Anniina Suominen
A textual/visual/video-based wandering composition, part 2a &2b
The proposed presentation explores a part #2 of a larger project that was originally built on four textual/visual segments. The project aims at exploring evolving sense of self as well as learning and understanding at specific contexts or in relation to the temporary collisions of knowledge, place and artistic inquiry. The project responds to the call for pedagogical and artistic intervention through the notion of radical availability, however the focus of the project is inverted (with the understanding that radical availability entails a notion/practice of activism and social responsibility). The artistically-driven inquiry utilized in this project (or arts-based -, holistic -, living -, a/r/tographic -, and autoethnographic inquiry) and conceptualized as a methodological and epistemological framework calls for attentive (re)search thus serving the goal of public pedagogy. Also, the projects aims to further explore the possibilities for philosophically and artistically driven inquiry in the context of ethical and political tension. Each presented segment approaches the topic from an altered theoretical, conceptual perspective and employs specific visual and/or video-based material. The focus of this presentation is to explore how one’s desire to orient and navigate in relation to place(s) as well as one’s ability to form subjectivities and positionalities is a matter of equity and social justice. The presentation uses methods and concepts such as critical/emotional/activist cartography, critical visual methods for research, and relational autobiography as frameworks to explore visual/material urban decay, transcendental places, disgrace, rituals, and death.
The presenter proposes that the pedagogical significance of such artistic and place-incident-specific research is to bring attentiveness to learners perceptions, experiences, and notions of place/space as well as how these impact learning with/through/within arts.
Bio
Dr. Anniina Suominen, born in Helsinki, Finland in 1973, is a citizen of both the United States and Finland and she has completed degrees and worked in both countries. She earned her BA/MA from the University of Arts and Design Helsinki in 1999 and her Ph.D. in Art Education from The Ohio Sate University in 2003. Since then, she has worked for Kent State and Florida Sate Universities in the U.S. She is currently an Associate Professor of Art Pedagogy in the Department of Art at the School of Arts, Design and Architecture at Aalto University. For the past decade and half Dr. Suominen has shared her time between the two countries navigating and negotiating their landscapes, socio-cultural traditions, and institutional differences. Her simultaneous attachment to both of these geographical places has shaped her work as a scholar and an art educator. The themes she works with are (non)contextual identities, learning in relation to place and others, gendered identities, and environmental art education, diversity art education, and visual/artistic methodologies.