“The Chinatown Foray” as Sensational Pedagogy

Abstract

Thinking through affective theories by Alfred North Whitehead, Giles Deleuze, and Brian Massumi, this paper proposes an understanding of pedagogy that is sensational. To consider affective theories and their implications for educational research, I engage with a relational artwork, "The Chinatown Foray," by Torontobased artist Diane Borsato. In "The Chinatown Foray," the artist and the audience, which consisted of amateur mycologists, foodies, and a few art students, foraged through Chinatown in Manhattan, New York, to collect various mushroom species in the shops and markets, followed by a group lunch of dim sum at a local restaurant. In the paper I describe relational art and situate Borsato's practice within this paradigm. From there I contextualize the use of walking as a form of researchcreation and attend to the politics of smell in the construction of alterity. The paper concludes by way of Deleuze and Guattari's (1986) theories of the "minor," which recognizes that bodily encounters-the act of one body interacting with another body-are affective. I argue that close, critical, and deeply contextual analyses of relational art practices as sensational pedagogy advances, develops, and enhances understandings, theories, and practices of body knowledge. Moving beyond a simple binary of mind and body, a sensational pedagogy endeavors to free the base senses, like smell, from their limiting associations.

New Kids on the Block: Young People, the City and Public Pedagogies

“…This in itself immediately created a social shift in child-to-adult power dynamics, and highlights the potential that walking as an arts practice provides as a form of relational and socially engaged art 'that aims to produce new social relationships and thus new social realities' (Springgay, 2008a), or 'an aesthetic of civic engagement' (O'Donnell, 2006). Developed from this was not simply a 'sensational public pedagogy' (Ellsworth & Kruse 2010;Springgay, 2011) in which experience, affect and inter-connection featured as part of the corporeal engagement of the city, but also a symbolic negotiation of the logics that surround childhoods and adulthoods, access to the city and the mediations of learned identities.…”

Learning to be Affected in Contemporary Art

“…Her work with mushrooms and mycelium, and her collaborations with amateur mychologists, speak to movements' virtuality. In the 2008 China Town Foray, which has had a number of iterations, Borsato leads a mushroom foray through urban streets, with a particular focus on a city's Chinatown, where variations of mushroom species can be found in shops (Springgay 2012). In another fungi project Terrestrial/Celestial from 2010, amateur mychologists and astronomers were brought together for a day-long event in which they shared their field knowledge.…”

The Flâneur and Education Research

“…Some chapters resonate with the writings of Baudelaire (1964 [1863]) and Benjamin (1999aBenjamin ( , b, 2006. Others respond to contemporary artists (O'Rourke 2013) who are committed to slowing down, mindful walking, to being conscious of affect and sensation (Deleuze and Guattari 1994;Springgay 2011), to observing and photographing their experiences in the act of walking (Irwin 2006), and to critiquing the notion of flâneur from an Indigenous perspective. This collection is thus intended to be both provocative and evocative, both generative and iterative.…”

“…By specifically positioning this series to focus on movement and mobility studies, it allows for a range of disciplines, perspectives, approaches, theoretical dispositions, representations, forms and interpretations to be accommodated. The range of movements/ mobilities/temporalities that may be explored include but are not limited to concepts of the stationary, of stillness, of sitting, of walking, of mapping, of slowness, lingering, fluidity, rapidity, haste and more in all of their affective and sensorial (Springgay 2011) potentiality. Other aspects such as self-mobilisation, mobility/non-mobility, human and non-human global movement flows, diaspora, migrations, cartographies, and human geographies all apply to this series.…”