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Agency and Social Construction: Practice of the Self in Art and Design
Author(s) -
Matthews Miranda
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
international journal of art and design education
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.312
H-Index - 25
eISSN - 1476-8070
pISSN - 1476-8062
DOI - 10.1111/jade.12186
Subject(s) - agency (philosophy) , sociology , normative , curriculum , constructive , the arts , pedagogy , diversity (politics) , social practice , resistance (ecology) , relation (database) , representation (politics) , subject (documents) , epistemology , social science , visual arts , political science , computer science , art , process (computing) , database , performance art , philosophy , anthropology , ecology , biology , operating system , art history , library science , law , politics
Learning in the arts has the potential to be a co‐constructive means of inquiry for students, which enables experience of the self in relation to practice. This research explores a practice‐based investigation of agency as self‐definition, amid normative social constructions of the subject. The focus for data analysis is a project taught to BTEC Level 2 Art and Design students in a deprived area of North London (2010–12). A dialogue is presented between the implications for Sartre's theory of free‐will and a Foucauldian critique of social construction. Applications for this comparative theory are discussed here as a form of resistance to the compression of learning identities in art and design, and across the curriculum. This is an approach which encourages emancipated self‐representation, acknowledging cultural diversity, for a discursive environment viable at all levels of study. In exploring the data, a positioning of free‐will with social responsibility is identified as an inclusive forum for creative understanding, and the tolerance of difference.