Towards Response-able Arts-based Practices in Higher Education

Abstract

This study aims to contribute to the proliferation of scholarship concerned with the postphilosophical queering of normative hegemonies within higher education (HE), by foregrounding a methodological interest in how else to do HE research, pedagogy and assessment. Creatively investigating how to do academia differently, this thesis challenges the teleological conception of learning as a pre-figured logical progression of predetermined outcomes, the centring of the bounded individual as the unitary subject of learning, as well as the commonplace reliance on representationalist logics that grant language the ability to capture meaning in its expansive fullness. These critical educational concerns are considered from the situated position of a private HE institution, the Cape Town Creative Academy (CTCA), located in South Africa. The CTCA specialises in delivering bachelor’s and postgraduate qualifications within contemporary art and various design disciplines.

This study responds to the widespread concern over the neoliberal reform of universities, where the private HE sector figures as the pinnacle entrepreneurial face of capitalised education. The South African private art and design school sector is a highly competitive market of (mostly) homologous qualification offerings. As such, the urgency for institutional differentiation results in the promotion of discourses of excellence—prioritising outcomes over process, individual achievement over communal learning, and marketable skills over critical praxis. Qualifications are ‘sold’ on the basis of graduate employment rates, student success in national and international competitions and the commercial (rather than pedagogical) track record of teaching staff. Critical engagements with learning are commonly overshadowed by a supply-and-demand logic of skills acquisition and a client-centred approach to academic delivery. As a founding partner and the academic head of the CTCA, my critical and creative inquiry into the normalising hegemonies that characterise HE stems from the personal (privilege and) responsibility for tending to the oppressive effects of this highly determining value framework.

In this thesis, I bring together posthumanist and new materialist ‘orientations’ within concrete HE scenarios to propose conceptual and practical reconfiguring of research, pedagogy and assessment cultures. Through each of its interventions, this study investigates how one can challenge neoliberal value frameworks in HE through an attunement to pedagogical response-ability as the contingent and entangled process of becoming-with the (human and non-human) other. Response-ability—as a pedagogical ethics—proceeds via a generous curiosity that opens up to the heterogeneous multiplicity of how the world can be known and/or experienced. Prioritising a reciprocal ethos grounded in the mutual ability to respond, response-ability offers a generative entry point to my research aim for thinking and doing HE differently.

As a whole, this thesis challenges normative and normalising neoliberal tendencies in HE by attending to material entanglements, affects, and the processual nature of learning. I argue for the central importance of response-ability—a thoroughly collective and co-constitutive doing and thinking—as an orientation for reconfiguring HE research, pedagogy and assessment. As its primary contribution, this thesis offers propositions for a deepening of embodied experimentation with response-able practices as a means with which to engage the much-needed transformability of, and transformation in HE.