eilis searson

• Abse Gogarty, Larne (2023) ‘Introduction’, What We Do Is Secret: Contemporary Art and the Antinomies of Conspiracy, Sternberg Press
  
  
• Adepitan, Ade for Parapride (2023) Intersectionality in Focus: Empowering Voices during UK Disability History Month 2023. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yID8_s5tjc&t=1s
  (Accessed: 23 July 2024)
  
  
• Art21 (2023) Christine Sun Kim in Friends & Strangers – Season 11 | Art21. 16 October 2020. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NpRaEDlLsI (Accessed: 23 July 2024)
  
  
• Bradbury, Alice (2020) A Critical Race Theory Framework for Education Policy Analysis: The Case of Bilingual Learners and Assessment Policy in England, Race Ethnicity and Education, 23:2, 241-260, DOI: 10.1080/13613324.2019.1599338
  
  
• Crenshaw, Kimberlé (1990) Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color. Stanford Law Review43 (6)
  
  
• Darling, Brett (2018) The Pluralist: The Visibility Issue, the Royal College of Art Newspaper
  
  
• Eddo-Lodge, Reni (2017) Why I’m No Longer Talking To White People About Race, Bloomsbury Publishing
  
  
• Fisher, Mark (2005) October 6, 1979: Capitalism and Bipolar Disorder, K-Punk, Repeater Books
  
  
• Garrett, Rhianna (2024) Racism shapes careers: career trajectories and imagined futures of racialised minority PhDs in UK higher education, Globalisation, Societies and Education, Routledge, DOI: 10.1080/14767724.2024.2307886
  
  
• Ghislaine Leung, Bosses, London/ Brussels: Divided Publishing (2023)
  
  
• Gillborn, David (2008) Racism and Education: Coincidence or Conspiracy? Routledge Books
  
  
• hooks, bell (1994) Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, Routledge
  
  
• hooks, bell (2000) Where We Stand: Class Matters, Routledge Books
  
  
• Jawad, H. (2022) Islam, Women and Sport: The Case of Visible Muslim Women. Available at: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/religionglobalsociety/2022/09/islam-women-and-sport-the-case-of-visible-muslim-women/ (Accessed: 23 July 2024)
  
  
• Kornfield, Jack in hooks, bell (2001) All About Love, New Visions: Harper Collins books
  
  
• Lazzarato, Maurizio (2011) The Making of the Indebted Man: An Essay on the Neoliberal Condition, Semiotext(e)
  
  
• Lloyd, David (1990) Analogies of the aesthetic: the politics of culture and the limits of materialist aesthetics, New Formations
  
  
• Mouffe, Chantal (2008) Art and Democracy: Art as an Agnostic Intervention in Public Space, Open 2008 / No.14 / Art as a Public Issue, Available at: https://readingpublicimage.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/mouffe_open14_p6-151.pdf (Accessed: 24 July 2024)
  
  
• Noble, Richard (2003/2004) Some Provisional Remarks on Art and Politics, The Showroom Annual
  
  
• Phillips, Mike (1973) Black Teachers, Open Door, BBC Broadcasting. Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p06ctzhf (Accessed 26 July 2024)
  
  
• Rekis, Jaclyn (2023) Religious Identity and Epistemic Injustice: An Intersectional Account. Hypatia 38
  
  
• Rosler, Martha (2013) Culture Class, e-flux journal, Sternberg Press
  
  
• Sadiq, Asif (2023) Diversity, Equity & Inclusion. Learning how to get it right, TEDx. Youtube, 2 March. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HR4wz1b54hw (Accessed: 26 July 2024)
  
  
• Scandone, Berenice (2017) Social Class, Ethnicity and the Process of ‘Fitting In, Higher Education and Social Inequalities: University Admissions, Experiences, and Outcomes, edited by Richard Waller, Nichole Ingram, and Michael Ward, Routledge Books

