positioning
With students, colleagues and communities, I aim to:
create new work,
develop innovative methodologies and outcomes,
critically debate the changing nature of contemporary art practices and pedagogy,
critically engage with where and how art practices and pedagogies are positioned locally and globally, and
most importantly how do we enable these ways and places to not only to endure but also to grow and evolve so that classrooms, schools, universities and informal learning contexts become emancipatory places that disrupt hegemonies of power and enable change.
My pedagogy, arts and research praxis are not separate. They are entangled where the intra-actions the action between is what matters and no one practice, theory etc. is more important or has status over the other; they all feed each other. I construct pedagogy as not a passive process nor just about the acquisition of knowledge, but as a ‘a union of the mind, body and spirit, not just for striving for knowledge in and understanding from books, but knowledge about how to live in the world’ (hooks, 1994, p.15). Therefore, through my praxis I aim to enable rupturing, disruption and questioning, that can then support punching through into new learning spaces of potentials.
My habitus of rupture and the entanglements of all phenomena; human, non-human, social, physical, material and immaterial or what Barbara Bolt (2014) calls a ‘mingle and mangle’ (p. 3), is the ontologically inseparability of intra-acting agencies’ (Barad, 2007, 338). This intra-action is the movement generated in an encounter of two or more bodies in a process of becoming different, ‘… the notion of intra-action recognises that distinct agencies do not precede, but rather emerge through, their intra-actions. (Barad, 2007, p.33). In other words it is not about the subject or the object but their entanglement, the event, the action between not in-between is what matters. Therefore, not only are we always with bodies, we are always with matter. So, not only do we, me with students and colleagues, aim to make matter and meaning, it also makes us, we are entangled, co-implicated in the generation and evolution of knowing and being. Just as Frieire (1970) states;
‘Through dialogue, the teachers-of-the-students and the students-of-the-teachers cease to exist and a new term emerges; teacher-student with student-teacher, the teacher is no longer merely the one who teaches, but the one who are themselves himself [sic] taught in dialogue with the students, who in turn while being taught also teach. They become jointly responsible for the process in which all grow’ (p.80).
I also conceive my praxis as poietic in that it is flexible, dynamic and open. It is continually becoming and not a thing, object or outcome but spaces of possibilities and potential where underpinned by new materialist scholarship Barad (2007) Braidotti (2000) and Barrett and Bolt and Barrett (2014) materiality is emphasised. But also an embodied, affective, relational understanding of the artistic and pedagogic process is enabled and together, a ‘shared place of discovery and learning is created’ (Page, 2012, p.73) and ultimately recreated.
Therefore, through these learning events we are all learning: we are teaching each other but also learning from each other that is structured on our shared knowledge, understanding and practicing, our ‘local curations’ of learning that enables little leaps into the unknown (Atkinson, 2011, p.11). But, what we are also learning is how these ways and places are embodied with wider, global, discourses and power relations so then we can enable a ‘practice of freedom, the means by which we, teachers with learners, deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of our world’ (Frieire, 1970, p.16).