A performative-archival practice: Visual culture and arts-based research in the Histories of Education

Melina Scheuermann, Researcher and Educator, Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Porto

How can archiving become a methodology for critical knowledge production at the intersection of arts education and histories of education? In this workshop Melina Scheuermann shares her performative-archival practice, a methodology rooted in visual culture studies, postcolonial education, arts education and creative history approaches that she developed as part of her PhD project.

Object lesson picture books were employed to teach children “how to look” across imperial Europe during the long 19th century. Melina studies how the visual pedagogy of the picture books and particularly images of “Nature” produced racial, gender, class and age difference and a universalist notion of human development.

Melina came to understand the picture books as ‘performative scores’ that trigger open-ended performances that urge reflections on how the past reverberates in the present. She responds to those scores by combining visual discourse analysis with arts-based strategies such as re-enactment and tracing. Deriving from her own practice and participatory workshops, she builds the archive that she imagines to unlearn the archive, a digital open-access archive that not only shares her research but also aims to function as research tool in itself. The term unlearning is borrowed from postcolonial scholars, describing a transformative and critical educational practice that questions “naturalised” knowledges and seeks to enable performing counter-hegemonic positions. The performative-archival practice is then driven by the question: How can we unlearn the hegemonic performances of looking that the picture books elicit?

This workshop is directed towards researchers, educators and artists who are interested in rethinking how we mobilise archives and pictures critically in research, education and arts-based production.

This work was supported by FCT - Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia, I.P., in the context of the project identified by https://doi.org/10.54499/2022.12937.BD

This is an interactive workshop so please being a laptop so that you can participate.

Biography

Melina Scheuermann (she/her) is a researcher, writer, and educator in the fields of visual culture, visual history, critical pedagogy and postcolonial studies. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Arts Education at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Porto and is affiliated with the Research Institute in Art, Design and Society (i2ADS) where her research is funded by the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (DOI: https://doi.org/10.54499/2022.12937.BD). She holds a Master’s degree in Cinema Studies from Stockholm University (Sweden) and a Bachelor's degree in Cultural Studies (Major) and Arts-Media-Aesthetic Education (Minor) from the University of Bremen (Germany).

• This is an in person event and registration is essential as places are limited.
• This event is free and open to the public, university staff and students .
• Please note, this workshop is not being recorded.