Transcultural Dialogue

Abstract

Transcultural Dialogue builds relationships, which becomes the content for a community to create collaborative art based on the group’s dialogue. As an art education professor in the United States, I began facilitating Transcultural Dialogues in 2007 with students and colleagues at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda, and at the University of Helsinki. In this chapter, I present theories, concepts, strategies, and examples of Transcultural Dialogue concerning contemporary visual culture, cultural practices in relation to particular places, and a pedagogy designed to erode assumptions, ignorance, and misunderstandings. Pedagogical strategies of Transcultural Dialogue consider positionality, subjectivity, situated knowledge, transformative learning, intra-action, speculative standpoint, and diffractive methodology. The dialogic process elicits micro-cultural views that are specific and unique (i.e., they sustain difference), yet are shared within or part of macro-cultural knowledge. The act of meaning-making from micro-cultural practices can sustain as well as change the macro-cultural beliefs. Transcultural Dialogue is conversational performative cultural critique, collaborative artmaking, and commentary surrounding artworks by those involved in Transcultural Dialogue^[1]. I have developed Transcultural Dialogue as a process that exposes systemic and environmental conditions, and approaches creativity as a social process.

[1]    This chapter is developed from my 2017 InSEA keynote as published in the InSEA 2017 proceedings and several publications (KABIITO, LIAO, MOTTER & KEIFER-BOYD, 2014; KEIFER-BOYD, 2012, 2016; PAATELA-NIEMINEN & KEIFER-BOYD, 2015) in which I, along with co-facilitators, reflected on our process in order to improve future Transcultural Dialogue projects and to study educational impacts in relationship to pedagogical goals.