To continue to question art school education and its role in preparing students for industry futures, the link between race and class must also be explored. Rhianna Garrett’s 2024 paper on how racism shapes careers, evidenced how racialised minority PhD students and graduates relate to an academic career trajectory and identity, how they experience white organisational spaces, and how diversity (or lack thereof) affects their career choices and imagined futures.[1] The examples this paper explores correlates closely with the experience of Reni Eddo Lodge who, whilst evidencing racist pay gaps for graduates,[2] writes of experiences of ‘assimilating’ to a lack of diversity. These experiences stress that class is much more than money:[3]

The children of immigrants have quietly assimilated to demands of colour-blindness, doing away with any evidence of our culture and heritage in an effort to fit in. We’ve listened to our socially conservative parents, and educated ourselves up to our eyeballs. We’ve kept our gripes to ourselves, and changed our appearance, names, accents and dress in order to fit the status quo. We have bitten our tongues, exercised safe judgement, and tiptoed around white feelings in an effort not to rock the boat. We’ve been tolerant up to the point of not even mentioning race, lest we’re accused of playing the race card.[4]

It is important to think about how the necessity to ‘fit in’ with white dominance is encouraged in the University classroom and curricula. With Eddo-Lodge’s inclusion of the parental relationship in her above statement, I am reminded of Mike Phillips’ poignant introduction to the programme Black Teachers, an Open Door broadcast, where 7 black teachers (including Phillips) discuss discrimination and the serious lack of diversity and opportunity in the educational system:

Schools are training people for various roles in society […] Look at the lowest income groups, the cleaners, the washers up and so on, and who do you see? Us. […] If you are a black parent, and you’re sitting there thinking that just because you dress up your child neat and tidy when you send him to school in the morning, that he’s going to come out as a civil engineer, or a lawyer, or a doctor, or even as an average, skilled man — think again! The most likely thing is that he’ll turn out not to do better than you, but to do the same, or worse. Because that’s the position that society has marked down for him.[5]

It is heartbreaking that Phillips’ words, spoken in 1973, echo the same sentiments of academics addressing Critical Race Theory[6] today.[7] Within my own teaching practice, I believe this represents an urgent necessity to re-address what success on a degree course might look like. I believe this is essential not only in diversifying references of ‘career success’, building towards addressing Sadiq’s poignant concern: ‘how can I become something I can’t see?’[8] — but perhaps more importantly, in platforming emotional, philosophical success and cultural empowerment, outside of monetary gain. As bell hooks so powerfully concludes:

The notion that problems in all our lives, but most especially the lives of the indigent and the poor, can be solved by money will continue to serve the interests of a predatory ruling class while rendering the rest of us powerless to create meaningful changes in our lives across class.[9]

[1] Garrett, Rhianna (2024) Racism shapes careers: career trajectories and imagined futures of racialised minority PhDs in UK higher education, Globalisation, Societies and Education, Routledge, DOI: 10.1080/14767724.2024.2307886

[2] “After I graduated, I quickly realised that social mobility was not going to save me. My suspicions were backed up by the statistics. When the Trades Union Congress looked at data from the Office for National Statistics Labour Force Survey, they found that black employees were dealing with a growing pay gap in comparison to their white counterparts, and that this pay gap actually widened with higher qualifications […] university-educated black graduates saw a gap of, on average, 23 percent less pay than their white peers.”

Eddo-Lodge, Reni (2017) Why I’m No Longer Talking To White People About Race, Bloomsbury Publishing, p. 208. Statistic taken from: ‘Black Workers With Degrees Earn a Quarter Less Than White Counterparts, Finds TUC’, tuc.org.uk, 1 February 2016

[3] hooks, bell (2000) Where We Stand: Class Matters, Routledge Books, p.157

[4] Eddo-Lodge, Reni (2017) Why I’m No Longer Talking To White People About Race, Bloomsbury Publishing, p. 208

[5] Phillips, Mike (1973) Black Teachers, Open Door, BBC Broadcasting. Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p06ctzhf (Accessed 26 July 2024)

[6] Critical Race Theory (CRT) focuses on how racism is embedded within everyday contexts and practices. Gillborn, David (2008) Racism and Education: Coincidence or Conspiracy? Routledge Books

