Caris, A.H. (2016). The Art of Interruption; concepts of art as a cooperative citizen practice driving cultural innovation and social change. Groningen: Rijksuniversiteit Groningen.
This dissertation studies informal communities of artists and creative citizens who cooperatively produce art and culture, experiment with it and in that way learn from it. It reviews concepts of informal situated human learning and informal cooperative situated art practices in order to build a theoretical framework that regards art not only as a social practice but also as an form of citizen agency that might induce progress and social change.
It describes three cases of such communities and practices, one in the Netherlands and two in New York City. The three cases deliver examples of the way artists may learn and develop their art outside or in the margins of the formal institutions of the art world which is interesting for art educators and policy makers of this art world considering their position and relation to these informal circuits.
But these cases also demonstrate how the creative class may produce progress and development in the community they’re part of which is interesting for local policy makers. Art does influence our society but at the moment mainly through advertisement and propaganda. This study explores approaches of an artistic form of citizenship.
Finally the study elaborates on different strategies of establishing an enclave that fosters an independent production of thought, meaning and culture, which is interesting for artists who seek social connection and want to establish an art practice that produces human growth and development.
Caris, A.H., Cowell, G. (2016). The artist can’t escape: The artist as (reluctant) public pedagogue – Policy Futures in Education, 14(4), 1-18.
This article addresses the question of how artists may recognise art as a public pedagogy whilst staying detached from the role of teacher in the traditional sense. We report on three art practices of citizens engaging in ‘situation art’ to support and illustrate a few theoretical concepts derived from Biesta’s theory of public pedagogy. The examples will be investigated as pedagogies ‘that enact a concern for publicness’, where Biesta argues for pedagogic interventions that make action possible in an arena of plurality and diversity. Inspired by Biesta we will develop the concept of ‘artistic citizenship’, a practising of citizenship in community settings that engages in playful and unknowable-in-advance artistic interventions in everyday life, thereby testing the quality of the public sphere and setting conditions for pedagogies that have the potential to be ‘politically significant’.
Caris, A. (2011, 9 16). Small talk sustainable public relations or the power of hospitality; how city promotion becomes city learning. (G. Biesta, Ed.) Berlin: ECER. Paper Session “Cities, Citizenship and Civic Learning (Part 2)”.
In the margins between centers of economic power, local communities consider themselves challenged to stage their public image in a spectacular way or disappear into oblivion. Regional PR-campaigns mimic economic power centers and metropolitan cities, adapting corporate “serious speech”, communicating pretensions often exaggerated and sometimes misleading. I argue that these campaigns do not deliver sustainable public relations for these marginal regions because: (a) the images they generate change rapidly according to economic and technological fashion, and (b) the images are not rooted in real-life experiences’. Therefore this “serious speech” will not take root in the mind of the passerby.
On the other hand, experiences of authentic places and encounters with genuine people are unique and irreplaceable, establish real personal bonds, and encourage sustainable memories. This sustainable public relations we might argue takes “small talk” – not “serious speech” – to maintain. In my presentation I report on a project hosting a visit of representatives from the Swedish community of Falkoping to the City of Groningen. Both communities can be considered to be marked as marginal regions. I analyze the visit through Biesta’s theory of civic learning (Biesta 2011) and argue that the “small talk approach” both sparks democratic processes of mutual community image building and at the same time generates an open and accessible nexus of perspectives trough plural and contradictory images.