[-empyre-] relational objects

[nick knouf]

Norah Zuniga Shaw wrote:
> Secondly, I'd love to hear from this month's contributors and others on the
> list about relationships between participatory art and participatory
> pedagogy and perhaps even some of the rhetoric around cyberlearning these
> days. I'm finding really productive connections between my research in this
> area and my teaching and I'd love to hear from others about this as well.

This is something I am also very interested in, and unfortunately I am
just beginning to look in this area so I can't offer much, so I hope
others will be able to chime in.  However, I have to say I am keen on
exploring in more detail the potential applicability of critical
pedagogy such as Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed and Augusto
Boal's (who sadly passed away recently) Theater of the Oppressed to new
types of artistic projects that continue to break down artificial
barriers between the gallery, the university, and the city.  (We of
course have to be careful to not simply take methods developed in
specific social and cultural contexts and apply them blindly elsewhere.)
 As well, I am interested in the work of groups like hackitectura
(http://hackitectura.net/), fiambreras
(http://www.ravalnet.org/bordergames/), PUKAR
(http://www.pukar.org.in/), Colectivo Situaciones
(http://www.situaciones.org/), and Precarias de la Deriva
(http://www.makeworlds.org/node/61), among many others of course, who
are working through new forms of participatory engagement and the
creation of alternative concepts of pedagogy that not only offer ways of
sharing knowledge amongst groups with different relationships to power,
but also do not easily fall into a consensus-based model of democracy
and therefore recognize the inherent agonism in any encounter with
o(O)thers.  I hope that we can go into more detail regarding these
groups' work over the course of the week.

nick