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Teaching Change by Learning Change
Get PDFWe live in times of unravelling; of disciplines, subjects and professions, due to social, ecological and personal crisis. This necessitates an ecological educational paradigm: a shift from mechanistic and rational, to participative and emergent practices of interdependence. This involves learning to let go of outmoded understandings of ourselves in the world. Fashion is apt in this re-conceptualisation as it involves all clad humans, implicating life and lives in fundamental ways.
By identifying tutors as vital intermediaries in change and highlighting engagement in an iterative process of reflection and action, this chapter explores findings from over two years of collaborative research, undertaken with teams in design departments in four European universities; London College of Fashion, Design School Kolding, Politecnico di Milano and Estonian Academy of Arts. The research identifies a gap in fashion (and wider design) and sustainability education discourse, of the role and needs of the educator as a distinctive lever for change towards climate justice. It recognises tutors as co-learners, drawing on a participatory, ecological perspective. Fashion and sustainability education is distinctive, due to the characteristics of fashion whilst offering potential for application across other disciplines. Fashion, whilst a discipline in its own right, intersects with multiple disciplines and is practiced across private, personal, to industrial, global scales. By connecting its micro and macro scales, complex elements of climate justice can be made actionable in a great many ways.
This tutor as co-learner approach to why, how and with whom as part of the what of fashion and sustainability goes beyond conventional approaches that start with material or product and the preparation of students to fit into current modes of design(ing). This study foregrounds ecological, social, cultural and economic dimensions of designing as a set of relationships that are manifest in and mediated by materials, products and services. This approach seeks to transform understandings and visions through a layered approach to pedagogy (Shulman, L.S. 2005) nurturing capabilities and practices of interdependence. It draws on and reflects on tacit knowledge (Polanyi. M.1967), education for sustainability, (Sterling, S. 2009 ) and transformation design, (Burns, C et al, 2006) explored through co-inquiry between a group of researchers and tutors and drawing on empirical studies from interviews with tutors in over 70 universities. The research team set out, from the start, to develop new knowledge in fashion design education for sustainability, but also, critically, to develop resources for tutors-as learners; for their peers, for themselves and others; known and unknown to them, via an open-source, online platform. The platform offers prompts for peer-peer co-inquiry, self and co-reflection as well as course content development. It is recognised that this intervention is part of a required structural change in fashion education, towards teaching that is inclusive in cultural, class, race, gender, sexuality and belief systems terms. This is vital in de-colonising and de-carbonising fashion education and its applications in the world.
Burns, C., Cottam, H., Vanstone, C. and Winhall, J. (2006). Transformation Design, Design Council, Red Paper 2, [online] Available at: www.designcouncil.org.uk/resources/report/red-paper-02-transformation-design
Polanyi, M. (1967). The Tacit Knowledge Dimension. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Shulman, L.S. (2005). Signature Pedagogies in the Professions. Daedalus.
Sterling, S. (2009). Ecological Intelligence: viewing the world relationally. In A. Stibbe, ed., The Handbook of Sustainability Literacy: Skills for a Changing World, Dartington: Green Books Ltd., pp. 77-83
From Trolling to Cyberbullying: Using Machine Learning and Network Analysis to Study Anti-Social Behavior on Social Media
Get PDFThe rise of social media and other web and mobile applications has transformed how people interact, but it has also created new challenges, such as anti-social behavior like trolling, cyberbullying, and hatespeech. This behavior can have severe negative consequences for individuals and communities. This tutorial is intended for researchers and practitioners interested in computational social science and provides an overview of how to use machine learning and social network analysis techniques to detect and examine anti-social behavior in online discourse
Art as Education: Redefining a Live Art Practice as a Pedagogical Tool, and its Perception and Place in the Learning Environment
Get PDFMy research study examines and tests how the pedagogical elements of live art have the potential to contribute to young people’s development and to play a transformative role in secondary education. It uses a methodology underpinned by a constructivist epistemology that promotes knowledge construction through disruption. The problem that this research addresses is revealed through the rising crisis for art under the STEM curriculum (Science, Technology, Engineering, Maths, excluding the arts). Moreover, a focus on attainments generates a counterproductive anxiety for students, and for teachers who are driven to ‘teach to the test’ (Giroux, 2017, p.9). This transpires through contemporary educationalist discourse in the field of critical pedagogy. These issues demonstrate a need for change that motivated this research study, in which live art acts as an agonistic tool in secondary education.