[7] “The spatial context of the institution also further marginalises racialised, working-class students, as institutional environments perpetuate the construction of meritocracy and underachievement, rather than addressing the structural and cultural processes at work excluding them (Scandone 2017)”

Scandone, Berenice (2017) Social Class, Ethnicity and the Process of ‘Fitting In, Higher Education and Social Inequalities: University Admissions, Experiences, and Outcomes, edited by Richard Waller, Nichole Ingram, and Michael Ward, p. 1–21, Routledge Books in Bradbury, Alice (2020) A Critical Race Theory Framework for Education Policy Analysis: The Case of Bilingual Learners and Assessment Policy in England, Race Ethnicity and Education, 23:2, 241-260, DOI: 10.1080/13613324.2019.1599338

[8] Sadiq, Asif (2023) Diversity, Equity & Inclusion. Learning how to get it right, TEDx. Youtube, 2 March. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HR4wz1b54hw(Accessed: 26 July 2024)

[9] hooks, bell (2000) Where We Stand: Class Matters, Routledge Books, p.157-158

Realism has nothing to do with the Real. On the contrary, the Real is what realism has continually to suppress.[1]

Mark Fisher suggests capitalist realism is about naturalising a set of political determinations. Today, artistic production plays a central role in the process of capital valorisation. Therefore, it can be claimed that it is not possible for art to play a critical role, because ‘critical art’, or ‘the Real’, is always recuperated and neutralised within industry.[2]

Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello evidence how demands for autonomy, individualism, and the networked economy have transformed into new forms of control.[3] These forms of control can discriminate multi-laterally against individuals with intersectional identities. For example, political requirements of secularism present an exclusion that can reinforce negative stereotypes and a lack of cultural understanding[4] — such as the assumed stereotype that Muslim women lack autonomy[5] — and therefore religious critical value may easily be undermined by society. In Jaclyn Rekis’s essay, Religious Identity and Epistemic Injustice, Rekis suggests the University is a largely secular space which re-affirms these signifiers for value:

We can see how someone whose religion is racialized in society at large will not want to offer a distinctly religious testimony in an academic environment […] For instance, stereotypes that one is less than fully rational because of one’s race may influence how one’s interlocutor perceives one’s religious testimony too, leading this testimony also to seem less than fully rational, less credible, and thus taken less seriously than it otherwise would have been. […] [This] may reaffirm the false idea that such beliefs held by the racialized religious subject are […] not suited for academic discussion.[6]

Here, to be guided by religious belief suggests a dependence that is not compatible with notions of autonomy as power, or autonomy as cultural worth, dominant within industry.

However, as the art school is a collective space that sits outside of industry, surely it can be understood as a public space in which to be guided by practice[s] of freedom,[7] outside of the dominance of power in individual life. Chantal Mouffe defines public space as a space for ‘agnostic[8] intervention’, i.e., a battleground on which different hegemonic projects are confronted, without any possibility of final reconciliation.[9] We might understand thisin the art school as a space for safe criticality, and religious freedom.

Ghislane Leung writes —

Freedom is often conflated with autonomy, but dependence is perhaps less the incarcerator than the liberator. I am free with support, not without. […] I am as dependent as you are and this is not an issue because care exists socially, is required and reciprocated a thousand times over in a moment. That I fail to acknowledge this is the price I pay when I misattribute agency to individual life, as identity in a monological sense, in my vivid financialised disincorporated life.[10]

UAL’s limited[11] statistical data on students who align themselves with religion or faith suggests a distinct loss — in Rekis’ critical position, lack of clear data might represent a gap in knowledge that perpetuates epistemic injustice, or in Leung’s critical position, it suggests a failure of acknowledgement of education outside of capital or individual gain — if we are to come back to Fisher’s critical position, this lack of data suggests direct suppression. The University has nothing to do with the Real…

[1] Fisher, Mark (2005) October 6, 1979: Capitalism and Bipolar Disorder, K-Punk, Repeater Books, p. 433

