Call for Chapter Proposals

Artwork Histories: Transnational Perspectives in Art Education (Working Title)

Dustin Garnet (California State University, Los Angeles)
& Anita Sinner (Concordia University)

Art education holds an important role in promoting historical awareness of the multiple relations that connect pedagogic inquiry with culture, heritage, place and identity, locally and globally. In our ongoing efforts to keep step with the movements of art and society, we believe art education requires more inclusive and holistic versions of history from transnational perspectives that break down barriers and cross borders in the pursuit of more informed and diverse understandings of the field.

Inspired by Munslow (2010), we invite submissions that adapt an approach of ‘artwork histories’ to explore the legacies of art education as an anticipatory mode of historical thinking and practice across the arts and across sites of learning. Acclaimed historian Hayden White (1973) described history as “a narrative discourse the content of which is as much imagined as found” (p. 82). Artwork Histories offers an opportunity for authentic engagement and intellectual risk, which includes the rejection of ‘correct’ interpretations of historical problems. As active agents, art education historians are not passive collectors of the past, but engaged in new ways of doing history predicated on cultivating stories that move beyond representation to attend to aesthetic dimensions that bridge historiography, material culture, oral history, art history, and teacher education. This edited collection will provide an interpretation of ‘historical thinking and historical consciousness’ (Seixas, 2017) through the interrelations of time (past, present, future) and space (geographic location, orientation, connectivity beyond borders) as we move towards what Seixas describes as coherent and interwoven historical approaches in an effort to provoke critical and creative practices in education.

We seek research that conceptualizes the entanglements of historical research in art education in a globalized society (Knudsen & Gram-Skjoldager, 2014; Larson, 2018). We encourage proposals that explore linkages and flows that shift from the nation-state to transnational actors: individuals, communities, institutions, and/or organizations. Five strands weave this collection, with a host of potential subject areas, including but not limited to the following:

• Emergent Historical Approaches (methodological fluidity, epistemological deliberations, conceptualising transdisciplinary, limits of historical inquiry)
• People in Relation to Art Education (issues, events, memory studies and/or first-person accounts of war, trauma, social justice, LGBTQ+, dis/ability as new forms of belonging)
• Studies of Places and Things (object-biographies, architecture, spatial design, universal design, and archives)
• Communities of Art Education (socially-engaged art, artist collaborations, collectives, interrogating national art education narratives)
• Institutions and Organizations (universities, museums, schools, community associations)

We welcome essays that bring forward anticipatory modes of thinking and practice, as well as multiple forms of archival research, and creative renderings of historical research, such as stories, visual essays, poetic expression and more.

Please send a chapter proposal of 500 words, identifying the topic area of your chapter, along with select references and brief bios of authors (50 words) by December 1^st, 2018 to dustin.garnet@calstatela.edu and anita.sinner@concordia.ca.

Invitations to submit full chapters will be sent out January 2019.

References

Knudsen, A. C., & Gram-Skjoldager, K. (2014). Historiography and narration in transnational history. Journal of Global History, 9(1), 143–161.

Larsen, M. A. (2018). The possibilities and potential of transnational history: A response to Kazamias’ call for historical research. European Education, 50(2), 101-115. doi: <ahref=”https://doi.org/10.1080/10564934.2018.1454261″>10.1080/10564934.2018.1454261

Munslow, A. (2010). The future of history. Basingstoke, United Kingdom: Palgrave Macmillan.

Seixas, P. (2017). A model of historical thinking. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 49(6), 593-605.

White, H. (1973). Metahistory: The historical imagination in nineteenth century Europe. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press.