This article proposes a 'pataphysical turn for arts-based research through the work of Alfred Jarry. Jarry outlined a unique research program that falls neatly neither into scientific inquiry nor artistic creation. Rather, this type of research can be defined in terms of three interconnected themes: (1) a postmetaphysical examination of the laws…

A growing and influential cohort of Black scholar-creatives are choosing to think, theorize, aesthetically practice, and articulate blackness (Black being and living) in excess of a settled Western racial logic (nonbeing) that produced it. I set forth to advance a paradigm of Black study for thinking and theorizing the intersections of Black…

Drawing from decolonial theories, I explore the history of art education in the Dominican Republic in the first half of the 20th century. I examine how racial hierarchies were activated in art classes in school through the romanticization of the countryside and the mystification of children's material culture. A distorted use of rural imagery…

This article explores the idea of a queer aesthetic sensibility and how it might provide ways of seeing, hearing, and feeling that help one better recognize the imminent potentialities that hide beneath the routine and expected rhythms of the everyday. Thinking alongside the work of Maxine Greene and Jose Esteban Muñoz, the article considers how…

Throughout the past decade, the maker movement has become a cultural force, and maker-centered learning has grown in popularity. At the same time, the arts have remained marginalized throughout the educational sphere and limited scholarship recognizes the connections between the maker movement and arts learning. To explore this connection, we…

This article engages in a conversation around the idea of queer energy; a term used by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick to describe the nourishing and sustaining force of high and low cultural objects. In doing so, it examines the idea of disidentification as a queer reading practice integral to the formation and endurance of queer folk who must navigate…

The standard educational gesture--in defense of its perceived secondary status relative to the "real world"--is to embed everything within its purview, such that even conceiving education as an art becomes a pedagogic imperative. In Anji County, China, we find an early childhood program (Anji Play) that uncouples play from this hierarchy…

Materials, making, and objects are important parts of an ecology of meaningful learning and teaching in art that must accompany the development of concept and social impact. New materialist theory suggests that matter matters to how life is lived, while emphasizing that animacy is inherent not only to what we think of as animate beings but to all…

Sentimentalism as a genre is known for its association with melodramatic 19th-century novels, such as Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin" or Alcott's "Little Women." But, as a cultural tendency, sentimentalism can be found in a range of 19th- and 20th-century cultural, social, and political phenomena, with philanthropic and educational…

This article addresses the human need to create uniquely beautiful things for social sharing, play and to elevate objects above functionality. For that reason we often see ordinary people "making special" in many types of informal settings. A pervasive notion exists among many in the art world and in the general public that making that…

Visual and cultural identities are situated in habitus, social theory on the body and clothing. Framed by narrative inquiry, girl method, and feminist research, I investigated the mean girl experiences of Grace and Hayley, who witnessed hostility alongside an exaggerated policed feminine sartorial aesthetic. White, middle and upper class, managers…

The article takes as its starting point the 2012 National Center for Education Statistics report that showed a clear statistical equity divide in access to art education. The article offers a philosophical examination of Alexander Baumgarten's concept of the "felix aestheticus". Using the theories of Jacques Ranciére, Maurice…

Employing the concept of a rhetoric of emotions, European Premodern fine art is revisioned as popular culture. From ancient times, the rhetoric of emotion was one of the principle concepts informing the theory and practice of all forms of European cultural production, including the visual arts, until it was gradually displaced during the 1700s and…

In this article, I consider the changing landscape of art education and explore potential directions for the field to situate itself within the spaces of early childhood education. I position that current understandings of child art and its use in both research and practice in the early childhood classroom are limited by a lack of connection to…

This article explores how to ensure visitor engagement with art objects at exhibition spaces in art museums through relational aesthetics, which focuses on the intersubjective relationship that art objects arouse in visitors. In the 1990s, Bourriaud coined the term "relational aesthetics" in reference to interactive installation art, but…