Pedagogy

In the face of rising authoritarianism and on the heels of urgent struggle, autonomy calls to us. How might we excavate the theory and history of autonomous politics to arrive at new possibilities for radical democracy and the radical imaginary? How can we rethink the ways in which artistic autonomy is theorized and practiced beyond the shrunken horizon of liberal individualism? How might we understand political and artistic autonomies as linked, rather than diametrically opposed? And what role does radical pedagogy have to play in all of this?

Framed by the thought of Cornelius Castoriadis, and engaging with Marxist, Black Radical, and Feminist approaches to liberation, as well as movements such as Occupy, Black Lives Matter, Me Too, Letters on the Autonomy Projectunderstands autonomy to be the capacity of a society, a community or an individual to modify its form. As Castoriadis argues, the struggle for self-determination requires unlimited questioning of the way things are, but also that we do or make something new in light of this interrogation. Autonomy is thus equally a project for thought, for education, for politics, and for art.

Stylistically, these open letters, addressed inclusively to artists, activists, and academics, are modeled on the philosophical letters of Friedrich Schiller on the one hand and the revolutionary communiqués of the Zapatistas on the other. Performing a kind of writing-as-praxis, they seek to grasp the potential of our moment with reference to historical and contemporary instances of political autonomy, notions of artistic autonomy, and art practices that connect the two. They also look at the possibilities of educating for autonomy, which cannot itself be taught. If we are indeed living in a time of creative struggle to remake the whole of society, then an understanding of the autonomy project – and how theory, pedagogy, activism, and art might contribute to it – is of burning relevance.

Janet Sarbanes is the author of the short story collections Army of One and The Protester Has Been Released. 

A New Program for Graphic Design is the first communication-design textbook expressly of and for the 21st century. Three courses—Typography, Gestalt and Interface—provide the foundation of this book.

Through a series of in-depth historical case studies (from Benjamin Franklin to the Macintosh computer) and assignments that progressively build in complexity, A New Program for Graphic Design serves as a practical guide both for designers and for undergraduate students coming from a range of other disciplines.

Synthesizing the pragmatic with the experimental, and drawing on the work of Max Bill, Beatrice Warde, Muriel Cooper and Stewart Brand (among many others), it builds upon mid-to-late 20th-century pedagogical models to convey contemporary design principles in an understandable form for students of all levels—treating graphic design as a liberal art that informs the dissemination of knowledge across all disciplines. For those seeking to understand and shape our increasingly networked world of information, this guide to visual literacy is an indispensable tool.

David Reinfurt (born 1971), a graphic designer, writer and educator, reestablished the Typography Studio at Princeton University and introduced the study of graphic design. Previously, he held positions at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Rhode Island School of Design and Yale University School of Art. As a cofounder of O-R-G inc. (2000), Dexter Sinister (2006) and the Serving Library (2012), Reinfurt has been involved in several studios that have reimagined graphic design, publishing and archiving in the 21st century. He was the lead designer for the New York City MTA Metrocard vending machine interface, still in use today. His work is included in the collections of the Walker Art Center, Whitney Museum of American Art, Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum and the Museum of Modern Art. He is the co-author of Muriel Cooper (MIT Press, 2017), a book about the pioneering designer.

This book navigates the debate on (in)equality and arts education in a variety of ways. The process that editors Stijn van Dorpe and Sarah Késenne used to compile it follows a dialogue in which they provided contexts to one another but also strayed into the complexity of stories, viewpoints, and contradictions. They distinguish three different “politics”; three ways they believe the research has critical power and the potential to trigger action: through active, analytical, and corrective power; (in)consistencies; and (shared) praxis.

The book forms part of a series of projects and activities that they began as an initiative within the Audiovisual and Visual Arts Master at the LUCA School of Arts in Belgium.

A study on the role of research and knowledge production in today's contemporary art, and the growing relevance of art as conduit of knowledge.

What is the role and function of contemporary art in economic and politicalsystems that increasingly manage data and affect? Knowledge Beside Itself delves into the peculiar emphasis placed in recent years, curatorially and institutionally, on notions such as “research” and “knowledge production.” Considered as a specific, expansive mode of the culture industry, contemporary art is viewed here as a strategic bet on the social distinctions and value extractions made possible by claiming a different, novel access to “knowledge.” Contemporary art's various liaisons with the humanities and the social and natural sciences, as well as its practitioners' frequent embeddedness within transdisciplinary research environments and educational settings, have created a sense of epistemo-aesthetic departure, which concurs with the growing relevance of art as conduit or catalyst of knowledge.

Discussing the practice of artists such as Christine Borland, Tony Chakar, Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Adelita Husni-Bey, Jakob Jakobsen, Claire Pentecost, and Pilvi Takala, writer and curator Tom Holert submits the gambit of conceptualizing contemporary art as an agent of epistemic politics to a genealogical analysis of its political-economic underpinnings in these times of cognitive capitalism, machine learning, and a renewed urgency of epistemological disobedience.

