Artwork Scholarship: International Perspectives in Education

How does whiteness sediment worlds? How does it format individuality in the name of a neurotypicality that polices how one bodies, and how one comes to know? And how does a poetics of relation shift the very logic of this sedimentation? Edouard Glissant's poetics of relation are bold in their call to "consent not to be a single being." This transindividual consent, born in the process of worlds crafting themselves in what he would call an "aesthetics of the earth," are felt in Fernand Deligny's errant lines. These errant lines, traced to move with the complex gestures of autistics over a period of several years in Monoblet, France (1965-1970), offer an alternative to pathology, and individual psychological assessment. The Being of Relation brings these two projects into encounter, exploring what else blackness can be at this non-pathological juncture where what is foregrounded is the very being of relation. On the way, trails of whiteness are excavated and interrogated. The aim: to move toward parapedagogies of resistance, in a logic of a poetics of relation, a logic of neurodiversity, minor sociality and the kind of difference without separability that refuses the binary that holds neurotypicality – as whiteness – in place.

How does whiteness sediment worlds? How does it format individuality in the name of a neurotypicality that polices how one bodies, and how one comes to know? And how does a poetics of relation shift the very logic of this sedimentation? Edouard Glissant's poetics of relation are bold in their call to "consent not to be a single being." This transindividual consent, born in the process of worlds crafting themselves in what he would call an "aesthetics of the earth," are felt in Fernand Deligny's errant lines. These errant lines, traced to move with the complex gestures of autistics over a period of several years in Monoblet, France (1965-1970), offer an alternative to pathology, and individual psychological assessment. The Being of Relation brings these two projects into encounter, exploring what else blackness can be at this non-pathological juncture where what is foregrounded is the very being of relation. On the way, trails of whiteness are excavated and interrogated. The aim: to move toward parapedagogies of resistance, in a logic of a poetics of relation, a logic of neurodiversity, minor sociality and the kind of difference without separability that refuses the binary that holds neurotypicality – as whiteness – in place.

This collection considers how Canadian art educators are engaging with a new range of approaches to museum education, and why educators are responding to 21st century challenges in ways that are unique to Canada. Organized into three sections, this collection reconceptualizes museums to consider accessibility, differences in lived experiences, and how practices create impactful change. With the overarching concept of relationality between art museums and interdisciplinary perspectives, authors consider methodological, philosophical, experiential and aesthetic forms of inquiry in regional museum contexts from coast-to-coast-to-coast that bring forward innovative theoretical standpoints with practice-based projects in museums, articulating how museums are shifting, and why museums are evolving as sites that mediate different and multiple knowledges for the future. Informed by social justice perspectives, and as catalysts for public scholarship, each chapter is passionate in addressing the mobilization of equity, diversity and inclusivity (EDI) in relation to practices in the field. By weaving the learning potential of interacting with artworks more fully within situated and localized social and cultural communities, the authors present a distinct socio-political discourse at the heart of teaching and learning. Rupturing preconceived ideas and sedimentary models, they suggest a discourse of living futures is already upon us in museums and in art education.

The focus of this edited book is to evoke and provoke conceptual conversations between early a/r/tographic publications and the contemporary scholarship of a/r/tographers publishing and producing today. Working around four pervasive themes found in a/r/tographic literature, this volume addresses relationality and renderings, ethics and embodiment, movement and materiality, and propositions and potentials. In doing so, it advances concepts that have permeated a/r/tographic literature to date. More specifically, the volume simultaneously offers a site where key historical works can easily be found and at the same time, offer new scholarship that is in conversation with these historical ideas as they are discussed, expanded and changed within contemporary contexts. The organizing themes offer conceptual pivots for thinking through how a/r/tography was first conceptualized and how it has evolved and how it might further evolve. Thus, this edited book affords an opportunity for all those working in and through a/r/tography to offer refined, revised, revisited or new conceptual understandings for contemporary scholarship and practice. Part of the Artwork Scholarship: International Perspectives in Education series.