Groundwork Gallery: A New Materialist Analysis of Arts-based Community Programming for the Building of Sociopolitical Consciousness

Abstract

My thesis is an attempt at bridging community programming with broader anti-imperialist pedagogy in addition to academia. I use a New Materialist lens to evaluate my community project, Groundwork Gallery, which provided arts-based anti-imperial education to high school students from marginalized backgrounds. I received a grant from the city of Kitchener and used this to run a six week program biweekly. Students were mentored by six young adults from various artistic fields as they worked on creating their own pieces for an installation held at the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery. As an educator and anti-imperialist, the project was informed by Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, to create a site for learning guided by the oppressed and a desire for liberation through the process of praxis: action and reflection in tandem. As both researcher and program lead, I was drawn to the way the multiple networks overlapped at the workshops, that they acted as sites for community development, anti-imperialist education and research. Using a New Materialist lens I address the ways various networks intersect and overlap to position the program as not only informed by the research process but created by the overlap of academia with the broader community. The reflective process created by the data collection required for my thesis informed not only my own experience with the workshops but that of the participants as well, enhancing the action-reflection dialectic required for Freire’s notion of true praxis. I argue that the overlap of the research assemblage and the workshop assemblage created a new site that enhanced the liberatory capacity of the space. I begin with an introduction on the theoretical background of both the project and the New Materialist lens used to assess the project. I then offer three student case studies, presenting their interview responses with my own reflections and their final pieces. I conclude by summarizing participant responses in interviews and focus groups in tandem, again, with my own reflections, before providing insight into the ways community programming and research can both be enhanced by acting as a joint entity rather than separate in community-based research. Programming run by researchers has enhanced capacity for participants as well as researchers by providing stronger connections with participants and subsequently an enhanced capacity for data-collection and insight, rather than the fly-on-the-wall approach that is typically employed.