In this article, we describe Food Landscapes, an interdisciplinary program involving youth who live in an urban community identified as a food desert. Food Landscapes combined socially engaged art-making, cooking, community engagement, and community service to open dialogue with youth about food justice and equity, the meaning of community, and the formation of meaningful relationships between youth and community members who have disabilities. We describe the program and discuss the theory and model bases for the program and lessons learned during program implementation.
US public parks are ideological sites where settler-colonial curriculum of territoriality is enacted through their organization and design. However, public parks and the rhetorics of nature and democracy that often frame them are rarely problematized as White settler projects occupying the colonized land. Drawing on the scholarship of decolonial, land-based education, this article critiques the narratives of US urban parks’ undergirding settler-colonial curricula and discusses a student-developed artistic intervention executed in a local public park. The ‘Lederer Park Placards Project’ is explored as both pedagogical gesture and art-based research, which engages in settler-colonial critique through site-specific installation to surface the erasure of Indigenous realities and to divert the existing settler-colonial narratives of public places. This art-in-action is discussed as a decolonial gesture intended to disrupt the White, Eurocentric, colonial curricula embedded in US public parks.
This paper summarizes the methods and outcomes of my dissertation inquiry, which examined the potential that critical perspectives on digital placemaking practices may hold for art teaching with digital materials. Within this study, placemaking is the (often, but not always, intentional) shaping of the material qualities of a place. The study described in this paper examined how critical sensitivity to the material qualities of digital places (i.e. the actions and sensations places invite and inhibit) and critical sensitivity to the colonial ideologies digital places often materially enact and habituate, may inform the crafting of arts curricula as places, and inform youth artists’ crafting of digital places. Drawing on theories of digital materialism, curricula as digital places of learning, and critical and anticolonial framings of digital placemaking, the study summarized in this article suggests that habituating critical sensitivity to the material qualities of digital places is a viable approach to addressing ideologically-laden material qualities of the digital. The study also suggests that approaching curriculum development with critical sensitivity as an act of placemaking is a viable and valuable approach to navigating tension between structure and open-endedness in curricular design, and to attending to the ideologically-laden material qualities of curricular places.
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