Tom Holert is a writer and curator. In 2015 he cofounded the Harun Farocki Institut in Berlin, a platform for research and production departing from the example set by Farocki. With Anselm Franke he curated the 2018 exhibition “Neolithic Childhood: Art in a False Present, c. 1930” at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin.

Design Dedication makes a plea for adaptive mentalities within design pedagogy, with a non-normative approach to design practices. It explores an attitude in and towards design education that is socially engaged, politically aware, generous in approach, lyrical in tone, experimental in form and collaborative in practice. How can we talk about and bring out the political that’s inherent in the work that design students are doing? How to work on specific urgencies that are rooted in experience and narration? What are the underlying values of such a pedagogy? What kind of practices are developed in the context? How can an institute support and safeguard this? 

Design Dedication explores these approaches through statements from within and reaches out to design students, designers, artists, and teachers who are open to questioning their own practices and reformulating values in design dedication for a yet unpredictable, but surely dedicated tomorrow.

Contributors: Hannes Bernard, Michèle Champagne, Rana Ghavami, Anja Groten, Agata Jaworska, Anastasia Kubrak, Sherida Kuffour, Gui Machiavelli, Daniel van der Velden, Annelys de Vet and many others.

Enrique Dussel is considered one of the founding philosophers of liberation in the Latin American tradition, an influential arm of what is now called decoloniality. While he is astoundingly prolific, relatively few of his works can be found in English translation - and none of these focus specifically on education. Founding members of the Latin American Philosophy of Education Society David I. Backer and Cecilia Diego bring to us Dussel's THE PEDAGOGICS OF LIBERATION: A Latin American Philosophy of Education, the first English translation of Dussel's thinking on education, and also the first translation of any part of his landmark multi-volume work Towards an Ethics of Latin American Liberation.

Drawing heavily from the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, Dussel examines the dominating and liberating features of intimate, concrete, and observable interactions between different kinds of people who might sit down and have face-to-face encounters, specifically where there may be an inequality of knowledge and a responsibility to guide, teach, learn, care, or study: teacher-student, politician-citizen, doctor-patient, philosopher-nonphilosopher, and so on. Those occupying the superior position of these face-to-face encounters (teachers, politicians, doctors, philosophers) have a clear choice for Dussel when it comes to their pedagogics. They are either open to hearing the voice of the Other, disrupting their sense of what is and should be by a newness beyond what they know; or, following the dominant pedagogics, they can try to communicate and instruct their sense of what is and should be to the (supposed) tabula rasas in their charge. Dussel calls that sense of what is and should be "lo Mismo."

This groundbreaking translation makes possible a face-to-face encounter between an Anglo Philosophy of Education and Latin American Pedagogics. "Pedagogics" should be considered as a type of philosophical inquiry alongside ethics, economics, and politics. Dussel's pedagogics is a decolonizing pedagogics, one rooted in the philosophy of liberation he has spent his epic career articulating. With an Introduction by renowned philosopher Linda Martin Alcoff, this book adds an essential voice to our conversations about teaching, learning, and studying, as well as critical theory in general.

ENRIQUE DUSSEL was born in 1934 in the town of La Paz, in the region of Mendoza, Argentina. He first came to Mexico in 1975 as a political exile and is currently a Mexican citizen, Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the Iztapalapa campus of the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana (Autonomous Metropolitan University, UAM), and also teaches courses at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (National Autonomous University of Mexico, UNAM).

The question of the voice and its prominent role in our postindustrial society.

The (non)human voice has always been part of modern art, notably within performance art, sound art, and conceptual art. However, Master of Voice temporary master program at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy, Amsterdam, mutated from this history, examining the voice as a unique “discipline.” The graduate program's focus was on the (non)human voice as a means to an end or an end in itself within artistic practice. A special orientation of the curriculum, co-developed with a team of artists with a longstanding interest in the (non)human voice, is the voice in relation to technology and gender. This book captures a two-year-long period of research—of thinking, talking, sharing, learning, making, acting, and creating by students and teachers, artists, and other practitioners—to find possible answers and approaches to the question of the voice and its prominent role in our postindustrial society.

Contributions by Tyler Coburn, Angelo Custódio, Thom Driver, Paul Elliman, Amelia Groom, Miyuki Inoue, Danae Io, Jamila Johnson-Small, Bin Koh, Snejanka Mihaylova, Maria Montesi, MPA, Natasha Papadopoulou, Duncan Robertson, Marnie Slater, Cécile Tafanelli, Mavi Veloso, Geo Wyeth, Eva Šusová.

Graphic design: Juliette Lizotte.

The book contextualizes the Creativity Exercises—an amateur art course led by neo-avant-garde artists Miklós Erdély and Dóra Maurer in Budapest from 1975 to 1977—within the postwar intellectual networks that connected artists, architects, educators, sociologists and other socially engaged professionals, fostering the exchange of ideas and concepts and making connections between different fields of knowledge.

