AG Archives

Teaching with Art for History and Religious Education

In an age where our emerging global society is increasingly visual, Teaching with Art for History and Religious Education invites a fresh approach to the use of artwork and other visual materials when teaching about religion, history and the stories of art. Visual sources can be illuminating, paradoxical, subversive and disruptive; they can stimulate new ways of thinking about how we understand the past, faith and belief, and what this means for us in the present.

Drawing on new research and practice in schools, museums, galleries and public spaces, the book explores generative ways that visual sources are experienced by young people and educators, as routes for investigating contested pasts, truth claims and traditions, or as provocations and protest. Running through the book is an exploration of theory and practice for using art in education and its potential for prompting interdisciplinary approaches to both RE and history. A ‘manifesto for using art in the curriculum’ offers principles for how art can act as a key pivot for student learning, and a section on the ethics of teaching with images guides teachers through tricky conversations. Ultimately, the book invites educators to use visual sources with young people not as mere adjuncts to text, but as unique, rich, complex, engaging and distinct forms of knowledge in their own right.

Lockdown Cultures

Lockdown Cultures is both a cultural response to our extraordinary times and a manifesto for the arts and humanities and their role in our post-pandemic society.

This book offers a unique response to the question of how the humanities commented on and were impacted by one of the dominant crises of our times: the Covid-19 pandemic. While the role of engineers, epidemiologists and, of course, medics is assumed, Lockdown Cultures illustrates some of the ways in which the humanities understood and analysed 2020–21, the year of lockdown and plague. Though the impulse behind the book was topical, underpinning the richly varied and individual essays is a lasting concern with the value of the humanities in the twenty-first century. Each contributor approaches this differently but there are two dominant strands: how art and culture can help us understand the Covid crisis; and how the value of the humanities can be demonstrated by engaging with cultural products from the past.

The result is a book that serves as testament to the humanities’ reinvigorated and reforged sense of identity, from the perspective of UCL and one of the leading arts and humanities faculties in the world. It bears witness to a globally impactful event while showcasing interdisciplinary thinking and examining how the pandemic has changed how we read, watch, write and educate. More than thirty individual contributions collectively reassert the importance of the arts and humanities for contemporary society.

Decolonizing Science in Latin American Art

Projects that bring the ‘hard’ sciences into art are increasingly being exhibited in galleries and museums across the world. In a surge of publications on the subject, few focus on regions beyond Europe and the Anglophone world. Decolonizing Science in Latin American Art assembles a new corpus of art-science projects by Latin American artists, ranging from big-budget collaborations with NASA and MIT to homegrown experiments in artists’ kitchens.

While they draw on recent scientific research, these art projects also ‘decolonize’ science. If increasing knowledge of the natural world has often gone hand-in-hand with our objectification and exploitation of it, the artists studied here emphasize the subjectivity and intelligence of other species, staging new forms of collaboration and co-creativity beyond the human. They design technologies that work with organic processes to promote the health of ecosystems, and seek alternatives to the logics of extractivism and monoculture farming that have caused extensive ecological damage in Latin America. They develop do-it-yourself, open-source, commons-based practices for sharing creative and intellectual property. They establish critical dialogues between Western science and indigenous thought, reconnecting a disembedded, abstracted form of knowledge with the cultural, social, spiritual, and ethical spheres of experience from which it has often been excluded.

Decolonizing Science in Latin American Art interrogates how artistic practices may communicate, extend, supplement, and challenge scientific ideas. At the same time, it explores broader questions in the field of art, including the relationship between knowledge, care, and curation; nonhuman agency; art and utility; and changing approaches to participation. It also highlights important contributions by Latin American thinkers to themes of global significance, including the Anthropocene, climate change and environmental justice.