Elevating Voices
Role of Narrative Architecture in the Process of Constructing National Identity through the Gallery Spaces
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Maha Alnunan, Laura Hanks, Jonathan Hale
The King Abdullaziz Historical Center KAHC is a culturally significant project in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, in which architecture has been used to rewrite national identity. The purpose of this research is to explore the relationship among the ways in which the nation-building negotiate and construct meanings of national identity. In order to identify its construction reflects, this study is divided into two important stages which are generally in the story of content and the forms of galleries and materials. The first stage highlights the role of content, structure of the story and the historical representation conceptualized within the research framework of narrative and discourse. The concern is to identify the link between the role of architecture that emerged at some translation from language to architecture through the theory in linguistics. A second stage then involves the issues of narrative ideas and what is the way of these galleries trying to tell the story and communicate, Also, looking at traditional understandings of Saudi culture to analyse the galleries and understand the major structures that interpret the regional style of Saudi Arabia.
"Showing Our Knowing" in Post-Secondary Contexts
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Sherry Martens, Cassandra Dam
Taking up two distinct but inter-related post-secondary institutions we uncover an origin story, made in Canada, whose legacy continues in elementary and high schools across Canada, and has found new possibilities in pedagogical approaches in post-secondary. Using personal experiences, documented outcomes, and interpretive qualitative research, this paper explores post-secondary opportunities to integrate learning through the arts and reveals hidden and taken-for-granted learning strategies for students in two distinct Bachelor programmes: Bachelor of Fine Art and Bachelor of Education (After) Degree. Both authors integrate artistic opportunities into learning and evaluative moments in College and University degree courses. We share longitudinal, qualitative research with exemplars for k-12 as well as explore experiences of undergraduate and graduate uses of the arts as vehicles for advance learning.
Emerging Street Galleries in East and Southeast Asia: Challenges and Contingencies of Transcultural Practices
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Minna Valjakka
Current research on participatory art continues to focus on established artists and art collectives while new forms of participatory agencies and aesthetic strategies are emerging from contemporary graffiti and street art scenes around the world. These new initiatives take the streets and local neighbourhoods both as the beginning and the end of their practices: they often ignore institutional and aesthetic paradigms grounded in contemporary art, and defy prevailing methodological and theoretical frameworks. What marks these initiatives are more organic site-responsiveness and spontaneous collaboration between people from various professional backgrounds. This involves new theoretical challenges, which require interdisciplinary approaches. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in East and Southeast Asia since 2012, this paper aims to indicate the growing potential of artistic and creative grassroots initiatives in urban public space. Through a critical analysis of Micro Galleries, a Hong Kong-based non-profit organization, I seek to delineate the disparate methods of participation, intersubjective exchange, and aesthetic strategies. Official cultural exchange programs celebrate international artists’ collaborations with local neighbourhoods as a way of invigorating communities, but transcultural collaboration is seldom unproblematic. Criticisms of a short-term engagement that results in diverging the attention away from the social issues are often both justified and partly short-sighted: in many street initiatives the main aim is not the immediate solution of a social problem. Rather, the goal is to build up solidarity across national borders, to challenge the dominating norms of spectacular, and while doing so, to claim space for subjectivities that can confront the spatio-aesthetic conventions.
Building an Identity through Arts Education
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Brad Lister
When examined through social identity theory, there is a clear link between participation in the arts and identity development, particularly during adolescence. Central to this theory is the idea that we are all members of various and overlapping social groups. The idea of in-groups and out-groups, and the emotional need to be included thus play heavily into decisions for participation in the arts. Social identity theory suggests that students participate, and continue to participate, out of a desire for acceptance and as a result of their identity. Psychologist Robert Cialdini claimed that once we make a decision to participate it becomes a part of who we are. This paper addresses the primary role that the arts can have in cultivating and nurturing identity in adolescents.
