Moving at the Speed of Trust: On Teaching Social Practice

Creative practices that take place outside the gallery, that think their impact beyond the aesthetic, and that frame their participants as other than hapless dupes have increased in visibility in Canada over the past 30 years. While socially engaged art, really an umbrella term for an agglomeration of diverse forms of creative work, is not new, its designation as a distinct practice has opened up the space to foster a new canon, and a new set of theoretical concerns. Although these practices do receive a share of attention in courses dealing with contemporary art histories, it is fairly surprising that only one academic institution in the country has a dedicated program for social and community engagement in practice. In thinking through not just social practice, but also its pedagogy, I cannot help but wonder whether the program’s anomalous presence may have something to do with the differential, at times even anti-institutional, sentiments that undergird the discipline.

The social practice and community engagement (SPACE) program at Emily Carr University of Art + Design (ECUAD) was introduced by Susan Stewart in 2010, and foregrounds a combination of fieldwork, theory, and community and social engagement. Describing the Ethics of Representation course as the backbone of the program, Stewart differentiates SPACE from the typical art-school paradigm, noting that the “basic motivation is activist.” Put another way, she told me that she sees socially engaged art as starting and ending with social justice. The possibilities of this education and subsequent work become ever more urgent