Open Collections

Thomas, Catherine

University of British Columbia

This study explores what can happen when a collective of art teachers come together to reside in a space that allows them to practice their impotential for nine months, deactivating the necessity to act as teachers, always in a mode of production (Agamben, 2013). Doing nothing at the site is not idle-ness but a radical gesture of conviviality (Illich, 1973). The distinction between what we cannot and can Not do is one I will emphasize in this dissertation, and is based on the philosopher, Giorgio Agamben’s (2013) distinction between (in)ability (something we can or cannot do) and (im)potentiality (something of which we can choose Not to do it). Through the creation of an experimental practice at a storefront site in Chicago called Spaces for Possibility, the artist collective enters into a heterotopic space (Foucault, 1984), a real place, where teachers can imagine what other worlds might be possible. As an artist collective made up of ten public school art teachers, and a researcher as participant, we put old uses, a building, to new use and queer use (Ahmed, 2020) as a space for possibilities to arise or not. In this experimental project, I employ research creation practices that support creative, affective and sensory processes of worlds unfolding, and being made, of stories accumulating and being re-arranged, of modes of responding and corresponding with each other (Ahmed, 2010; Haraway, 2017; Manning, 2014; Stewart, 2007). These practices afford me as a researcher the ability to create and design an experimental project that follows what is made or not made, documented and collected as events, scenes, and stories that build up as affects and other forms of accumulation at the site of this research, affording the researcher space to let emergent events unfurl without predetermined outcomes (Haraway, 2017; Stewart, 2007). The promise in this study is in how we come to the space permitting ourselves to imagine what other worlds we wish to inhabit as teachers, while we also put into question the ethical dilemmas of use and our potential to act.  

Text

2023-09-06

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/85809

Curriculum Studies

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/