El giro social de las artes y la Educación Cultural Crítica

The Esbrina Research Group — Subjectivities, Visualities and Contemporary Educational Environments (2021SGR00686) organizes the II Symposium El Giro Social de las Artes y la Educación Cultural Crítica, which will take place on September 4 and 5, 2026 at the Tàpies Museum (C/ d’Aragó, 255, 08007 Barcelona).

Presentation

Critical Cultural Literacy (CCL) is a way of renaming the world. It proposes, on the one hand, recognizing and engaging with the cultural practices and repertoires of marginalized groups, beyond the framework of a national culture and in purely textual or written forms. On the other hand, it involves adopting a conscious attitude toward the history, politics, socio-cultural systems, and forms of power that surround these groups, in order to displace discourses and identities that are unjust or dehumanizing (Shor, 1999). Thus, CCL can be understood as:

1. The questioning of hegemonic cultural narratives based on the diversity of practices that, sometimes marginalized or instrumentalized, inhabit a plural and complex society.
2. The vision of culture as a set of multimedia activities (visual, aural, electronic, gestural, spatial, etc.), linked to socio-material experiences that are crucial for the construction of meaning.
3. A way of understanding education that goes beyond the mere acquisition of knowledge about texts or cultural artifacts and includes the ability to grow reflectively in the multiplicity of cultural forms that allow one to inhabit and read the world.

Adding the word critical to the term “cultural literacy” has also been the task of the European research project Exploring and Educating Cultural literacy Through Arts (EXPECT_Art), which has been running for three years in collaboration between universities, artistic collectives, public schools and communities in six countries of the European Union: Hungary, Denmark, Slovenia, Germany, Poland, and Spain. The specific objectives of the project are: 1) To explore and diversify how art education is taught and practiced in schools; 2) To identify the difficulties and limitations in developing critical cultural literacy through art education; and 3) To use artistic and participatory research methodologies, together with teachers and students in schools, to explore the potential of critical cultural education.

In this way, EXPECT_Art has sought to combine a research and pedagogical practice grounded in Cultural and Creative Writing (CCE) with the social turn in the arts (Bishop, 2006), in which art moves from the gallery or museum to an expanded field of relational practices. Thus, the artistic medium becomes the process itself, taking place in specific contexts and seeking to generate socio-cultural links or foster the exchange of situated knowledge (Helguera, 2011).

Following the one held in May 2024, this second symposium on the social turn of the arts will serve to explore its intersection with CCL regarding the following themes in school contexts connected with other environments and communities:

• Artistic practices as the driving force behind a critical cultural education.
• Minority cultural practices and their capacity to reread/rename the world.
• Learning relationships between minority communities and schools.

Guiding questions

1. How can arts education empower students to distrust and question everything that is naturalized and normalized?
2. How can artistic practices be introduced into school curricula to articulate an education for social justice, committed to social change and destabilizing naturalized, normalized, and standardized knowledge?
3. How do marginalized cultural practices challenge representations, histories, and knowledge as socially constructed narratives?
4. How does the curricular relationship with communities serve to produce knowledge and learning that fosters estrangement, understood as a process that encourages students to critically distance themselves from hegemonic ideas and perspectives?
5. To what extent do the arts in schools assume that students are capable of engaging in mature dialogues and inquiries, and of experiencing personal and collective transformations?

Contributions

The symposium is open to presentations in the format of oral communication, poster/graphic support and artistic action.

A maximum of two proposals per person may be submitted (in any of the provided formats), and a person may be listed as an author on a maximum of three proposals. The languages ​​for submitting proposals are: Catalan, Spanish and English.

Proposals must be submitted following this model:

• Title of the proposal.
• Authors, affiliation, and email address.
• Presentation format (oral communication, poster/graphic support or artistic action).
• Proposal summary (up to 3,500 characters including spaces, not including references).
• 3 to 5 keywords.
• Mini-biography of the author person or group (up to 500 characters including spaces). 
• Motivation (Why do you want to participate? What can you contribute? What do you hope to learn?) (up to 1,000 characters including spaces)
• Optionally: Additional notes and observations (in the case of artistic actions, for example, special or space requirements).

The proposals will be sent through the following form

All proposals will be evaluated by the symposium’s scientific committee based on the relevance of the topics covered, originality, and quality. A monograph will also be published following the symposium, and proposals may be submitted for further details.

Important note: The symposium venue will have the basic elements necessary for the presentations to take place. In the case of presentations in the form of posters/graphic displays, or artistic performances, the organization cannot be held responsible for their production. Generally speaking, the artists must provide the necessary materials and support for their creation.

Key dates

Accreditation

At the end of the activity, participants who meet the attendance requirement will receive a certificate of participation issued by the Institute for Professional Development (IDP) of the University of Barcelona in their registered email. For teachers in the Department of Education and Vocational Training of the Government of Catalonia, this certificate will be directly added to their training record on the XTEC platform and can be used as accreditation to participate in the Department’s various selection processes, under the terms and conditions specified in each call for applications.

Header image by Javier Esteban on Unsplash