Engaging in justice-oriented art education practice and research can be exhausting. Tackling systemic and institutional racism, patriarchy, capitalism, heterosexism, disability, and power is an overwhelming task. Such work often results in intangible, but nevertheless salient violence against one’s psyche. Because art educators who are committed to justice work have the responsibility to identify, research, analyze and destabilize inequities on a daily basis, they re-inflict trauma and psychological violence on themselves over and over again. Thus, oftentimes, art education scholars who write about their justice-oriented work cite feelings of rage, defeat, perplexity, anguish, and fatigue (See Acuff, 2018; Acuff, Lopez & Wilson, 2019; Cosier, 2019; Spillane, 2016). There is another side to critical justice work that is rarely written about in art education: pleasure.
The Journal of Cultural Research in Art Education seeks papers that center pleasure in art activism and justice-oriented art education. Recent scholarship from disciplines as wide-ranging as women of color feminisms, sociology, and psychology explores the politics of pleasure and its relationship to justice work. It suggests that pleasure, as well as joy, strength, healing, community-building, allyship, and kinship result when futuristic worldmaking is part of disrupting inequities. Cooper (2018) stresses this point. She argues, “what you build is infinitely more important than what you tear down” (p. 275) and finding joy in the midst of social justice projects is “critical to reinvigorating our capacity for new visions” (p. 275). In her investigation of pleasure activism, Adrienne Maree Brown (2019) finds that “our radical imagination is a tool for decolonization, for reclaiming our right to shape our lived reality” (p. 126). How might activism be different if it were to center happiness and healing? What political, experimental, and self-determined narratives of pleasure within activism and everyday living have yet to be told?
The co-editors of this mini-theme invite essays, research and creative submissions that speak to the new (or newly found) spaces (physical, mental and emotional) that have been built (or imagined) for each other (especially marginalized groups) to thrive. We are especially interested in narratives that describe how ancestral and Indigenous practices and strategies inform the construction of these sites of refuge.