[2] Mouffe, Chantal (2008) Art and Democracy: Art as an Agnostic Intervention in Public Space, Open 2008 / No.14 / Art as a Public Issue, p.7. Available at: https://readingpublicimage.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/mouffe_open14_p6-151.pdf (Accessed: 24 July 2024)

[3] Boltanski, Luc and Chiapello, Eve (2005) The New Spirit of Capitalism, Verso books

[4] ‘The degree of contention surrounding Islam […] and the West, are often based on lack of knowledge and understanding about each other’s lives.’ Jawad, H. (2022) Islam, Women and Sport: The Case of Visible Muslim Women. Available at: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/religionglobalsociety/2022/09/islam-women-and-sport-the-case-of-visible-muslim-women/ (Accessed: 23 July 2024)

[5] Jawad, H. (2022) Islam, Women and Sport: The Case of Visible Muslim Women. [Online]. Available at: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/religionglobalsociety/2022/09/islam-women-and-sport-the-case-of-visible-muslim-women/ 

[6] Rekis, Jaclyn (2023) Religious Identity and Epistemic Injustice: An Intersectional Account. Hypatia 38, p.786

[7] hooks, bell (1994) Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, Routledge

[8] The use of the word ‘agnostic’ here is in direct comparison to ‘agonistic’ or ‘antagonistic’ public space, that which favours dominant hegemonic communication — it is not to suggest the absence of faith or religious belief, it is to suggest the absence of a conclusion.

This understanding in the use of the word is adapted from Mouffe’s essay: Mouffe, Chantal (2008) Art and Democracy: Art as an Agnostic Intervention in Public Space, Open 2008 / No.14 / Art as a Public Issue, p.1. Available at: https://readingpublicimage.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/mouffe_open14_p6-151.pdf

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ghislaine Leung, Bosses, London/ Brussels: Divided Publishing (2023), p.1

[11] 2023/24 UAL data states that 71% of students have ‘no religion or belief’ or ‘prefer not to say’, whilst 29% of students shared that they do have ‘religion or belief’’. As Rekis notes, within the University there can be stigma in being openly religious. This pressure can be heightened even further for someone whose religion has been racialised in society, and so speaking about their religion can be uncomfortable due to the possibility it could feed existing racialized stereotypes about them.

Rekis, Jaclyn (2023) Religious Identity and Epistemic Injustice: An Intersectional Account. Hypatia 38, p.786

I am interested in the idea of ‘critical art’,[1] especially in relation to why an individual might want to attend an art school. Martha Rosler’s Culture Class, discusses whether political and socio-critical art can survive in an overheated market environment — questioning whether choosing to be an artist means aspiring to serve the rich [as the dominant economic model].[2] Following on from David Lloyd’s proposition that through its compensatory[3] qualities, the aesthetic sphere naturalises forms of life lived under the rule of property,[4] Larne Abse Gogarty writes:

I am preoccupied by the relationship between liberalism, aesthetics, and processes of racialization and domination […] What kind of art can work against this? Can art exist as a conspiracy capable of corroding that rule? [5]

Would this corrosion be equivalent to the power of being able to disappear, loudly?[6]

Christine Sum Kim is an artist who identifies as a deaf person, and as a cisgender mother, who is American, German, and has Korean parents.[7] She states:

I’m always a little bit jealous of artists who have the privilege to be misunderstood. For me, I automatically feel like I need to explain what things mean. […] I think that stems from a place of how misunderstandings can affect my rights […] navigating access, education, employment, family… [8]

Here, Kim suggests that with non-marginalised selfhood comes opportunity towards fearlessness, whilst positioning herself outwardly amongst the mechanisms of exploitation and domination that the neo-liberal debtor-creditor relationship requires of the oppressed.[9] Kim’s intersectional identity has a direct impact on her intentionality in visibility and the scale of her work.[10]

I am interested in the responsibility and potential de-humanisation put upon an artist who is ‘critical’. Again, from Culture Class:

Categories of criticality have evolved over time, but their taxonomic history is short. The naming process is itself frequently a method of recuperation, importing expressions of critique into the system being criticised, freezing [things] into academic formulas[11]

