Research in Arts and Education

Walking with the Trouble: Exploring More-Than-Humanness Through Playful ‘Walk-Shops’

Simon Ceder, tina carlsson — Wed, 19 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0300

How can humans transcend their human perceptions and explore more-than-human experiences in arts education events? This question was explored in an iterative process of playful arts-based workshops rooted in posthumanism. Two workshops were organized as ‘walk-shops’ in the local environment and involved various approaches to engage with more-than-human experiences. Each walk-shop evolved from an affirmative response to a previous workshop experience. The paper discusses how these playful continuations can fuel radical imagination and transformation. We argue that workshops can develop iteratively when one actively pays attention to the situated possibilities within the context of the arts education event.

From the Bedroom to the Moon: Tuning into the Relations of Children and Music through Spacetimemattering

Synnøve Kvile — Wed, 19 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0300

Visiting family homes to intra-view children about their relations to music open doors into family houses, digitization of music and children, trampolines, composing songs to stop climate changes, and bodies dancing before the researcher’s, and iPhone’s gaze. Through stories and visual artworks, the phenomenon childmusicking is diffracted through Karen Barad’s concept spacetimematter. This article gives a taste of how spatial, temporal, and material agencies intra-acts within childmusicking. The article articulates how childmusicking is entangled with global matters such as the climate crisis, and it troubles binaries such as adult–child, nature–culture, humans–non-humans, matter-–meaning.

Shifting the Focus: Intra-acting with Diverse Agencies and Happy Objects in a Day Center of Disability Services

Liisa Jaakonaho — Wed, 19 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0300

The article is based on the author’s experiences of facilitating creative movement groups in a disability services day center. Through artistic and performative research, she investigates different forms of agency in and around the movement groups. She draws on theoretical perspectives from critical disability studies, feminist new materialism and affect studies, particularly focusing on Sara Ahmed’s (2010) notion of the “happy object,” to challenge the human-centric view of arts education and artistic agency. She proposes a shift of focus in arts education from individual agents to the intra-action of diverse agencies in art making, teaching, and learning in diverse contexts.

Attunements of Care – The Art of Existence in the Anthropocene

Jan Varpanen, Johanna Kallio, Antti Saari, Sonja Helkala, Liila Holmberg — Wed, 19 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0300

The ecological crisis places an unavoidable ethical imperative for the conscientious adult: to learn an art of existing in a way that supports life instead of destroying it. The paper suggests that care is a useful conceptual resource for responding to this imperative. An interpretation of the art of existence is presented by bringing together two different takes on care, the Foucauldian tradition of care of the self and feminist ethics of care. This novel connection is argued to hold theoretical promise for making sense of the unique challenge of self-cultivation implied by the art of existence in the Anthropocene.

Editorial: Arts Education in a More-Than-Human World

Henrika Ylirisku, Tomi Slotte Dufva, Mikko Snellman — Wed, 19 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0300

"Once upon a time, in a world where change danced on the horizon like leaves in the wind, there were art teachers, artist-pedagogues, artists, and art educational researchers, who read themselves into the posthumanist theories.

Or maybe they engaged with the key ideas of these theories through their colleagues, or from random YouTube videos.

Or maybe they ended up following the call of vital materialities, or became attracted by encounters with other-than-human species (clicks of cameras capturing fleeting moments, water droplets dotting on snow, or the whispers of limpets clinging to rocky shores).

In any case, something in the world made them think differently their understandings of learning, pedagogies, art practices and research.

This resulted in creative experimentation, rigorous rethinking of existing practices, and negotiating ethical responses to the messy, complex entanglements in the more-than-human worlds."

The (Un)Capture of Cappanawalla: Vital Materiality and Collaborative Artistic Emergence

Timothy Smith — Wed, 19 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0300

This visual essay recounts a photography excursion that unexpectedly evolved into a transformative artistic encounter on Cappanawalla mountain in rural Ireland. What started as a systematic and detached approach of photographic framing and capture, took on a dramatic shift toward an exertion of unknown forces disrupting the human role as artist-photographer. Various nonhuman actants exerted their vital materiality as thing-power forces and collaborators in the creation of images along Cappanawalla. This experience provoked a radical reframing of artistic creation as a distributive agency of authorship among the vital materiality, in which the human is just one creative actant among many.

Place-making Beyond Humans: Environmental Photography with Dots

Anna Vladimirova — Wed, 19 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0300

Thinking with the environmental photography collection on her Instagram account, the author of this visual essay focuses on a conceptual exploration of dots and their agential capacity. From COVID-19-shot blood drops, egg cells, and black fly bites to human irises as devices unlocking phones–all images are unique re-presentations of a posthuman, non-anthropocentric fabric, constantly shaping and reshaping territory. Dots prompt the question: Who contributes to this place besides humans? The author concludes with a discussion on how, in times of climate change, the conceptual insights of the blog can be applied in environmental art education through her place-responsive practice.

The Human Limpet Project: Where Humans and Limpets Meet

Helen Garbett — Wed, 19 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0300

The story of limpets, those conical sea-snails frequently found on rocky shorelines may seem inconsequential in the grand scheme of things, but that is not the case. If given careful, prolonged attention, room to express themselves and an engaged receptive audience they reveal a richly entangled human-nonhuman story which unfolds over thousands of years. A process of art-based research, underpinned by new materialist thinking and practice channels this attentiveness, provides physical room, makes space for creative inquiry, corresponds with humans and nonhumans, and generates a willing audience with enchanting, potentially life affirming consequences.

Order and Chaos in the Research-Creation Classroom

Nikki Rotas — Wed, 19 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0300

In this essay I use posthuman theories and research-creation methodologies to explore the tensions between two disciplines (science and art) alongside children. Through a short video clip and still images of children engaging in abstract painting using magnets, washers, bolts, and nails, I showcase the importance of learning with and through art, and I argue that posthuman arts education enriches the pedagogical environment beyond core academic skills.

Weeds in the Greenhouse: Curating Posthuman Engagements

Nina Liebenberg — Wed, 19 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0300

In an ode to Woolgar and Latour’s Laboratory life (1979), this visual essay traces what occurred during a series of fieldtrips and workshops I organised between students from Uniarts and Aalto University, and researchers at the Viikki Plant Sciences Centre, Helsinki. It highlights how disciplines promote a particular way of looking and of understanding the world that privileges certain of its characteristics over others – a process that can lead to the development of potential blind spots that hinder discovery. The curatorial is posited as a means for combating these limitations and for understanding plant-human relationships in an expanded way.