Research in Arts and Education

Arctic Wool

Fabiola Hernandez Cervantes — 2023-09-29

This research presents the work of two women, a crafter and a farmer, and considers connections between people working with textiles, sustainable processes, local economy, traditional knowledge, and roles within the craft sector in the Finnish Arctic and Circumpolar region. Two qualitative interviews were conducted in Finland: one with a textile-dyeing artisan using sustainable processes and another with a farmer and yarn crafter. Crafters and farmers preserve heritage skills in the textile field, valuable to the continuation of traditional knowledge. Their network has an environmental impact on the craft sector, helping to preserve endemic breeds of sheep.

Children of Drama: An Arts-Based Educational Action Research Project Applied to a Group of In-Service Educators

Theodora Salti — 2023-09-29

Children of Drama is an arts-based educational action research project with five drama pedagogy actions, launched in 2019 at the University of Gävle, Sweden. It aimed to explore drama pedagogy’s personal and professional impacts on a group of in-service educators using Winnicott’s potential space theory. The results revealed that participants enriched their teaching method toolbox with drama pedagogical techniques and theories, fostering self-exploration and motivation to use drama in the classroom. Notably, the qualities of the drama pedagogical instructor and environment enhanced safety, inspiration, and engagement. This study contributes to research in drama pedagogy and educators’ arts-based professional development.

We are all necronauts

Helena Sederholm — 2023-09-29

In this thematic issue, we have a compilation of articles, visual essays, and a commentary dealing with death from diverse viewpoints. In many texts, posthuman and more-than-human-aspect, that is, the relation to other species, has been emphasized. Nevertheless, it is impossible to avoid the perspective of humans, especially when dealing with art, philosophy, and education.

Ecologies of Death, Ecologies of Mourning: A Biophilosophy of Non/Living Arts

Marietta Radomska — 2023-09-29

In the present condition of planetary environmental crises, violence, and war, entire ecosystems are annihilated, habitats turn into unliveable spaces, and shared “more-than-human” vulnerabilities get amplified. Here and now, death and loss become urgent environmental concerns, while the Anthropocene-induced anxiety, anger, and grief are manifested in popular-scientific narratives, art, culture, and activism. Grounded in the theoretical framework of queer death studies, this article explores present grief imaginaries and engagements with more-than-human death, dying, and extinction, as they are interwoven through contemporary art. It is there where an ecological ontology of death is being exposed and ethical territories of eco-grief unfold.

Reimagining Death in an All-Too-Human World: A Pedagogical Exploration of Pinar Yoldas' Ecosystem of Excess

Juliette Clara Bertoldo — 2023-09-29

This article offers a pedagogical response to Pinar Yoldas’ Ecosystem of Excess, a speculative marine ecosystem of creatures that have evolved to survive the human-induced proliferation of plastic. In questioning our relationship to death in an era of ecological devastation due to excessive consumption, it proposes a pedagogy of ambivalence to explore what Ecosystem of Excess can teach us about our complicated relations with death. The article then develops three articulations of death—death beyond finality, silent death, and relational death—that are generative for attending to the multi-faceted ways ambivalence manifests itself in the context of more-than-human death.

The Spores of Life and Death

Tiina Pusa — 2023-09-29

Fungi are key players in ecosystems. They sustain life, affect the transformation of life forms, and are crucial actors in recycling carbon and minerals back into the common cycle. In addition to the author, three mushrooms are involved in the constellation of this article. In Western art history, self-portraits are intertwined with the theme of death in multiple ways. This posthumanist art-based study asks how mushrooms challenge our understanding of death. The study is located in the framework of queer death studies. Queering death by providing a basis for fungi to grow is a comforting thought.

The Bouquet of Death and Decay

Eeva-Liisa Puhakka — 2023-09-29

This text talks about death and the smell of death. It elaborates on the difficulties that arise in attempting to describe smells and olfactory phenomena in a visual essay using images and words. The ineffable qualities of smell and death prevent certainties. Materiality, however, can provide a window into awareness and the beginnings of understanding.

Corpses in Training: Blanchot and The International Necronautical Society’s Experimental Expeditions Beyond Life

Sami Sjöberg — 2023-09-29

The commentary discusses Blanchodian theorization on death and its experimental application in the International Necronautical Society (1999–2010). Maurice Blanchot and Emmanuel Levinas regarded life as suspended living overshadowed by one’s death that was unknowable. Challenging such utter unknowability, the INS took cues from twentieth-century avant-garde discourses (revolving around the mélange of life and art) where death imbued perceptions of temporal stasis, finality, and journeying into the unknown. Their experimentalism conceptualized death as a “space” to be explored through artistic means. The INS sought to unravel the unassailable binaries between life and the absoluteness of death through art.

To the Other Side with Bees

Ulla Taipale — 2023-09-29

The mythical bee flies over and throughout human history, leaving traces of coexistence between insect and human cultures in numerous writings and artworks. Bees have been documented in multiple forms, evidencing the human fascination with their life. Today, people are facing the reality of semi-feral bees vanishing from their hives: the ever-living bee colonies featured in the literature of the past have gone extinct. The Other Side aural space is an artwork by Ulla Taipale that offers an opportunity to listen to a selection of literary excerpts associated with the honeybees' immortality and their ability to communicate across parallel worlds.

Unravelling Haptic Visuality and Notions of Care Through Two Videos About Death

Anna Walker — 2023-09-29

In this collaborative paper, artists Jo Milne and Anna Walker discuss the haptic visual through 2 videos: “Death as a Reforming” (Milne, 2022), and “Proposition 4: Red is the Colour of Pomegranates” (Walker, 2020). The artists utilize Laura Marks’ concept of the haptic as a component of inquiry to understand grieving, death, and loss. In addition, they extend Maria Puig de la Bellacasa's idea of haptic technologies as matters of care, arguing for a notion of care that extends beyond life and the living, to incorporate death and dying.