The Possibility of an Alternative: Starting a Conversation Around Arts Education Conferences

By: Hamish McIntosh*

New romantics/new academics

One of the questions that has inspired me most as a young artist-scholar is “How different might things be?”

As a graduate of a dance conservatory training marred by authoritarianism, I have dedicated myself to resisting and interrupting the ‘cycle of violence’ that I experienced. I have a deep wish for difference; for an alternative. In part, my decision to pursue academia and teaching has been shaped by this very desire.

However, of my myriad assumptions in life one may be particularly obvious in the passage above. Perhaps it is a symptom of my age or naivety, but I continue to find myself over-investing in the capacity of institutions to make good on their potential for change. Moreover, I continue to over-invest in the role academic conferences might play in this.

Unpacking conferences as a site for change

Without going into too much detail, my experiences at arts education conferences have lead me to question whether our current means of conferencing are sustainable and effective.

For instance, are we actually integrating the communities we intend to work with and assist with our research into conferences? Are we attending to the environmental issues of conferencing? In what ways are we encouraging diversity across race, age, gender identity, sexuality, and class in our conferences? 

The importance of academic conferencing is widely accepted. Conferences across disciplines provide an opportunity for scholars and practitioners to gather and garner new insights into the world of research and praxis. It is a chance to share new findings, question old ones, and reconnect with friends and colleagues.

Issues with academic conferences are varied and significant though. The environmental impact of international air travel is a major issue for the academic community and underscores our contribution to the climate crisis. Academic conferences can be exclusionary by design and tradition, and often perpetuate didacticism and non-participation. Conferences further mirror the over-representation of White-male perspectives in academia, and contribute to the high-pressure and hopelessness felt by early career researchers.

Hostile terrains 

Despite these issues with conferencing, arguably the arts and arts education have never been so vital and yet so simultaneously at risk. 

In a recent guest lecture at UniArts Helsinki, Professor André Lepecki of NYU Tisch touched on why artists are so often the targets of neoliberal scorn. Lepecki argued that by targeting artists current hard-right political systems can extinguish the possibility of ‘something else’, of an alternative to now: of something better.

Lepecki drew on the case of Brazilian artist Wagner Schwartz. In his 2017 piece La Bête Schwartz lay nude on the floor of a museum and yielded his body to the audience, who were allowed to move him around the space. When video of children moving Schwartz emerged online he was branded a pedophile, and received death threats from the right and evangelical Christians in Brazil. 

In the moment of this art-making—of tenderness perhaps, of honesty and fragility—Schwartz extended “his reflection on the relationship with the Other, and the Outsider” and organised “a resolutely head-on encounter with the public, under the sign of tactility” (CND, 2018). He provided, in short, a vista for ‘something else’ to flourish.

As Lepecki went on to explain, this alternative was treated as a threat to the hegemony of the emboldened hard-right and established systems of neoliberal power. This suffocation has been mirrored in the conservative Australian government’s recent amalgamation of the Department for Communication and the Arts with the succinctly titled Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Communications. The 2015 decimation of the Australian Council for the Arts budget also continues to affect the industry and our community.

Conference ethics for a relational future

Therein, we have a double-edged sword. On one side, systems of power seek to undermine the arts and arts education to sustain the violence of the status quo; to suffocate difference. On the other, our arts education and academic community at large is troubled by a lack of diversity and endemic normativity as evidenced in conferences.

However, as I have come to hope and as Oliver and Morris (2019, p. 18) so eloquently describe,

A re-imagining of conferences is not beyond possibility, but only with further understandings of the intricacies of conferences as embodied and spatial events can change be enacted, in relation to wider institutional change.

That is, the significance of the possibility of an alternative is not only underlined by its reactivity to existing violence and power, but further by its potential to empower our arts education and research community to act and create material change.

I look to academic conferences and propose the following nine points on ethics as conversation starters. These are by no means exhaustive, but hopefully provocative enough to encourage dialogue:

  • Be specific, be explicit—How might conferences address increasingly specific issues and develop a road-map for enacting change e.g. “Arts Education and Water Conflict in the Global South” over “Arts Education and Climate Change.”

  • Make space or cede space—How might established and majoritarian academics yield or create space for minority researchers and practitioners? 

  • Champion youth leadership—How might young people be empowered in conference contexts, both in planning and execution, in a humanising way?

  • Celebrate rigorous methodologies—In what ways might we continue to broaden our understanding of research epistemologies whilst celebrating novel scholarship?

  • Foreground diversity—How might we dismantle economic and systematic barriers that prevent our conferencing spaces from being more diverse and representative of marginalised research perspectives?

  • Minimise air travel—How might we commit to less air travel and utilise video technology to protect our planet whilst remaining engaged with our community?

  • Act now—What could we be doing during a conference that might reflect material and more nuanced political change?

  • Bring someone with you—For those financially able, how might facilitating/paying for a minority member of our community to attend a conference reflect our goal of inclusivity and diversity?

  • Plan from the bottom up—How might incorporating the ‘on the ground’ community of a conference location/subject mitigate the globalist/‘ivory tower’ inclinations of the academe? How might we better involve these stakeholders?

 Again I ask, how different might things be? 

*Hamish McIntosh

Hamish McIntosh (CertDancePerf - NZSD, PGDipDanceSt - Auckland, MDanceSt - Auckland) is a queer Pākehā artist, dramaturg, and dance researcher based in Melbourne, Australia. Now working as a ballet tutor and research assistant at the University of Melbourne where he will soon commence his PhD, Hamish’s research draws on queer theory to explore queer populations and meanings in dance. Hamish is a SpringBoard and Twinning Board member of Dance and the Child International and has worked closely with members of the World Dance Alliance and the World Alliance for Arts Education. Hamish has previously been a guest writer and critic for Dance Aotearoa New Zealand and continues to review work through his self-published platform Thoughts on Dance.