community.

Composting our practices (and organisations) through artist-led pedagogy

Jacina Leong — Thu, 09 Nov 2023 15:27:21 -0800

Composting as a pedagogy is about cultivating a transformative practice, in and with community — for
relational and affective assembly. Thinking with composting as a pedagogic (and more-than-human)
metaphoric device, this article introduces composting our practices, an online pedagogical exchange
developed and facilitated by the author for the 2021 disorganising project. Included are conversations
shared between the author and practitioners who gathered to compost their practices — to ingest,
digest, and churn their practices — by collectively attuning to the rhythms and temporalities of practice,
including the chronic stress and cumulative impacts of operating under capitalist, neoliberal logics of
productivity, growth and expansion, job casualisation and precarity, and competitive and scarce
funding models. Our shared conversations are an offering to readers to forage what is useful to their
thinking. In doing so, we propose that you ask yourself: what aspects of your practice are transforming?
What needs to transform? And how might we be able to do this, at different scales, through shared
practices of reflexivity? Composting as a pedagogy is a situated, practical, and ongoing labour towards
the maintenance, repair, and where necessary and possible, decomposition and transmogrification of
our institutionalised habits and behaviours — including those we enact, knowingly or otherwise,
through the organisations in which our practices operate.

Fugitive Bakery's un-recipe-like recipe book

Anathapindika Dai, Liza Markus — Tue, 07 Nov 2023 17:37:41 -0800

Our reception and consumption of cultural scholarship often fall under a hierarchy of mediums, where
text-based pieces are deemed superior to alternative and digitally porous forms of knowledge transfer
such as YouTube videos, social media content, verbal and gestural activations, and more. This
emphasis is reinforced through traditional forms of pedagogy that operate in a one-way social order
between lecturer and pupil. This structural obsession toward text-exclusive, one-way pedagogic
practice limits the contaminative possibility of knowledge. The incorporation of public pedagogy in the
contemporary art domain enhances the potential for commoning. Likewise, an artist's increasing
agency in initiating public pedagogy correlates with the expanding definition of what a contemporary
art initiative can be.
Fugitive Bakery is a concept bakery that invites its collaborators to share their personal
responses to and interpretations of scholarly and non-scholarly texts with Anathapindika Dai and Liza
Markus—collectively known as Dika+Lija—in exchange for handmade baked goods provided free of
charge. In an anti-academic spirit, the duo ‘digest’ the books through baking and dialogue. In line with
their anti-capitalist beliefs, they provide each Bake free of charge while resisting set menus and rigid
working hours. Through this, the duo aims to address untraceable productivities, abstract values of
labour, hoarding of resources, profit maximisation, greed, hierarchies of scholarly credibility, the
insatiable need for factual accuracy, and the bias of statistics, ego, and pride.

Of the everyday and play in improper education

Khoiril Maqin — Tue, 07 Nov 2023 15:55:31 -0800

This article explores the role of the everyday and play in alternative school practices. I propose the
concept of a democratic 'common school' as one based on mundane daily experiences and different
ways of knowing. The everyday and play are usually seen as complementary tools in pedagogical
practices, rather than active cultural agents in cultivating the subjectivities of school participants. I
propose exploring the everyday and play in alternative education practices as a contribution to the
discourse of alternative pedagogies. This article is based on my observations and reflections from
participating in the School of Improper Education (SoIE) initiated by KUNCI Study Forum & Collective.
The article proposes that the everyday and play are not only tools in SoIE's day-to-day operations, but
also ways of learning that enable participants to question knowledge hierarchies and to develop self-
determined and emancipatory ways of knowing.

Liquid architecture, West space and bus projects are disorganising

Channon Goodwin, Amelia Wallin — Tue, 07 Nov 2023 15:57:16 -0800

“Liquid Architecture, West Space and Bus Projects are disorganising.” So began a public statement, first
circulated in November 2020, co-signed by the three organisations in question. It went on: “This
methodology is not a pathway to merger, but an experimental exercise in cooperative practice beyond
previous models of partnership, grounded in principles of solidarity and interdependence.” In this
polyvocal essay, Channon Goodwin, Joel Stern, and Amelia Wallin — former Artistic Directors of Bus
Projects, Liquid Architecture, and West Space — offer accounts of disorganising, which was staged
throughout 2020 and 2021 at the organisations’ shared base of Collingwood Yards in
Naarm/Melbourne. By contextualising, sharing and reflecting on disorganising, we explore how artist-
led forms of encounter and exchange can engage publics by challenging hegemonies, critiquing power,
and engaging publics in civil dialogue. While making these claims, the essay also acknowledges the
limits to achieving change under conditions governed by funding bodies, the demands of
‘professionalisation’ in the sector, and other infrastructures that curtail the radicality of our programs.

