Ungrasping the Other: The Parent, the Child, and the Making of Solidarities. A Response to Esther Ohito

The child reaches forward with his toes, extending to touch the world from the comfort of his mother’s lap. She smiles, wide brown eyes into the camera, left hand resting on her left knee while the index finger of her right hand clinches the child’s overalls near his belly, holding him in place. He smiles, wide eyes into the camera, right hand resting on her right wrist while the index finger of his left hand points forward. He feels the warmth of his mother’s chin resting on his nearly bald head, nested in the safety of her crossed legs. The blades of grass reach up like threads bracing them both to the land. A scribble behind the photo, likely in my abuela’s handwriting, marks the date, 8 noviembre 1972, 48 years ago today

Social Justice, Deferred Complicity, and the Moral Plight of the Wealthy

Faced with the facts of economic inequality, the wealthy are confronted with a particular set of moral, social, and political questions, not least of which is the question of how to preserve a sense of being a “good” human being. In the case of justifying privilege, the problem becomes how to position oneself as being uniquely able to enact a superior moral character. In this response to Swalwell’s article, we argue that her data show how being good and having moral standing is a social outcome that is premised on the unequally distributed ability to do certain things, to enact certain roles, and to mobilize particular discourses. Swalwell demonstrated the complicated ways in which privileged students understand what it means to have a commitment to social justice, and her analysis raises questions about the possibility of as well as the potential for educating students with economic privilege toward social justice commitments. In this response we highlight the important symbolic role that economically disadvantaged groups play in the imaginary of students who attend elite private schools and what this illustrates about the ways in which they are complicit in sustaining social inequality

Regarding Race: The Necessary Browning of Our Curriculum and Pedagogy Public Project

Author offers observations regarding the persistence of white supremacy within the field of curriculum studies and makes a call for the "browning" of curriculum studies

“Musiqueando” en la Ciudad: Re-Conceptualizando la Educación Musical Urbana como Práctica Cultural

Challenging prevailing ideas of urban music in order to expand normative conceptions of urban music education, this essay proposes a reconceptualization of urban music education as cultural practice. Music educators, particularly those working in urban classrooms and committed to social justice, need to work both with and against the prevailing narrow conception of the “urban” that shapes the way we think about both urban music and urban education. Drawing on insights from contemporary cultural theory, the essay extends a definition of the urban as cultural practice and points to the possibilities that such a framework might offer for a reconceptualization of urban music education.En este ensayo se discuten las ideas mas prevalecientes sobre la música urbana con el propósito de expandir las ideas normativas sobre la educación musical urbana y se propone una reconceptualización de ésta como práctica cultural. Los educadores de música, particularmente aquellos que trabajan en salones de clase urbanos y que están comprometidos con la justicia social, necesitan trabajar con y en contra de la noción estrecha prevaleciente de lo «urbano» que da forma a la manera en que pensamos tanto sobre la música urbana como sobre la educación urbana. Utilizando ideas de la teoría cultural contemporánea, en este ensayo se extiende la definición de lo urbano como práctica cultural y se señalan las posibilidades que tal marco pudiera ofrecer para la reconceptualización de la educación musical urbana

Journal Editor Session

Not available

Holding “The Arts” at Bay: A Response

Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández responds to the other author

Decolonial options and artistic/aestheSic entanglements: An interview with Walter Mignolo

Since the 1990s Walter Mignolo has been a central figure in discussions and debates around the world about coloniality and the development of thinking within the frame of the “decolonial option.” Most recently, Mignolo has been deeply engaged in discussions with artists, curators, critics, theoreticians, and other cultural producers committed to the decolonial option with whom he has developed decolonial understandings of and approaches to “aestheTics” and “aestheSis.” In this interview with Decolonization editorial board member Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández, Mignolo discusses decolonial options and their entanglements within contemporary political and cultural processes, arguing that “decolonial thinkers and doers have to work in the entanglement and differential of power.” He elaborates on the range of options available to artists committed to decolonial work, as they navigate contemporary art worlds shaped by competing norms and based on diverging epistemologies and conceptions of creation and sensory experience. He talks about the role of Indigenous conceptions of and approaches to creative work, suggesting that Indigenous practices have a central role to play in how we come to deal with the colonial wound through decolonial healing

Jenseits des banalen Empirismus – Gedanken zu einem neuen Paradigma

In this essay, first delivered as a keynote at the Von Mythen Zu Erkenntnissen? Gegenwart und Zukunft Empirischer Forschung Zur Kulturellen Bildung (From Myths to Insights? Present and Future Empirical Research on Cultural Education) conference, sponsored by the Rat für Kulturelle Bildung on October 25, 2016, at the Bundesakademie für Kulturelle Bildung, Wolfenbüttel, Gaztambide-Fernández offers a reflection on how to approach the problem of why and to what end we might engage arts education today as well some ideas about how to frame arts education research productively. The chapter challenges arts advocates to move beyond what Gaztambide-Fernández calls the “banal empiricism” of the rhetoric of effects that shapes mainstream approaches to the arts in education. Instead, he proposes that a rhetoric of cultural production might recast the fundamental assumptions we bring to both research and practice in arts education

The Orders of Cultural Production

In this article, Gaztambide-Fernández elaborates on what it means to engage the concept of cultural production as an analytic framework for making sense of creative symbolic practices within educational contexts. Building on his critique of the “rhetoric of effect” in arts education, Gaztambide-Fernández introduces the notion of cultural production as a framework for both analysis and for thoughtful arts education practice and advocacy. The paper presents the outline of a framework based on the idea that cultural production can be understood and engaged through five different but intersecting “orders” or dimensions of practice: the spatiotemporal order, the material order, the symbolic order, the relational order, and the affective order. Understanding these “orders” also opens up possibilities for thinking otherwise about the arts in education and for using cultural production as a pedagogical framework

Specialized Arts Programs in the Toronto District School Board: Exploratory Case Studies. Report of the Urban Arts High Schools Project, Phase 1: Exploratory Research - 2007-2009

The Report includes portraits of five specialized arts programs in Toronto public high schools. It provides and introduction with a brief review of the literature and a description of the research. The conclusion outlines the implications of the research as well as provides ideas for future research.Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. University of Toronto Connaught Fund