In Kimberlé Crenshaw’s theory of intersectionality, the idea of supplementing dominant (or institutional) criticality is challenged, and instead a reconstruction of what it means to be free, or socially empowered, is the desired outcome:

Implicit in certain strands of feminist and racial liberation movements is the view that the power in delineating difference need not be the power of domination; instead [it can] be the source of social empowerment and reconstruction[12]

In an undergraduate design course, academics are often asked to write course content that is geared towards employability, or [perhaps more pertinently] ‘industry expectations’. These expectations are rarely geared towards design as a tool for understanding selfhood (or indeed, the cultural landscape) that is not in direct relation to positionality in capital, or neo-liberal society.

What makes people disabled is not their disability […] it’s society. Society is what holds us back. It’s that systemic discrimination and oppression.[13]

I wonder if this particular framework re-affirms dominant social categorisation, neglecting the possibility that a design student might in fact wish to utilise ‘critical art’ to better understand and empower themselves intellectually, or socially, outside of the expectations of industry — offering choice, and the potentiality of re-construction. A refusal of the words “here I am”, that instead asks the question: by ‘being nowhere’, where are we [now] who get to / are called to / must speak?[14]

[1] Following Richard Noble and Chantal Mouffe we can distinguish four distinct ways of making critical art:

1. There is the kind of work that more or less directly engages critically with political reality.

2. Artworks exploring subject positions or identities defined by otherness, marginality, oppression, or victimization (this has been the dominant mode of making critical art in recent years: feminist art, queer art, art made by ethnic or religious minorities).

3. The type of critical art which investigates its own political condition of production and circulation.

4. Art as utopian experimentation, attempts to imagine alternative ways of living: societies or communities built around values in opposition to the ethos of late capitalism.

Noble, Richard (2003/2004) Some Provisional Remarks on Art and Politics, The Showroom Annual and Mouffe, Chantal (2008) Art and Democracy: Art as an Agnostic Intervention in Public Space, Open 2008 / No.14 / Art as a Public Issue, p.11-12. Available at: https://readingpublicimage.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/mouffe_open14_p6-151.pdf (Accessed: 24 July 2024)

[2] Rosler, Martha (2013) Culture Class, e-flux journal, Sternberg Press, p.31

[3] Here ‘compensatory’ is to be understood in the form of economic return

[4] Lloyd, David (1990) Analogies of the aesthetic: the politics of culture and the limits of materialist aesthetics, New Formations

[5] Abse Gogarty, Larne (2023) ‘Introduction’, What We Do Is Secret: Contemporary Art and the Antinomies of Conspiracy, Sternberg Press, p.22

[6] Darling, Brett (2018) The Pluralist: The Visibility Issue, the Royal College of Art Newspaper

[7] Art21 (2023) Christine Sun Kim in Friends & Strangers – Season 11 | Art21. 16 October 2020. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NpRaEDlLsI (Accessed: 23 July 2024)

[8] Ibid.

[9] Lazzarato, Maurizio (2011) The Making of the Indebted Man: An Essay on the Neoliberal Condition, Semiotext(e)

[10] Kim states that “scale = visibility — and that has the ability to shape social norms”. Art21 (2023). Christine Sun Kim in Friends & Strangers – Season 11 | Art21. 16 October 2020. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NpRaEDlLsI (Accessed: 23 July 2024)

[11] Rosler, Matha (2013) Culture Class, e-flux journal, Sternberg Press, p.30

[12] Crenshaw, Kimberlé (1990) Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color. Stanford Law Review43 (6), p.1242

[13] Adepitan, Ade for Parapride (2023) Intersectionality in Focus: Empowering Voices during UK Disability History Month 2023. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yID8_s5tjc&t=1s
(Accessed: 23 July 2024)

[14] Darling, Brett (2018) The Pluralist: The Visibility Issue, the Royal College of Art Newspaper

