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CAL, Known and Unknown, 2024-25

In 2024-25 the Centre for Arts and Learning (CAL) is focusing on Known and Unknown as a research theme. Situating research in the arts and learning, we are immediately bringing into question what learning is and the approaches that can realise the knowledge we find through learning. Working with mapping processes, rhizomatic hunting and gathering, or arboreal bigger pictures, artists, students and educators gather understandings in practice and reflection. What are the difficulties with this?

Researching the many different stances regarding the positioning and value of knowledge and unknowing in the arts and learning, CAL will be hearing from speakers with divergent viewpoints and perspectives, so that our research encourages criticality and awareness of different belief systems.

Some view the empowering capacities of learning as a gradual socially constructive assemblage of ‘powerful knowledge’ – as presented by Michael Young, in which in-depth disciplinary learning is acquired in discussion with teachers and peers who have experience in the field, and in professional environments. Others, connecting with thinkers like Michel Foucault view knowledge as a gradual layering of relational discourses that have particular historical and cultural significances, with networks of lateral or hierarchical power/knowledge .

A different view is that knowledge can become too static and ‘stultifying’ – as Jacques Rancière put it. If the discoveries of others, or our own discoveries, are relied upon in the present - as identified inspirational and signature knowledges to always return to. Dennis Atkinson argues that unlearning the known can become a place of investigation, learning by making, doing and adventure. Yet do we need to ‘stay with’ the issues presented, as Donna Harraway advised, instead of moving on before resolutions are found?

Also integral, indigenous knowledges that are in themselves powerful and focused on growth with the Earth – as presented by Robin Wall Kimmerer – are brought into the arts and learning. These epistemologies hold different ways of knowing, and visionary practices.

In addition to enable the confidence to reach out into the unknown and create meaningful existences with arts practice, we could nurture the resourcefulness to find the inner expert in our own learning - as Dorothy Heathcote did; for discovery not only of artforms but of the self at the same time.

Engaging with change and plurality, these are some of the theorised positions that Centre for Arts and Learning will be researching and practicing.

Centre for Arts and Learning Events

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CAL, Known and Unknown, 2024-25

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