An investigation of past pedagogic art projects, which began with Beuys’ teaching performances in the 1960s, highlights the tensions that this practice brings to education. The rise of social art from the 1960s onwards presents the artistic context in which the radical stance of live art as a shifting practice has developed. Criticality, resistance, and disruption emerge as pedagogical elements. My research study tests their potential impact within educational contexts. This live art methodology becomes embedded in an action research investigation in schools as a democratic and self-reflexive enquiry. Elements that contribute to young people’s development are revealed through a diffractive qualitative methodology that considers a ‘more-than-human assemblage’ (Hickey-Moody and Willcox, 2019, p.1).
The final presentation of findings in a performance reveals the role of live art as an episteme that provokes self-reflexivity. My immersion in the secondary education system authorised the integration of this live art practice in the art curriculum (UK). An artistic manifesto is proposed as an alternative art syllabus that incites and respects individual freedom. The sustainability of this radical practice was questioned when embedded in the mainstream education system that relies on discipline and order. The final discussion considers embodiment, vulnerability, and unpredictability as elements that can transform the perception of assessments in education—a consideration of creative modes of self that supports responsibility, self-construct, and agency for learning to be-in-the-world
Policy-Oriented Art: Developing Disaster Displacement Norms in Diplomatic Venues
Get PDFThis research seeks to increase understanding about artists’ and art’s potential influence on international policymaking addressing disaster displacement. Its overall aim is to identify and characterize strategies for artists, curators, and others seeking to bring art within collective efforts to advance the development of disaster displacement norms in diplomatic venues, and to articulate the relevance of such strategies to international policymakers. While previous studies in art and curating explore art’s role in political change, there is insufficient knowledge about how art contributes to the formation of international law and policy.
The research uses a qualitative approach to identify, describe, and analyse artistic strategies used in diplomatic contexts through two case studies. The first case, a selective historical and contextual investigation into art as diplomatic gift at the United Nations Office at Geneva, found that art creates conditions conducive for diplomatic relations and, less frequently, addresses the substantive content of multilateral discussions. The second case examining my curatorial practice leading the DISPLACEMENT: Uncertain Journeys project between 2018-2022, which develops art exhibitions for diplomatic conferences, concluded that art contributes to collective norm development efforts by drawing from four artistic strategies: i) Manifesting or revealing abstract ideals, values, and power dynamics; ii) Stimulating reflection, conversation, and debate; iii) Contributing novel information, knowledge, and methods; and iv) Investigating and modelling policy solutions.
The study makes three main contributions. First, through interdisciplinary inquiry, the thesis integrates norm evolution theories from international relations in its analysis, expanding current research on contemporary art and curatorial practices that engage social and political issues. Second, it develops a conceptual framework for such art’s influence on international norm development, which may include: i) increasing awareness and understanding of the norm; ii) exhibiting and inspiring ideational commitment to the norm; and/or iii) generating creative thinking and innovative solutions to implement the norm. Third, it proposes the terms “policy-oriented art” and “policy-oriented curating,” which focus on exhibiting art for international policymakers within diplomatic venues as compared to “white cube activist” curatorial strategies that address the public at large from within art institutions. Together, these provide a cross-disciplinary foundation for future research and practice at a time when the climate emergency and other global challenges demand a concerted effort by all, including artists
Situating Google’s Alphabet
Get PDFThis chapter considers Google's 2015 decision to rename itself as Alphabet, Inc. in the context of mid-to-late twentieth century media studies claims regarding the western alphabet's phoneticism as well as subsequent critiques of these positions as inherently colonial. Beginning with Marshall McLuhan and Vilém Flusser's writings, the chapter asks the question of what it means for the world’s largest actor in the domain of spatial data, not to mention one of the world’s largest multi-national corporations, to lay claim to, and indeed entangle its very identity with, the concept of alphabet. Building on this, it also speculates more broadly on relationships in the development of location as a medium and the role of situatedness in our understanding of media
Product Life Sphere: a toolkit to support learning and teaching of product life cycle model
Get PDFPeer-reviewed conference paper, International Conference on Innovation Digital Design (ICIDD) 2023.
