International Journal of Public Law and Policy

The Glasgow Effect is the name given to a public health mystery: Why do people in Glasgow, Scotland, die younger than similar post-industrial UK cities such as Manchester and Liverpool? Ellie Harrison appropriated this name to title an artwork where she confined herself to Glasgow for 2016. During that year the only vehicle Harrison used was her bike and she actively engaged with a variety of communities where she lives. The artwork’s invocation of Glasgow’s poor health record in combination with the £15,000 of public funding awarded to Harrison hit a nerve with some Glaswegians that led to outrage on Facebook. Subsequently, Harrison and her artwork were demonized by a broader UK media. Why fund a middle-class English artist’s ‘poverty safari’ in Glasgow when so many others never have the chance to leave? This article grapples with the educative potential of The Glasgow Effect. Harrison began the project because her teaching job in Dundee required her to ‘write and submit a significant research grant application’. That application’s success prohibited Harrison from travelling from her home in Glasgow to her job in Dundee; making her unable to teach. By enacting a complete dematerialization of markers of success – motorized travel and related carbon emissions – the artwork, and subsequent book, publicly challenge preconceived notions of ‘good career progression’, offering a critical artistic pedagogy that explodes success fantasies that hang on internationalization, excess travel and ultimately vast amounts of carbon emissions.

Artworks operating at the intersection of art and education often attempt to challenge dominant education systems in suggesting alternative pedagogical models that could function outside the official academic realm, proposing radical changes to the latter. However, the lack of continuity of alternative education models implemented by artists and curators within universities’ art and design departments fails to provide a longer-term change. This article stems from our research on the usological turn, a recent shift from spectatorship to usership according to which artists and curators tend to create art projects which situate themselves as part of a broader usership. Using an autoethnographic approach, we will analyse how the principles of the art group Arte Útil intersects with the undercommons. Hence, we explore how they apply an alternative method, through participatory curriculum planning, as a tool for change within the institution of education.

How do the disciplinary boundaries of arts education shape art’s political horizons? Sixty-five years on from CP Snow’s controversial lecture The Two Cultures, both his protagonists (on one side the arts and humanities, on the other the sciences, management, finance) have claimed significant epistemological, political and practical ground. The distance that separates them, however, appears greater than ever. Art often stands in opposition to the hegemonic tendencies of positivist forms of knowledge, dismissing them as incompatible with its political goals. Given the formal disciplinary setting of art education, exacerbated in the competitive modern academy, I suggest that such restrictions to art’s epistemological and practical horizons are, in fact, politically counterproductive. I propose that by rejecting an array of knowledges – particularly those based on ideals such as rationalism, evidence and epistemological certainty – as a priori incompatible with artistic practice, artistic education may be doing a considerable disservice to the political and social interventions of art that are shaped by it. To suggest that art could tactically engage with alternative forms of knowledge to expand the political field, I propose artist group Forensic Architecture as an example of a practice that circumvents traditional disciplinary limitations to, in Snow’s parlance, become a bona fide culture characterized by political credibility, albeit at the expense of limiting art’s epistemic influence in the process.

Once again, the COVID-19 pandemic has tragically made visible on whose shoulders the functioning of our society rests. While precarious workers faced depletion and increased time-poverty, the privileged gained an extra portion of leisure time. Under the present conjectures, politics of time allocation have exacerbated. We are a Vienna-based feminist art collective, which during the pandemic experienced an urge to shift our work on unpaid care work towards the dimension of self-care. We stress on the feminist potential of practices of self-care, to subvert, as a collective action, neo-liberal notions of individualized ‘self-carishness’. In this article, we illustrate this shift with an array of selected artworks, which problematize the social relations around unpaid and underpaid labour in relating to historical sites. Hereby we search historically meaningful venues of feminist struggles to create a public sphere of discussion. Our artwork consists of a range of emancipatory practices from performance to fine arts, including pieces like public psychotherapy consultations, a video installation of the invisibility of the cleaning body, a performance of ‘the mother that is not present’. Besides exhibiting, the collective also engaged in editing an art book, featuring artist workshops on the legal dimension of care, labour union activism, feminist writing and other collective strategies of taking back self-care.

The history of art, more accurately described as the history of western art, has been premised on a history of cultural imperialism that privileges certain traditions and ideologies over others. The decline of the discipline within the academy in recent decades and replacement in many cases with the more critically evaluative and broader area of critical and contextual studies (CCS) has filled a function in art and design education but needs to be critically interrogated for its relevance and its pedagogical usefulness in thinking about the politicized discourse of art. Attempts have been made within the academy to decolonize the curriculum. Within the context of CCS this entails ensuring standardizing the approach to the subject but not the content, which would be neither desirable nor possible given the decentralized way in which CCS is staffed. A standardization of approach means the inculcation of critical reflexivity when considering structures of knowledge, which helps identify gaps in the curricula and ways of addressing these. Decolonizing is a process that needs to be continuous and reflexive in order to embed significant change.

