NAFAE ANNUAL CONFERENCE 2025 Feral Art School, Hull Friday 25th April 2025
Culture Co-operative: Moments, Spaces, and Alternatives for Art and Cultures of Learning
Call For Contributions. Deadline: 3rd March 2025 and Confirmation: 17th March 2025
Context
The themes of this conference follow on from those of the 2024 NAFAE Conference: The Art of Resistance (UCA Canterbury), and the arguments of the recent book Cooperative Education, Politics, and Art: Creative, Critical, and Community Resistance to Corporate Higher Education (Hudson-Miles and Goodman eds 2024). Herein, educators from both mainstream and alternative art schools issued a variety of creative, political, and pedagogical challenges to the current neoliberal HE paradigm. Art educators recognise that the arts are a force for creating engaged citizenship and civic agency. Beyond the conferment of diplomas, art schools embody this sociocultural engagement whilst also offering wider benefits to local wellbeing, regional innovation, community building, and urban regeneration (Crossick and Kaszynska 2016). Yet, incremental ‘financialisation, commodification, and marketisation’ (McGettigan 2013) of higher education has made art education into an increasingly corporate endeavour. Here, creativity, cultural value, and social justice cede to managerial realism and instrumental notions of value for money. This has made the political, artistic, and pedagogical critique of art schools more urgent. In various ways, protest has always been the substance of art education. The cooperative education projects and community-based alternative art schools, as discussed within Hudson-Miles and Goodman (2024) embody this critique, importantly including this year’s host venue, The Feral Art School.
This year’s conference looks at a culture of co-operation between mainstream and alternative art schools, and other partners, to consider what this looks like now and how it could be in the future. We are looking for conference contributions that address the moments, spaces, and alternatives for art and cultures of learning. By doing so the aim is to question and speculate on whether a counter hegemonic alliance between mainstream and alternative art schools is possible? If so, what would be the terms of reference? Or do the embedded corporatisation/marketing structures risk co-opting the language of subversion/refusal/critique (Punk/Guerilla Girls) and by extension bluewashing and greenwashing programme identities? What would be the key research questions? What policies would need reforming? What discourses need challenging? What foundations require deterritorializing (Deleuze and Guattari 1988)?
Our gathering at Feral Art School this year is a chance to unite initiatives and share stories of resilience, creativity, active critique and positive actions. Alongside proposals, the conference will include invited speakers: sociologist, historian and radical and co-operative education expert practitioner, Professor Cilla Ross and Alice Woodhouse: originator and co-ordinator of From the Foundations and creator of the Joe Woodhouse archive.
Points of focus for contributions:
Some issues that contributions might address are, but not limited to:
Moments:
· What are the persistent barriers to (HE) art education?
· Changes in learner attitudes caused by a ‘pedagogy of debt’ (Williams in Edu-Factory Collective 2009).
· Hidden inequalities in HE.
Spaces:
· Urban renewal through creative placemaking.
· The employability paradigm vis à vis modest graduate employability and widely reported skills deficits.
· The loss of the traditional art school identity.
· What spaces make for good art schools – future thinking.
Alternatives:
· What good practice is already happening between mainstream and alternative art schools?
· What is the ‘cultural value’ (Crossick and Kaszynska 2016) of art education – what ‘else’ does it offer?
· Connecting alternative and mainstream HE to industry.
· What is the future (alternative) art school?
Proposals:
Proposals should be no more than 500 words and should include your name, email address and organisation or situation, along with the title of the proposed presentation, paper or provocation. All proposals will be peer reviewed.
Proposals for contributions should be submitted to: admin@nafae.org.uk no later than Monday 3rd March 2025 , 23:59.
The decision on contributions for our next NAFAE conference will be communicated to the participants by 17th March 2025.
To submit a proposal for contributions, you must be a NAFAE member. Further information is available on the NAFAE wesbite.