Educating for Social Change Through Art: A Personal Reckoning

The state of the world keeps me up at night, questioning my role as a social justice educator. I think with, through, and around what social change means. Reflecting on my practice, I have followed Western/colonial research and educational methodologies, knowing that they need to be challenged but often being unable to do so. I make present this living in contradiction in this personal narrative, a research methodology practiced for generations by people in the global south and by marginalized people in the United States. It is a reckoning of my work as a researcher, teacher, activist, and director of programs in the academic industrial complex. My desire for a decolonial option in art education requires me to interrogate its classificatory lenses. I explore social optics, drawing on examples through three lenses: art as inherently progressive; the interrelationship between visibility and invisibility; and artistic activism for organizing and building solidarity.