In autumn 2020 the open-air construction fence exhibition Face It! of Vienna’s city museum (Wien Museum) was repeatedly damaged and marked with graffiti during demonstrations against measures taken by the government to fight the COVID-19 pandemic. Ultimately, the museum decided to re-curate the initial exhibition and exhibited the protesters’ graffiti markings instead. Approaching these events through situational analysis, I interrogate their political and politicizing dimension in reference to Chantal Mouffe’s idea of ‘agonistic pluralism’ and a radical democratic conceptualization of museum practice. By delineating their agonizing effect, I argue for a conflict-attuned notion of graffiti-based cultural practices in order to foster their democratic potential. In the end, I assess the museum’s decision to re-curate and ask if it contributes to a democratization of its practice and furthermore which role (re-politicized) museum education did and could play in this context.

In this article, which introduces the second of two Special Issues on the theme of ‘politicizing artistic pedagogies’, we turn our attention to the practice and practising of artistic pedagogies. This issue’s emphasis is on presenting versions of pedagogical practice that perform politicizing modes of engagement. Accordingly, the issue and this introductory essay build on the understanding of art, politics and pedagogy outlined in the introductory essay from the first Special Issue (Volume 10, Issue 2 of Art & the Public Sphere). At the same time, the below discussion departs from our collaborations, which was the focus in the introduction to the first Special Issue, to consider our individual attempts at performing pedagogy via situated politics. For instance, Mel’s recent project as part of the Partisan Social Club, How to Talk to the City: Public Interventions and Observations in the Practice of Art and Ethnography, and Ian’s work with students on novel methods for engaging with the contested concept of ‘Europe’. These ‘projects’ are not evaluated from the point of view of the participants/students, although the interactions between us and them are discussed. Thus, our rationale for including them in this essay is to forefront our pedagogical strategies and what this means for our attempts at politicizing practice; they are not case studies in a traditional ‘teaching techniques’ sense. Finally, we briefly introduce the articles that comprise the Special Issue.

The purpose of this article is to explore how the process of depoliticization occurs in neoliberal governance, with the aim of identifying approaches to counter its control over the way we live together. Depoliticization is a process of neoliberal political and social organization that undermines democracy. An instance of how depoliticization happens is through a lack of accountability in the way that government devolves responsibility through non-governmental agencies or quangos. Arts Council England is a quango with an increasingly instrumental policy agenda. Arts-based participation is being fostered through policy agendas; art projects that are funded in this arrangement are expected to promote social inclusion or audience engagement. While this is superficially laudable, a reduced gap between state policy objectives and commissioned artistic outcomes sees artworks utilized as interpretive publicity for policy objectives. In this way, the funding of the arts can be considered as part of the wider process of depoliticization. Yet, we argue, contra much of the depoliticization literature with its formalist understandings of power, that politics is not limited to the actions and non-actions of the state alone and can be radically understood as an everyday process. In this conception of politics, we conclude that certain forms of art practice, those that employ social praxis and critical citizenship through critical pedagogical and participatory methods, can perform a politicizing function and thus potentially reshape democracy in more emancipatory ways.

The university has now, totally, found its way into our homes. First through demands of the kitchen table to provide the setting for teaching preparation. Then inadvertently: the endless work done with others in mutable workspaces, such as the home, characterizing that same teaching. And now recently, the coronavirus pandemic has found a new, hybrid, teaching space – (working from) home. So, where else is there ‘to seminar’? These questions are not new: Roland Barthes made an everlasting call to ‘outline a space and call it: seminar’. Henk Slager, whose plea in 2017 to ‘[re]activate [the] “unpredictable rhythm” of the seminar’ echoed Barthes, following artists, activists, teachers and organizers calling for new alternatives to ever-institutionalized formats and modes of education. Much of this – sentimentalizing, reproducing, extracting educational forms – is held within the discursive framework of art’s ‘Educational Turn’. In the light of impact that the ‘move online’ has had on art education I am reframing this question of the seminar’s ‘where’ else and ‘what’ else, again in 2022. Once obvious spaces of art education, clearly defined, are left empty, expensive, expansive and broken. Where ghosts and infrastructures contend with one another, the mechanisms of universities are, in theory, open bare; their complex continues to be impenetrable. This text constellates a set of infrastructural considerations to take stock of what it means to ask this question of ‘where’ else and ‘what’ else in 2022.

The past fifteen years have seen a rich debate situating the curatorial in the expanded field of exhibition-making, towards dialogical and discursive formats. Under the umbrella term the ‘educational turn’, pedagogical programmes have explored classroom aesthetics and the emancipatory potentials of pedagogy in the arts and curating – within and outside arts institutions. This article investigates the relevance of such pedagogical programmes in the cultural sector that aim to generate an open resource for long-term critical debates and collective thinking. The article reflects on the role of cultural institutions in wider discussions around the neo-liberalization of formal education and the political potentials of new pedagogical initiatives. It draws on decolonial problem-posing pedagogy to counter the increasing cultures of anti-intellectualism and anti-complexity in the United Kingdom (UK). The text reflects upon the experience of the CAMPUS Independent Study Programme, I curated in 2019–20 at Nottingham Contemporary, a contemporary art centre in the United Kingdom. Contrary to the popular claim for alterity and outsideness, this article demonstrates the political role of embeddedness and radical interdependence in critical pedagogical initiatives in contemporary art institutions.

