As part of the Public Pedagogies Institute 2022 conference Sometimes Connect, we are excited to announce an hour with Aseel Tayah, creator of Bukjeh.

Aseel Tayah is a Melbourne-based Palestinian artist, creative director, and cultural leader who uses her practice to advocate for artists of colour, mothers, children, and young people, changing the world, one project at a time. She has recently been described as “an unstoppable force in the Australian cultural landscape.”

Through the power of storytelling, Aseel’s artistic practice creates awareness and facilitates connection by humanising the experiences of people who have been displaced.
As such, her work is embedded in the community and is often highly responsive to current issues. 

During Refugee Week 2020, Aseel curated produced, and presented a series of live online discussion panels featuring national and international artists and cultural leaders. The series attracted more than 40,000 views and led to an invitation to participate in the inaugural TEDx Melbourne PluggedIn event where she was awarded Best Speaker.

As a creative director and installation artist, Aseel has a wide range of experience; international highlights include We Too Want To Play, the establishment of Palestine’s first network of toy libraries and Fingerprint of an Arab Girl, an annual event showcasing the talents and achievements of girls living under occupation.

In Australia, collaborations include unique intercultural experiences such as Lullabies under the Stars, an Arabic/First Nations work for children, and the participatory installation Bukjeh, exploring stories of home and being forced to leave it.

Aseel exemplifies the use of art and creativity to achieve social justice and is renowned for her kindness, optimism, and generosity. She also has an incredible singing voice which she uses to connect hearts and harvest hope.

This event will be a feature of Day Two of the conference.

Public Pedagogies Institute Conference
November 24 -25, 2022, Footscray, Melbourne

Register Here

The Public Pedagogies Institute is excited to announce Dr Marnie Badham as one of our keynote speakers for our 2022 conference Sometimes Connect.

Marnie Badham, artist-researcher

With a 25-year history of art and justice practice in both Canada and Australia, Marnie’s research sits at the intersection of socially engaged art practice, participatory methodologies, and the politics of cultural measurement. Through aesthetic and dialogic forms of encounter and exchange, Marnie’s collaborative social practices bring together disparate groups of people (artists, communities, industry, local government) in dialogue to examine and affect local issues.

Her recent collaborations include a participatory public performance following extreme weather events in the Dandenong Ranges; public art commissioning development on Wurundjeri and Bunurong Country with Vicki Couzens; expanded curation projects on food-art-politics; and a series of creative cartographies registering emotion in public space in the Yarra Ranges (AUS), Kamloops (CAN), and Cape Breton Island (CAN). Her book The Social Life of Artist Residencies: connecting with people and place not your own is soon to be released.

Marnie is a Chief Investigator on the Australian Research Council Linkage Project Ambitious and Fair: towards a sustainable visual arts sector and contributes to industry standards on public art commissioning, artist residencies, and arts funding. She is Senior Lecturer at the School of Art, RMIT University. www.marrniebadham.com

Public Pedagogies Institute Conference
November 24 -25, 2022, Melbourne, Australia

The Public Pedagogies Institute invites proposal that respond to our 2022 conference theme Sometimes Connect.  The intent of this theme is to explore alliances that afford change.  At present there is an ever present necessity to consider how ‘we’ can work together toward mutual issues of concern. The Institute recognises the urgency for change that is increasingly stymied in prevailing dominant institutions.

This conference extends the call raised by Burdick and Sandlin (Journal of Public Pedagogies 2021, p.18) “Anker and Felski (2017) state, “[r]ethinking critique can . . . forge stronger links between intellectual life and the nonacademic world. Such links are not simply a matter of capitulation or collusion but can offer a vital means of influencing larger conversations and intervening in institutional policies and structures” (p. 19). This collaboration, employing what Latour (2004) calls an emphasis on “matters of concern [. . .] whose import then will no longer be to debunk, but to protect and to care” (p. 232) might abandon the wages, antagonistic nature, and insular interests of academic critique towards a pedagogy of care. Similarly, Charman and Dixon (Theory and Methods of Public Pedagogies Research, 2021) argue that within the public realm there is the circulation of knowledge and authority made manifest in the educative agent. The educative agent is the public pedagogue. “We do not see public pedagogy as necessarily being about a particular kind of political agency as the very act of knowledge circulation out-side of the bounded discursive power of claimed institutional knowledge is itself broadly speaking political (Charman and Dixon p.34, 2021). Max Liboiron writes “there can be solidarity without a We. There must be solidarity without a universal We. The absence of We and the acknowledgement of many we’s (including those to which you/I/we do not belong) is imperative for good relations in solidarity against ongoing colonialism and allows cooperation’ with the incommensurabilities of different worlds, values and obligations” (Liboiron, Max. 2021. Pollution Is Colonialism. Durham: Duke University Press pp. 24-25).

Extending these prompts this conference seeks to explore what constitutes connection, how can alliances be built, what are the affordances for social change and what are moments of discord

Proposals may take the form of exemplars of practice, theoretical understandings of social movements both past and present, workshops or creative practice. The Public Pedagogies Institute works at the intersection of creativity, community education and theory.

Please note: the deadline has been extended to October 14, 2022. Submit a proposal to Karen.Charman@vu.edu.au

We now have available video recordings of some of the online presentations from our 2020 seminar series:
Public Pedagogies of Location

Seminar 2 – October 8, 2020
Visual Considerations and Contemplations
Presented by BelindaMacGill 

……………..

Seminar 3 – October 15, 2020
Narrative Panoramas: surfacing tacit knowledge through material translation and co-analysis of lived experience
Presented by Kelly Anderson

………….

Seminar 4 – October 22, 2020
The Educative Agent and Authority in Public Pedagogy
Karen Charman and Mary Dixon

…….

Seminar 6 – November 5, 2020
Locations of Law or non Law
by Peter Alsen 

Please note: the annual conference will now be run as a series of online seminars throughout October and November 2020.

Public Pedagogies of Location

As the smoke from the country fires permeated the city a renewed relationship arises out of the ashes.  The borders between public and personal, nature and creation, became obscured, perhaps showing ideological relationships to location that are fluid. 

In what ways might relationships to location be pedagogical? Location is critical for a number of reasons. Locations are ignored or privileged; they are positioned against each other, yet we claim our location and location claims us. Locations of protest are contested and behaviour monitored. The ecologies of location are fragile and in need of care, or perhaps attentiveness to these ecologies are strengthening?

This conference theme extends a call to reimagine relationships to location, to engage these blurred boundaries and emergent spaces of location and our relationships to concepts of localism, activism, and pedagogy.

Please email karen.charman@vu.edu.au with any proposals or to discuss ideas for the conference.