In 2018, I was collaborating with a writing partner called Brett Darling, often by email, sometimes by text. In December I sent him the following text message:

dear b, it is possible to speak with our heart directly. most ancient cultures know this. we can actually converse with our heart as if it were a good friend. in modern life we have become so busy with our daily affairs and thoughts that we have lost this essential art of taking time to converse with our heart. jack kornfield[1] said that, not me. but i might’ve. b, i’m reading bell hooks. b, i’m talking to my heart. b,, it’s invisible. hello, b! can you respond to the words ‘INVISIBILITY IN VISIBILITY’ for me? e x

He responded (unnervingly quickly, considering he was using a Nokia 3310):

e. re. ‘invisiblity in visibility’, could we be saying something like… to visible as to be allowed not to be? not to not exist, but to be able to disappear, loudly! to walk with the silence of the undefined is to be ‘everywhere’, a night walker of the bright day. a refusal of the words “here i am”, that rather asks the question instead, by ‘being nowhere’, where are we [now] who get to / are called to / must speak? b[2]

While researching for this unit, this response has felt prescient in suggesting the notion of being ‘able to disappear, loudly[!]’ in a post 2020 landscape. What follows uses that text message as an anchor/[an]tagonist. I also recently attended a lecture by independent curator Jessie Krisch, whose kindness in sharing her reading list has acted as the scaffolding for my bibliography.

[1] Kornfield, Jack in hooks, bell (2001) All About Love, New Visions: Harper Collins books

[2] Each of these text messages were first published in: The Pluralist: The Visibility Issue, the Royal College of Art Newspaper, December 2018

this blog is solely for exchanging developmental feedback between colleagues. its reflective aspect informs PgCert and Fellowship assessment, but it is not an official evaluation of teaching and is not intended for other internal or legal applications such as probation, disciplinary action or publishing

attached below as a word document is a review a peer’s practice, and their preparatory reflections.

(student work from session by millie cobb-stanier)

attached below as a word document is a review of my practice written by a peer, and my response to their feedback.

i arranged for both my teaching observations to take place on the same day, and thus have used the same form for both my peer and tutor observations. Lindsay Jordan (tutor) was present for a review of my practice written by a tutor, for an hour in the morning session (when students had just finished their warm-up tasks and were engaging with a lecture), and Peony Gent (peer) was present for the last hour of the afternoon session (when students were making mono-prints).

i am awaiting Lindsay’s observation report and will attach and respond to it when i receive it.

reflective blog post (IV)

The introductory session for the PGCert, lead by Lindsay Jordan, took place in a rectangular, long room, with a presentation screen on one end, and a passage for walking past rows of student desks along the long edge of the room — meaning, if Lindsay was to remain at the front of the room (where the presentation screen was located) she would be situated rather far away from students sat towards the back of the room. Acknowledging this challenge, Lindsay casually remarked that the PGCert team sometimes discuss two modes of delivery, asking:

“Will you be the sage on the stage, or the guide on the side?”

Upon encountering the word ‘sage’, I couldn’t help but think about Marshall McLuhan’s brilliant and aphoristic book, The Medium is the Massage, (1967) which is famous (in part) for the way that spelling mistakes are embraced both inside and outside the book. The book describes the influence of media on our consciousness, on our bodies, and even our relationship to knowledge:

I’ve always admired the quote, “Now all the world’s a sage,”¹ (a play on Shakespeare’s As You Like It: “all the world’s a stage”, or indeed, an extremely meta spelling mistake), as I am interested in the performative nature of acquiring, defining, and exercising wisdom. 

With this in mind, if we (the learners) are to define the word ‘sage’ in Lindsay’s question as a merely performative signifier for knowledge, I wonder if a shift in power dynamic and autonomy of learning could be achieved.  

1. McLuhan, M & Fiore, Q (1967) The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects. Penguin Books p.14 ↩︎

attached to this post as a word document is a reflective blog post (III), reflecting further on the idea of ‘the charismatic lecturer’, and expectations of parity (not performativity) in higher education in 2024, towards how a ‘both-and’ approach might be understood within my own teaching practice.

i am relying on footnotes to aid the readability of the supporting materials. if you have any trouble accessing this word document, please feel free to reach out to me on: e.searson@lcc.arts.ac.uk and i can send you a copy via email.