Art’s asymptotic leadership:Arts leadership, education and the loss of autonomy

This article will mostly engage with arts leadership through a discussion that focuses on the arts, leadership and education, and how their convergence might have a direct impact on autonomy. Taking a meta-theoretical approach, the main argument is that arts leadership is an asymptotic state of affairs. Rather than pose art and leadership as antithetical events that necessitate forms of syntheses through identifiable contexts, the context for arts leadership represents a contiguous space where art and leadership continuously seek a mutual way of preserving their integrity in an asymptotic relationship. If this relationship turns into a synthesis, both art’s autonomy and the ability to lead creatively are neutralized. The aim is to question the various implications that bring together the autonomous spheres of the arts, education and leadership, while inviting the reader to draw his or her own conclusions critically and autonomously. To clarify this approach, this article straddles across several horizons, including: arts practice as a sphere of autonomous dispositions and the political implications that follow; education as a horizon that educes - leads out - through the pedagogical exits that are offered by the arts; and art’s anti-systemic pedagogy, where art’s autonomy becomes a possibility of unlearning systems.<br/

The Right to Creative Illegitimacy: Art and the Fallacy of Proprietary Legitimation

When we speak of the arts, and more so when one engages with the arts as a practitioner in their various contexts, the questions of legitimacy and legitimation take a very different turn. This spans across a wide horizon, whether it is that of art-making in the studio; of showing in the gallery; of performing in the hall; or of teaching, learning and unlearning in schools, colleges or universities. To start with, one needs to understand and find a way of differentiating between legitimacy and legitimation. Legitimacy implies a degree of conformity, whether it is with the law, agreed rules, or a grammar of speech, practice, and procedure. Legitimation is the action by which legitimacy is or could be claimed. In terms of images, by which we mostly make art, the process of being justified and verified, and more so, in terms of a manner by which a process of legitimation comes forth, emerges from that which is shown in terms of what it represents to groups and individuals who, in being recognized as sources of legitimacy, are then ready to give it. This raises an immediate question: is legitimacy a gift that is expected from others? In turn, this could imply that as recipients of this gift, human actions only gain the validity of what they represent so as to have a value that is identifiable with forms of legitimation established outside them. Values that immediately come to mind, when the arts are presented within this realm of legitimacy, would include those aesthetic, pedagogical, social, and moral categories from which one could always glean a political set of assumptions. These are often sustained and justified by socio-economic metrics that are now linked to the so-called culture and creative industries. The latter seems to have completed the circle of legitimacy, where the arts are not simply seen, but expected to justify their existence from perspectives that are tangible, and to which the institutional voice of the arts is increasingly and often actively, giving assent

Art ± Education: The Paradox of the Ventriloquist’s Soliloquy

When we speak of art education, are we trying to make sense of somethingby means of something else, just as a ventriloquist speaks with the mouth ofa dummy to make us believe that he is having a dialogue with someone elsewhen in effect he is speaking to himself? This paper discusses how art educationcould only flourish as an act of approximation as it rejects the incrementaland constructivist assumptions that have turned art and educationinto transactional instruments. Discussing art and education’s immanentrelationship, this paper argues that art education is only necessary by forceof the accidents that characterise it. Four scenarios, here identified in whatthe author calls the paradox of the ventriloquist’s soliloquy in art education,illustrate this argument. In discussing how this comes about, this papermakes reference to Herner Saeverot’s concept of indirect pedagogy andCharles Garoian’s prosthetic pedagogy

Communicating identities : a sociology of house names in Malta

19,683 house names from a convenience sample of ten localities across the island of Malta were collected and analysed in late 2022, with the aim of teasing out how they communicate social identities. Trends in multilingualism and secularisation were particularly explored, from two sets of house names that represent different historical epochs, one dating from 1977 and one from 1977–2022. Results, secured from the ten localities studied, suggest that: (1) English remains by far the preferred language for naming houses, followed by Maltese; (2) house names that involve two or more languages have increased; (3) house names that relate to the religious or sacred have declined (from around 16% to 10%); and (4) in spite of evident secularisation in house-naming practices, the most common house name is ‘St Joseph’.peer-reviewe

Dataset integration identifies transcriptional regulation of microRNA genes by PPARγ in differentiating mouse 3T3-L1 adipocytes

Peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor γ (PPARγ) is a key transcription factor in mammalian adipogenesis. Genome-wide approaches have identified thousands of PPARγ binding sites in mouse adipocytes and PPARγ upregulates hundreds of protein-coding genes during adipogenesis. However, no microRNA (miRNA) genes have been identified as primary PPARγ-targets. By integration of four separate datasets of genome-wide PPARγ binding sites in 3T3-L1 adipocytes we identified 98 miRNA clusters with PPARγ binding within 50 kb from miRNA transcription start sites. Nineteen mature miRNAs were upregulated ≥2-fold during adipogenesis and for six of these miRNA loci the PPARγ binding sites were confirmed by at least three datasets. The upregulation of five miRNA genes miR-103-1 (host gene Pank3), miR-148b (Copz1), miR-182/96/183, miR-205 and miR-378 (Ppargc1b) followed that of Pparg. The PPARγ-dependence of four of these miRNA loci was demonstrated by PPARγ knock-down and the loci of miR-103-1 (Pank3), miR-205 and miR-378 (Ppargc1b) were also responsive to the PPARγ ligand rosiglitazone. Finally, chromatin immunoprecipitation analysis validated in silico predicted PPARγ binding sites at all three loci and H3K27 acetylation was analyzed to confirm the activity of these enhancers. In conclusion, we identified 22 putative PPARγ target miRNA genes, showed the PPARγ dependence of four of these genes and demonstrated three as direct PPARγ target genes in mouse adipogenesis