Peer Reviewed Journal Article by michelle bae-dimitriadis
Art Education, 2024
This editorial revisits four approaches to transformative education for soci... more
This editorial revisits four approaches to transformative education for social and educational change.
Art Education Journal, 2024
Studies in Art Education, 2024
Place has long been noticed, made, developed, and narrativized in favor of settler majorities' ec... more Place has long been noticed, made, developed, and narrativized in favor of settler majorities' economies and hegemonies. Disregarding Indigenous presence and land, the terror on the land continues in the form of dislocation and dispossession of Indigenous, Black, and other minoritized communities of color, along with racial segregation and alienation. Drawing on the scholarship of land-based and decolonizing education, this article provides the conceptual groundwork for a form of art education theory and practice concerned with place-based social justice and equity. Particularly, I propose land-based art inquiry as a decolonizing pedagogy that helps critically assess settler colonial ways of sharing and making place via spatial-temporal injustice and the normalization of settler colonial logics that pervade our daily lives. The art inquiry generates new and critical ways to engage with the land as a site of art and museum (educational) practice as exemplified in the three different sites-a graduate students' collaborative art-based project, a contemporary artist's praxis, and museum praxis. Graduate students' site-specific installation and contemporary artist JeeYeun Lee's mobile walking are artistic interventions to public places that critique
Journal of Studies in Art Education, 2023
International Journal of Education Through Art, 2022
US public parks are ideological sites where settler-colonial curriculum of territoriality is enac... more US public parks are ideological sites where settler-colonial curriculum of territoriality is enacted through their organization and design. However, public parks and the rhetorics of nature and democracy that often frame them are rarely problematized as White settler projects occupying the colonized land. Drawing on the scholarship of decolonial, land-based education, this article critiques the narratives of US urban parks’ undergirding settler-colonial curricula and discusses a student-developed artistic intervention executed in a local public park. The ‘Lederer Park Placards Project’ is explored as both pedagogical gesture and art-based research, which engages in settler-colonial critique through site-specific installation to surface the erasure of Indigenous realities and to divert the existing settler-colonial narratives of public places. This art-in-action is discussed as a decolonial gesture intended to disrupt the White, Eurocentric, colonial curricula embedded in US public p...
Visual Arts Research, 2021
This article provides an overview of how land-based settler colonial critique can reorient art cr... more This article provides an overview of how land-based settler colonial critique can reorient art criticism and art education to expand the scope of art and art practice to critical considerations of land politics and social justice, particularly in terms of the repatriation of Indigenous lands. In particular, land-based perspectives can help to rethink place/land by offering decolonizing methods for critiquing Western works of art that address place. Art educators’ ability to understand and critique settler colonialism in art has been hindered by Eurocentric art criticism. This article seeks to reveal settler colonial imperatives and ambitions regarding land through a critical analysis of American landscape paintings and land art. This piece further examines contemporary Indigenous artists’ site-specific works through adopting decolonial, land-based inquiry. Land-based art criticism interrupts the dominant mode of art inquiry to more comprehensively analyze art associated with place/l...
Studies in Art Education, 2020
This article introduces a mobile Global Positioning System app created by refugee girls in the Un... more This article introduces a mobile Global Positioning System app created by refugee girls in the United States as a social justice-and communityoriented media art project that provides visual and oral countermapping stories that reflect an anticolonial orientation in their presentation of the city of Buffalo, New York. Through collaborative work with refugee girls in a community media art educational setting in Buffalo, I centered our projects on challenging settler colonial geographies by presencing subaltern stories of place. I use a land-based, critical race educational approach to guide my understanding of the youths' subaltern stories of place in relation to settler colonialism. This anticolonial mobile cartographic story app highlights land pedagogy; the young refugees' palimpsest-like, subaltern stories of urban spaces, which serve as testimonies to their lived experiences; and countermapping, which challenges and rewrites the imperatives of settler cartographies.
Educational Studies, 2021
These articles help counter authoritarian and dominant narratives about minoritized populations a... more These articles help counter authoritarian and dominant narratives about minoritized populations and communities and transgress orthodoxies, bureaucratic and hierarchical procedures embedded in research practices (e.g.
