On 8 April, NOG PhD Nike Romano will defend her thesis Reconfiguring a History of Art and Design Curriculum in a South African University of Technology. Becoming-With Critical Arts-Based Pedagogical Encounters.
In her dissertation, Nike explores the question of how critical-arts based pedagogies can be used to reconfigure an art history curriculum. Using a diffractive methodological approach that generates differences within, which are perceived as affirmative rather than oppositional, the inquiry further explores how critical arts-based pedagogies might disrupt the hegemonic canon of Western art history. The thesis also investigates how to build relationships of solidarity and trust in classroom encounters in order to make a difference that matters. Drawing on feminist new materialist, critical posthumanist perspectives, care ethics studies and postphilosophies scholarship, her thesis explores the novel contributions of critical-arts based pedagogies to socially just academic practices in South African higher education in order to challenge coloniality. Her intervention aims at showing how critical arts-based pedagogies play an important role in critiquing issues of inclusion, exclusion and assimilation within contemporary academic contexts. In summary, the thesis argues that in foregrounding students’ “non-dominant” subjectivities, and situating them as producers of knowledge, their artworkings and knowledge-practices have the potential to disrupt hegemonic discourses.
Details PhD Defense
Date: Friday April 8, 2022
Time: 14.15 – 15.15
Location: Due to Covid-19 the PhD defense is hybrid. On location by invitation only. Follow this link to attend the livestream.
Title: Reconfiguring a History of Art and Design Curriculum in a South African University of Technology. Becoming-With Critical Arts-Based Pedagogical Encounters.
Supervisors: Dr. Kathrin C. Thiele (Utrecht University) and Prof. Vivienne Bozalek (University of the Western Cape)