This paper presents an approach to teaching and learning the product life cycle through an innovative design intervention that enables students to critically review their design decisions using environmental and social impact lenses. The intervention employs a physical model as a form of tangible learning material, designed to promote circular thinking and accelerate learning in sustainable design education. The paper addresses the question of how new ways of interacting with and interpreting the product life cycle can be re-contextualised to support deeper student understanding and engagement.
Zhang, L. (2023) “Product Life Sphere: a toolkit to support learning and teaching of product life cycle model”, International Conference on Innovation Digital Design (ICIDD) 2023, College of Digital Design, Southern Taiwan University of Science and Technology (STUST), Tainan, Taiwan, 26/05/2023. Page 48. ISBN: 978-986-96479-6-
Quantum Feminicity: Modes of Countermanding Time
Get PDFQuantum feminicity is a term that refers to the intersection of quantum theory, a technological branch of physics, with feminist theory, a social and political movement.
Engaging the modal logics of this intersection, the article explores this intersection through one aspect of quantum literacy; that of the quantum splitting of the concept of the temporal narrative. The article examines what are the interdisciplinary convergences of feminist and physics’s respective philosophies. Focussing on the quantum modalities that are being practiced in relation to the situated nature of technological platforms engaged, the article proposes that modelling a quantum feminicity can assist in disengaging modes of sexual difference that are used to gender all kinds of bodies through a countermanding the temporal. Experiences of bodies are considered as experimental modes that provide quantum vectors for feminist actions
A song to Sana in (becoming) sea
No full textA song to Sana in (becoming) sea is a love letter to my unborn son. As a piece that works through grief, it recognises that grief as embodiment is a series of processes of accumulation, as well as of weaving and attuning to multiple human and more-than-human beings and bodies of water. Drawing upon Michrochimerism, or the fate of travelling cells from mother to son, this piece is constructed of seven citations that dwell on Astrida Neimanis’s “becoming bodies of water”. It speaks to the multiplicity of entanglements and the impossibility of separation, as Katherine McKittrick reminds us: “what I know, where I know from, who I know from, and why I cannot possibly know.
Dicken Castro (1922–2016)
Get PDFDespite a tension between vernacular interests and modernist aspirations, Castro’s legacy highlights the potential of guadua as a versatile building material
Freedom is a Performance Hangout* (*Click on this fake sweat distraction technique to release infinite scroll)
Get PDFHow can the infinitely distracted meet? We are no longer amused to death as we once were in Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, but rather we are as visual artist Hito Steyerl puts it, ‘represented to pieces.’ Both the decision to participate in or disengage from social networks renders subjects powerless over their attention. How, then, might theatre, which Rancière famously declared an exemplary community form, be redeployed as a way of testing alternate modes of ‘being together’ at a time of infinite distraction? What new modes of performance, attention and indeed meeting might be called forth and imagined?
This article turns to an example of Parry’s practice-based research, a four-hour live performance titled fic.the.sky that he calls ‘a performance hangout’, and that was staged across various iterations from 2015 to 2019. A performance hangout, in this example, involves easy non-accumulative choreography, fake sweat, fan-made pop music, costume changes and hanging out across an extended duration in a theatre. Audiences come and go, lounge and picnic on beanbags, plug-in their digital devices to work, re-charge, nap, or follow the performance both in situ and simultaneously via the livestream on social media.
Building on a history of experimental hanging out, this article explores a performance hangout as an open-ended, unreified concept; an emergent practice in search of a meeting – in search of a ‘scene’ – that seems to be missing or in pieces. While focusing on a singular example, this article offers up a performance hangout as a generative concept for making, attending to, and thinking about a range of contemporary performances and live artworks that test new, pleasurable modes of ‘being-together’, and comprise non-accumulative performance and hanging out across an extended duration