Journal of Science and Technology of the Arts (JSTA)

CITAR – Research Center for Science and Technology of the ArtsSchool of Arts, Universidade Católica Portuguesa

https://revistas.ucp.pt/index.php/jsta/index

A peer-reviewed publication that results from a commitment of the Research Center for Science and Technology of the Arts (CITAR) to promote knowledge, research and artworks in the field of the Arts. The Journal provides a distinctive forum for anyone interested in artistic research and practised-based research. JSTA publishes three issues annually (April, July, and December) by the Universidade Católica Portuguesa, under an open access policy and has no article submission charges or article processing charges. JSTA is indexed by Scopus.

Critical approaches towards (a new) arts education

Deadline: April 15, 2021

Guest-Editors: Pedro Alves (EA-UCP / CITAR) & Catarina S. Martins (FBAUP / i2ADS)

Arts education, as a field of research and action in different spaces (schools, museums, cultural institutions, communities, etc.), still struggles to claim its specificity and equal importance in relation to other kinds of knowledge (Martins, 2017). In public and curricular policies and in several research discourses, it still remains subdued to purposes imposed from the outside which frame it between a rhetoric of effects and instrumentalizing practices (Gaztambide-Fernández, 2013; Martins, 2018). On the one hand, there remains an idea that arts are powerful transformative agents and could save the world (Martins, 2018; Martins & Popkewitz, 2015); on the other hand, neoliberalism tends to put economic utility and usage as principles that end up capturing art under the great jargons of creativity, cultural industries, flexibility, etc (Assis, 2019; Kalin, 2018; Martins, 2020). In schools, for example, it is not uncommon to see arts – under the pretext of interdisciplinarity – being mobilized under other curricular subjects (the so-called ‘serious’ knowledge), transforming them into vehicles that merely facilitate learning and neglecting in them what is also knowledge and possibilities for critical displacement and interventional action in the world. What we do with the arts matters more than what arts do to us (Gaztambide-Fernández, 2013).

However, talking about ‘arts’ is already abusive. Today, and in works that intend to be critical towards themselves, it is necessary to question the very concept and status that arts, but also education, built from European perspectives, aligned with colonial practices, the building of nations, identity constructions and a culture of taste, under a universalist idea of civilization and progress (Gikandi, 2011; Mörsch, n.d.; Varela, 2016). If we look into curricular programs from primary to high school education – and even higher education – in the broad field of arts education we understand how a history of white, mostly male and western art is inscribed in them. Arts do not appear on the margins of society, they are an integral part of it, and carry in them stories that are also responsible for the production and maintenance of social inequalities and injustice.

Thus, in this JSTA special issue we intend to pose one of the most difficult challenges that arts education faces today: how to build a place and status for arts education knowledge (in a still unequal struggle against other kinds of knowledge) and, simultaneously, how to do it from a critical standpoint, which does not assume for itself, from the outset, a privileged or exceptional place, which does not reproduce the hegemonic power relations it seeks to criticize (Mörsch, 2018), and which stimulates provocation and change instead of accommodation and homogenization. We invite authors to a place of questioning, under critical perspectives (anti-discrimination, anti-racist, postcolonial, queer, feminist, etc.), which promote alternative views and practices of action and research in arts education, committed to greater epistemological and social justice. For this special issue of JSTA we seek articles and researches that lead, from criticism or practice, to a critical, diverse and current reflection on the problems and turbulences of arts education, under any of the following topics:

– Histories of arts education

– Critical pedagogical practices and theoretical approaches in arts education

– Action and research methodologies in arts education

– Political frameworks in arts education

– Social and cultural frameworks in arts education

– Anti-discriminatory perspectives in arts education