The kNOw school

Anga Art Collective , Kelly Hussey-Smith — Tue, 07 Nov 2023 15:58:49 -0800

In January 2023 the Anga Art Collective met with Kelly Hussey-Smith for an online conversation about
their practice and collective approach to art making. Anga Art Collective’s work explores artist-led
public pedagogy through friendship and modes of collectivity, performance, and interventions in public
space. Emerging from fifteen years of art, friendship, public interventions, and inter-disciplinary
dialogue the fifteen-member collective use creative practice and public pedagogy to explore local
contexts and issues in Assam. Their practice shows how collective approaches to knowledge
production, learning and creativity can be dynamic forces in generating and sustaining relations.
In 2020 the collective established The kNOw School as a response to monolithic narratives and
representations of national identity in contemporary India. Over time, the school has developed into a
series of pedagogic and epistemological questions about knowledge production, knowledge
hierarchies, and contextual learning. Concerned with local knowledge and regional plurality, their
projects and interventions range from workshops with young people to curatorial projects that both
strengthen regional bonds and challenge art world hierarchies. Through these site-specific
collaborations and interventions, they generate collective questions about how public pedagogy might
contribute to practices of equality and solidarity and contribute to a vision of a more egalitarian society.
In this conversational interview, edited from an online video conversation between five members of the
Anga Art Collective in Assam, and journal co-editor Kelly Hussey-Smith in Naarm, we explore Anga Art
Collective's (d)evolving practice as a form of relational, durational and iterative public pedagogy.

These three words; community activation, knowledge sharing and collaboration through letterpress printing

Jan Brueggemeier, Neal Haslem — Tue, 07 Nov 2023 16:00:02 -0800

Commoners Press is a small, newly established experimental letterpress studio in North Coburg,
Australia. As part of the 2022 Melbourne Design Week, Commoners Press presented the project these
three words in response to the festival’s theme of ‘civic spaces’. This article discusses the project as an
example of a mode of public pedagogy (Charman & Dixon, 2021) which enables moments of collective
reflection, inclusiveness, community activation, local knowledge sharing as well as collaborative
making, creative exploration, social aspiration and being together. The project asked participants to
respond to the provocation: Thinking about the future liveability of your community, what three words
come to mind? Participants set their ‘three words’ in type and they were letterpress printed in a moment
that externalised and materialised participants’ concepts in ink and paper. Thus the redundant
technology of letterpress introduced – through its labour and slowness – a sense of mindfulness,
achievement and ‘access to the means of production’ that elevated participants’ words into a public
collaborative endeavour. As each participants’ printed words were revealed, they were celebrated and
discussed within the group. A week later participants were given the opportunity to attend a roundtable
to reflect on their own and others’ ‘three words’ as a collective imagining of possible futures, all
different, all together (Escobar, 2017). The pedagogy here brought participants together to form an
“interpretive community” (Santos, 2017) by allowing them to teach one another new things about
community, collaboration, creativity, and what the future may hold.

Rekindling the spirit of resistance in Ludruk folk art

Riksa Afiaty, Moelyono — Tue, 07 Nov 2023 16:01:01 -0800

Indonesian artist-activist Moelyono and arts worker Riksa Afiaty engage in a deep conversation focusing
on the East Javanese folk performance called ludruk. Ludruk is a medium of art that voices the
resistance and struggles of the lower classes through humour, improvisation and popular narratives.
This Javanese traditional cultural expression has survived through the dark history of Indonesian
genocide followed by decades under an oppressive military regime. Ludruk has been historically
elevating gender pluralism and galvanising community participation in attaining self-sustainability,
including during the COVID-19 pandemic. In this dialogue, Afiaty and Moelyono reflect on how art is
intertwined with social movements, self-organising, independence, and sustainability, and how art
workers’ are increasingly challenged in traversing their roles as facilitator, agitator, innovator,
motivator, curator, and networker.

Connecting literary cultures

Tue, 31 Oct 2023 20:49:56 -0700

What are the assumptions (institutional, individual, cultural, structural, artistic) of encounter and
exchange? How can they be measured and tested? And how do they play out in creative writing and
literary communities in the region broadly defined as the Asia-Pacific? This paper argues that
methodologies enabling an examination of the ethics and power relations inherent to intercultural
encounters must be predicated on creative uncertainty; be collaborative; and be testable in the sense
that they allow artists and researchers to ‘meet’ structures of power and ethical knots through evolving,
creative-led, iterative, practices. This paper is interested in what might be understood as a pedagogy of
encounter. The emergent methodology holds a number of overlapping principles including ethics as a
process, holding (prepositional) space, and uncertainty and the not-yet-made.