Art Education, 2021
55 HOW HAS (VISUAL) LANGUAGE REINFORCED THE DISEASE OF DIS-EASE IN RACISM AGAINST ASIAN AMERICANS... more 55 HOW HAS (VISUAL) LANGUAGE REINFORCED THE DISEASE OF DIS-EASE IN RACISM AGAINST ASIAN AMERICANS? The virus of COVID-19 is no longer on single demand of physical immunity, yet ideological immunity to the virus of racial hatred. In particular, former president Trump’s rhetoricization of COVID-19 as the “Chinese Virus” has fueled xenophobic resentment toward Chinese people and their descendants and has caused a surge of racial attacks on Asian Americans. The use of linguistic personification as a marker of mythmaking has thus done more than make the unfamiliar virus more familiar—it has shaped a worldview that classifies Chinese Americans and other Asian Americans as carriers and spreaders of the virus. However, this kind of rhetoric is not new. Rather, it is a continuation of anti-Asian rhetoric from the past that symbolically dehumanizes and excludes Asian immigrants from the U.S. social and political system. In what follows, I reflect this doubly entangled anti-Asian racism with disease in relation to the (visual) rhetorical violence of Whiteness, which has long contested, exploited, and suppressed Asian immigrants’ contributions to the stolen Indigenous land known as America. In doing so, I demonstrate how, in this context, the physical disease of COVID-19 and the symbolic disease of racism have been combined to spread further dis-ease.
Journal of Social Theory in Art Education, 2020
Studies in Art Educaiton, 2016
I explore a spontaneous community art event involving pre-teen and teen refugee girls and their e... more I explore a spontaneous community art event involving pre-teen and teen refugee girls and their embodied experiences at a local café located in a Northeastern U.S. city. Their bodily encounters involved incipient actions-drifting, knitting, and wrist-tying performances-in the creation of a new space within the space of the café. Drawing on posthumanists' and new materialists' works, I engage the lived body as foci of understanding, necessitating an understanding of the body as "liberating to" rather than "liberating from." A central consideration of thing-power rather than human-power advances a framework of corporeal spatial/temporality for understanding curriculum and pedagogy. Understanding of the real, lived body informs a new direction for an art educational approach, one that offers a new materialistic agency that goes beyond the strictures of the humanist mindset. It opens up new ways of thinking about community art practice, as it organizes and reorganizes the senses.
Journal of Cultural Studies <-> Critical Methodologies, 2017
With an overview of the authors' contributions, this introduction to the special issue on girls f... more With an overview of the authors' contributions, this introduction to the special issue on girls from outer space provides a conceptual framework for bringing counter-narratives of girls from the margins, where unheard voices and movements have emerged, developed, and expanded as a way of talking back to the dominant girlhood space and discourse as well as society. Moving away from both binary and canonical lenses of girlhood that center on White middle-class girlhood, this special issue focuses on lived experiences of girls of color who exist among socioeconomically alienated spaces such as immigrant, homeless, queer, and domestically violent spaces, etc. Most of all, it delineates a conceptual revision of the notion of outsideness by shifting from simply victimized, within a deficit model, to a complex dimension of girl agency that demonstrates both limiting and expanding experiences of the girls. Drawing upon feminist insights, this conceptual work attempts to relocate outsideness in the center of girlhood studies, which pays attention to alternative methodological approaches that recover epistemological barriers of girlhood by addressing (dis)entanglement of the girl participants' minds and actions in diverse research contexts, and by disclosing the dynamic, contradictory, and complicated ideas, voices, and values from the girls' perspectives.
Visual Culture and Gender, 2018
The iconic Barbie doll and young girls’ Barbie play, in particular, is an ambiguous site where th... more The iconic Barbie doll and young girls’ Barbie play, in particular, is an ambiguous site where the distinctions between Barbie as a normative gendered object and girls’ subjective desiring and fantasizing through the doll play, collide in an act of abjection. Using Julia Kristeva’s (1982) feminist theory of abjection, we substantiate our argument with two ethnographic cases of preadolescent girls’ transgressive Barbie play, which includes homosexual enactment, gender bending, and violent acts. We analyze these acts as replacing the dominant symbolic order, or what Kristeva calls the Law of the Father, with the maternal, affective, (pre)symbolic bodily performance. Furthermore, we propose to view young girls’ Barbie play as a form of public pedagogy that offers opportunities for a productive disruption and critique of the hegemonic gender regimes.
Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education , 2015
Book Chapters by michelle bae-dimitriadis
A Love Letter to This Bridge Called My Back, 2022
A Love Letter to This Bridge Called My Back, 2022
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education
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Peer Reviewed Journal Article by michelle bae-dimitriadis
This editorial revisits four approaches to transformative education for social and educational change.
Book Chapters by michelle bae-dimitriadis
This editorial revisits four approaches to transformative education for social and educational change.