Art & the Public Sphere - Politicizing Artistic Pedagogies: Publics, Spaces, Teachings, Nov 2021

In Agonistics (2013), Chantal Mouffe highlights sociability and notes its potential for artists in devising agonistic counter-hegemonic performances. However, sociability as an isolated factor is unlikely to produce politicized dissent. Instead, therefore, a politicized form of conflictual sociability is created by applying Mouffe’s notion of a ‘conflictual consensus’ (an agreement between opponents to disagree) to art practice. By applying paradoxical thinking to the performance of dissent in the public realm, the article argues for sociability in service of politicized critique. The potential of conflictual sociability is examined through guerrilla street theatre performances, an artform with the capacity to generate unauthorized and participatory incursions into the urban public realm. Firstly, via autoethnographic reflections upon a practice-based research project, The Wizard of Oz (2015) performed in London, United Kingdom; and secondly, in analysis of Dread Scott’s Money to Burn (2010) performance in Wall Street, New York, United States. Conflictual sociability offers a novel methods-led process of engaging agonistically with passers-by (publics) and transforming them into activated participants. Because it is engaging, conflictual sociability creates spaces of public dialogue that antagonistic conflict potentially shuts down. This reveals an effective pedagogy for facilitating agonistic politicized dissent through performative practices in the public realm.

Without a permit, a masterplan, or corporate or public funding, artists have evaded conventional norms to accomplish a feat: the urban and socio-economic revitalization of abandoned or depressed cities worldwide. In Rio’s favelas and America’s impoverished suburbs, artists are the political force that promotes local economies, defines collective identities, gives people a sense of belonging, while covering the land with beauty. To act at the city’s scale, artists teach their craft to the locals and use art to empower the community, and unveil needed urban policies, bringing economic development, expertise and collaborative action. As a result, public art becomes instrumental for infusing new life in marginalized neighbourhoods, and the city becomes the ideal canvas for free expression without bureaucracy. This article is a bird’s eye view of two public art interventions that have highlighted the political and pedagogical implications of a citizen-design approach to urban renewal. Ultimately, it is a call for artists to activate as impactful makers of urban transformations.

This article is a critical reflection on our forays in the curatorial practice and exposition in March 2018 for a map art exhibit called Faces Places: Mapping Embodiments held at the University of the Philippines campus in Diliman. The exhibit was an exposition of different and alternative forms of mapping through the works of three Filipino artists: Mideo Cruz, Cian Dayrit and Mark Salvatus. We analysed their interventions in making visible the progressive geographies inherent in the everyday lifeworlds of Filipinos. Drawing from Nancy Fraser’s subaltern counterpublics, we argue that their artistic outputs are forms of counter-mapping vignettes that allow the possibility to illuminate the voices and habitus of the sifted and the excluded as new cartographical interventions intended for critical reflection and pedagogy. The art maps and countermaps of the artists evoked different responses that broadened and expanded understanding beyond what maps are, which allowed us to further interrogate the power structures that define world order through time. The production of new knowledges was derived not only from analysing the textual and symbolic aspects of the artistic countermaps but also with the processual aspect of art-making as emancipatory politics.

Recent contributions to urban geography have considered state space by innovatively focusing on specific cases of the city built environment. Examples could include here Karl Schlögel’s slicing through the spaces of state power in Moscow 1937 or Yuri Slezkine’s methodological cue to read the saga of the Russian Revolution across time in The House of Government. This article adds to the methodological insights of urban researchers by honing in on the Monument to the Revolution in Mexico City, in order to consider its role as a socially produced, conflictual and dynamically changing site in the struggle over public space and its memorialization. Since its opening in 1938, the Monument to the Revolution at Plaza de la República has been a pivotal fulcrum of state power in abetting the changing geography of state space. Equally, the site has experienced contradictions and differences stemming from socially produced space across time, in the form of periods of state crisis and, most recently, state ‘rollback’ and ‘rollout’ under neo-liberalization. This article addresses both neo-liberalizing and differential structures of feeling as they bear on the space at the Monument to the Revolution. It does so by situating the Monument to the Revolution within the urban question and how neo-liberalization has unlocked local and aesthetic meanings that have become commodified, not least through the extraction of monopoly rents. Further, the article spotlights simultaneous contemporary contestations of state power and impulses of socio-spatial struggle over difference articulated in and around Plaza de la República at the monument. In so doing, the article contributes an important pedagogical focus on both homogenizing and differential structures of feeling inscribed in spaces of capitalism in the twenty-first century.