The political question of who can produce knowledge and how we delineate epistemological standards without reproducing epistemic marginalization is central to critical pedagogy in international relations (IR) scholarship. While critical pedagogies often attempt to enact an emancipatory agenda, they largely rely on the educator as knowledge (re)producer and student as passive consumer, with little to say on what it means to be emancipated, the oppressions at stake or the means of enacting this project. Drawing on Simon Bronner’s definition of folklore, this article explores folklore as a creative practice allowing us to explore who the ‘folk’ are in the process of teaching and how we constitute disciplinary ‘lore’ to incite students to revise and reflect on disciplinary boundaries. The article focuses on IR pedagogy as a creative practice, arguing that deploying a folklore lens allows us to challenge the uncritical reproduction of disciplinary boundaries.

In this opening essay we explain the rationale for the Special Issue, the first of two on the theme of ‘politicizing artistic pedagogies’. In doing so, we outline the connections between this collection of articles and those in the next issue of Art & the Public Sphere while also stressing the distinctive, societal scope of the present issue. The article considers some themes of particular relevance for this edited collection. For example, we discuss our understanding of art, politics and pedagogy and draw on Juliet Hooker’s work on juxtaposition to advocate the benefits of discomfiting yet welcome disruptions to our more established ways of thinking and practising. This is often narrated in a biographical style, which enables us to highlight how we, from rather different backgrounds, came to collaborate at various points over the last decade and how this manifested in a noteworthy and instructive teaching experience for Ian when invited to deliver two seminar sessions for Mel’s students. Overall, we promote a pluralistic and inclusive approach to the notion of ‘politicizing artistic pedagogies’ but make sure, in the process, to outline where we depart from more established positions (such as on pedagogy and on art’s function). Finally, we briefly introduce the articles that comprise the Special Issue.

By exploring some of the challenges of teaching a radical politics in the neo-liberal university, the article looks to the writings of radical pedagogues like Freire and Giroux to position hope as an important resource for critical pedagogy for teachers. Drawing on Coole’s work on Merleau-Ponty, the article examines the potential of a critical pedagogy that taps into the body, rather than a mind, as a vessel for capturing hope and thus as a way of opening up a new resource for linking hope to educational practice. These resources are discussed in relation to debates concerning the politics of artistic practices, particularly with regard to how an embodied pedagogy might work around the constraints imposed by neo-liberal universities. Three themes are identified as warranting further discussion for an embodied pedagogy and their implications are reflected upon. These relate to how we view the student as embodying hope, how we view the classroom as a place of rich connections and how we capture learning through richness and reflection. The United Kingdom is the focus of the article, but there is a wider relevance given ongoing global trends in and debates about higher education.

Recent contributions to urban geography have considered state space by innovatively focusing on specific cases of the city built environment. Examples could include here Karl Schlögel’s slicing through the spaces of state power in Moscow 1937 or Yuri Slezkine’s methodological cue to read the saga of the Russian Revolution across time in The House of Government. This article adds to the methodological insights of urban researchers by honing in on the Monument to the Revolution in Mexico City, in order to consider its role as a socially produced, conflictual and dynamically changing site in the struggle over public space and its memorialization. Since its opening in 1938, the Monument to the Revolution at Plaza de la República has been a pivotal fulcrum of state power in abetting the changing geography of state space. Equally, the site has experienced contradictions and differences stemming from socially produced space across time, in the form of periods of state crisis and, most recently, state ‘rollback’ and ‘rollout’ under neo-liberalization. This article addresses both neo-liberalizing and differential structures of feeling as they bear on the space at the Monument to the Revolution. It does so by situating the Monument to the Revolution within the urban question and how neo-liberalization has unlocked local and aesthetic meanings that have become commodified, not least through the extraction of monopoly rents. Further, the article spotlights simultaneous contemporary contestations of state power and impulses of socio-spatial struggle over difference articulated in and around Plaza de la República at the monument. In so doing, the article contributes an important pedagogical focus on both homogenizing and differential structures of feeling inscribed in spaces of capitalism in the twenty-first century.

This article is a critical reflection on our forays in the curatorial practice and exposition in March 2018 for a map art exhibit called Faces Places: Mapping Embodiments held at the University of the Philippines campus in Diliman. The exhibit was an exposition of different and alternative forms of mapping through the works of three Filipino artists: Mideo Cruz, Cian Dayrit and Mark Salvatus. We analysed their interventions in making visible the progressive geographies inherent in the everyday lifeworlds of Filipinos. Drawing from Nancy Fraser’s subaltern counterpublics, we argue that their artistic outputs are forms of counter-mapping vignettes that allow the possibility to illuminate the voices and habitus of the sifted and the excluded as new cartographical interventions intended for critical reflection and pedagogy. The art maps and countermaps of the artists evoked different responses that broadened and expanded understanding beyond what maps are, which allowed us to further interrogate the power structures that define world order through time. The production of new knowledges was derived not only from analysing the textual and symbolic aspects of the artistic countermaps but also with the processual aspect of art-making as emancipatory politics.