How do people learn, what do they know, and how does it influence their personality, their behavior and their position in society? These questions were the focus of the research project and exhibition series entitled “Creativity Exercises” between 2014 and 2016, which displayed historical and contemporary art projects experimenting with alternative forms of learning, spanning three exhibition stations: Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst Leipzig, tranzit.hu in Budapest, and the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw.

The first part of the publication consists of historical texts translated into English for the first time, including the exercise descriptions that functioned as the curriculum for the Creativity Exercises, studies written on the methods employed in the Creativity Exercises course, and parallel models for progressive pedagogies and art education. In the second part of the book, newly commissioned essays offer historical and transnational context for the “case study” of the Creativity Exercises course. The impact that such “creativity exercises” had on aesthetic, educational and institutional concepts, and the impulses for participation, co-creation, knowledge production and exchange that they continue to give—even beyond the realm of art—are the central themes of the book.

Texts by Ferenc Mérei & Tamás St. Auby, László Beke, Ildikó Enyedi, Miklós Erdély, Éva Forgács, Janna Graham, Dóra Hegyi, Sándor Hornyik, Zsolt K. Horváth, Emese Kürti, Zsuzsa László, Dóra Maurer, Marion von Osten, Axel Wieder.

This publication offers a critical assessment of the complicity of design in creating, perpetuating, and reinforcing social, political, and environmental problems, both today and in the past. It proposes going against the grain by problematising Western notions of design to foster situated, decolonial, and queer-feminist modes of disciplinary self-critique, and looks at design through the intersections of gender, culture, ethnicity, and class. Applying robust scholarly insight with engaging and accessible modes of conveyance and storytelling, an urgent and expansive array of voices and views emerge from those engaged in struggles with, against, or around the field of design.

Since its founding as a cultural studies group in 1999 in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, KUNCI Study Forum & Collective has experimented with methods of producing and sharing knowledge through acts of collective study at the intersections of affective, manual, and intellectual labor. This pamphlet is a collaboratively authored epistolary essay that narrates the discourse behind the development of KUNCI’s School of Improper Education, an initiative that posits studying together as a tactical approach to creating the conditions for social movement. Founded in 2016, The School of Improper Education is an avenue through which unlearning can be practiced, where unknowingness can be transformed into a series of productive tools for understanding the contemporary social ecosystem and articulating the resourcefulness of an independent art and cultural organization.

This pamphlet is part of UDP’s 2020 Pamphlet Series: twenty commissioned essays on collective work, translation, performance, pedagogy, poetics, and small press publishing. The pamphlets are available for individual purchase and as a subscription. Each offers a different approach to the pamphlet as a form of working in the present, an engagement at once sustained and ephemeral.

KUNCI Study Forum & Collective experiments with methods of producing and sharing knowledge through acts of studying together at the intersections between affective, manual, and intellectual labor. Since its founding in 1999 in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, KUNCI has been continuously transforming its structure, ways, and medium of working. Initially formed as a cultural studies study group, at present KUNCI’s practices emphasize collectivizing study by way of space-making, discussion, research, publishing, and school-organizing. KUNCI traverses and connects institutional, disciplinary, and geographical boundaries. KUNCI’S membership is informal and based on friendship, as well as principles of self-organization and collaboration.

A Textbook for the Ecocene is a how-to guide for connecting to self, community and planet. The Ecocene is an emergent and imagined geologic era where all humyns are living in reciprocity with their ecosystems again. Each textbook chapter shares practical exercises to try at home, Earth-centered theory and spirituality, and interviews with Black and Indigenous Earth warriors—cultural workers generating planetary liberation in their everyday lives. These testimonios from Johanna Iraheta, Bruje Fuego, Raquel Lemus, Patty Denisse, Jasmine Nyende, Queen Hollins and Olivia Chumacero shine with wisdom and advice for new and seasoned Earth stewards alike. Created originally as Sarita Dougherty's DIY PhD Dissertation, A Textbook for the Ecocene is a curricula for eco-feminista educations, DIY degrees and planetary destinies. We are activating the Ecocene right now, one step at a time. What we pay attention to grows.

Self-published by Co—Conspirator Press with the support of Women's Center for Creative Work. Edited by Simone Krug, copy edited by Gowri Chandra and Demi Corso. Designed by MJ Balvanera, Riso-printed by Neko Natalia.

SARITA DOUGHERTY (she/her, they/them) is a painter, parent, collaborator and educator of Cajun, Irish and Andean descent. Sarita is a cocreator of The School for the Ecocene Cooperative, offering a DIY PhD and more programs for planetary liberation. She currently lives and cultivates habitat on Ohlone Land. Sarita’s book, A Textbook for the Ecocene, is a continuation of her Artist Residency at The Feminist Center for Creative Work in Fall 2018.

In 2018, a group of three visual artists — Agathe Boulanger, Signe Frederiksen and Jules Lagrange— started a year-long conversations with Laurence Rassel, exploring her social and educational background, her ways of working, and examining the tools she applies in her daily practice of running institutions: feminism, the open source and free software movements, and the institutional psychotherapy developed by François Tosquelles and Jean Oury in the psychiatric field around the mid-20^th century.