Art-Based (Un)Learning Unexpected Dialogues with Artworks

For many years, teachers, artists, and academics have drawn attention to education as an open discipline with creative space that ‘advocates agency over intention and whose trade is critical intimacy’ (Mieke Bal, 2012). Rather than being a site of intimidation, conventions, and rules, education should be a place where friendship is the motor for response. It should look at hegemonic structures in society, art, and pedagogy itself, and thus be able to critically question these. Open, reversible, respectful pedagogies as such lead to creative thinking, to open minds, and to building critical, communicative citizenship across borders.

In panoramically exploring this understanding of education, this volume of essays traverses the fields of cinema studies, dance, fine arts, fashion, literature, design, music, theatre, photography, storytelling, technology studies, pedagogy, politics, sociology, psychology, medicine, media, and contemporary cultural studies. It examines art and its objects, and how these become teaching objects that trigger the beholder’s imagination and knowledge. ‘Unlearning’ is a subjective process that values organic, unexpected experiences over objective, scripted learning itineraries.

This multi-disciplinary, international collection unites many possible prisms of re-thinking pedagogy in a scholarly context that embraces critical intimacy. It thus offers readers a kaleidoscope of how art and imagination can teach us about ourselves, our world(s), and a cosmopolitan life together through art and (un)learning.