This article explores teaching international politics, international political economy (IPE) and urbanism through a reading of China Miéville’s novel, Perdido Street Station. The novel as an artefact of popular culture affords a critical encounter with the production of space for students of international politics and IPE. Departing from prevailing approaches to understanding the urban in relation to the international that tend to focus on networks and circulation, the article offers a reading of the novel as demonstrating the production of space. The article links a critique of the hierarchical relations between teacher and student to critiques of the subordination of labour to design and planning, both of which render invisible the work of producing knowledge and space. Through an analysis of the political struggles over the formal and real subsumption of labour in Perdido Street Station, the article argues that studying the politics of urbanism in relation to the international through artefacts of popular culture can disrupt the invisibility of work.

The political question of who can produce knowledge and how we delineate epistemological standards without reproducing epistemic marginalization is central to critical pedagogy in international relations (IR) scholarship. While critical pedagogies often attempt to enact an emancipatory agenda, they largely rely on the educator as knowledge (re)producer and student as passive consumer, with little to say on what it means to be emancipated, the oppressions at stake or the means of enacting this project. Drawing on Simon Bronner’s definition of folklore, this article explores folklore as a creative practice allowing us to explore who the ‘folk’ are in the process of teaching and how we constitute disciplinary ‘lore’ to incite students to revise and reflect on disciplinary boundaries. The article focuses on IR pedagogy as a creative practice, arguing that deploying a folklore lens allows us to challenge the uncritical reproduction of disciplinary boundaries.

This article addresses the themes animating the Special Issue from the other side of the coin, namely the notion of aestheticizing political pedagogies. This reflects the direction of travel in some sections of politics and international relations scholarship, where there has been an upsurge of interest in aesthetics and especially popular culture. While there have been valuable contributions on teaching within such work, there has been a lack of sustained reflection on how, for example, a more aesthetically informed pedagogical practice can help us encourage students to think critically in creative ways. There has also been a rather bloodless account of aesthetics, diverting attention away from its visceral essence. Taking inspiration from the writings of Matt Davies on aesthetics, Jennifer Mason on the sensory and Cynthia Enloe on curiosity and surprise, the article explores the potential for aestheticizing political pedagogies to be mobilized in purposeful, strategic ways for enhancing the capacity of students to think critically and creatively. More specifically, I discuss how sensorily-oriented modes of teaching can disrupt entanglements between students’ ways of knowing and experiencing the world and their ‘objective’ understandings of politics, society, culture and so on. Three examples from my own teaching practice are discussed, all rooted in my utilization of extreme metal music with the aim of cultivating curiosity among students about their topics.

By exploring some of the challenges of teaching a radical politics in the neo-liberal university, the article looks to the writings of radical pedagogues like Freire and Giroux to position hope as an important resource for critical pedagogy for teachers. Drawing on Coole’s work on Merleau-Ponty, the article examines the potential of a critical pedagogy that taps into the body, rather than a mind, as a vessel for capturing hope and thus as a way of opening up a new resource for linking hope to educational practice. These resources are discussed in relation to debates concerning the politics of artistic practices, particularly with regard to how an embodied pedagogy might work around the constraints imposed by neo-liberal universities. Three themes are identified as warranting further discussion for an embodied pedagogy and their implications are reflected upon. These relate to how we view the student as embodying hope, how we view the classroom as a place of rich connections and how we capture learning through richness and reflection. The United Kingdom is the focus of the article, but there is a wider relevance given ongoing global trends in and debates about higher education.

This article explores the possibilities of using critical pedagogy inside and outside the art school to counter the effects of neoliberalism. Developed from an initial transcript of a conversation between three graduates of the Royal College of Art (United Kingdom) about our education-as-art projects, it takes the form of a constructed dialogue that mirrors our approach to working collectively. We discuss particular issues that arose for us whilst studying, as we experienced how the neo-liberal art school conceptualized a form of education and arts practice that promoted individualized paths and set competitive dynamics between students. We are interested in how art practices characterized as being social, collaborative and democratic can resist the neo-liberal art school. Advocating for process-based methods that facilitate learning between groups of students, we aim to open up space for embodied and situated knowledges. Bringing critical pedagogical approaches to the inside of the university creates a porosity with the alternatives we experienced outside. Through re-practicing historically radical methods and creating supportive structures, we challenge the dominant ways of communicating and managing the student-body. We argue that students and artists can organize their own cultures of learning in opposition to those that the university-as-business wants to promote, whilst creating supportive models that take students’ needs into account.