PhD Oral Exam - Jose Luis Cortes Santander, Art Education

When studying for a doctoral degree (PhD), candidates submit a thesis that provides a critical review of the current state of knowledge of the thesis subject as well as the student’s own contributions to the subject. The distinguishing criterion of doctoral graduate research is a significant and original contribution to knowledge.

Once accepted, the candidate presents the thesis orally. This oral exam is open to the public.

Abstract

Art education is caught in a persistent paradox: it depends on critique, experimentation, and uncertainty, but institutionally resists them. This dissertation explores that condition through three conundrums—pedagogical distortions, bureaucratic ghosts, and artistic unruliness—exposing a field suspended between transformative aspiration and institutional inertia. Its aim is to reframe art as education through (in)disciplinarity—not the rejection or submission to discipline, but its strategic reworking from within; a parenthetical condition in which learning emerges through suspension, refusal, and critical irresolution. This study examines three collective art projects—A-Positioning, The Bureau of Noncompetitive Research, and BANAL—entities that exist independently of this dissertation but are approached here from within, with the researcher participating as co-author and treating performance, collaboration, and institutional negotiation as primary sites of knowledge production. Together, they provide the ground for developing (in)disciplinarity as a situated methodology that departs from research-creation as its institutional container, yet exceeds it as an operative stance that moves within and against those conditions. Each project revealed a distinct aspect of that stance: frustration as a generative pedagogical force; slowness, collective authorship, and administrative absurdity as ways to reclaim research from competitive logic; and socially engaged art as epistemological disturbance, reorganizing what can be sensed, voiced, and negotiated by approaching extremity through the mundane. The dissertation concludes that (in)disciplinarity does not resolve art education’s structural contradictions, but prevents them from sedimenting into common sense—offering teachers, community organizers, and cultural stakeholders a site from which to reframe art as education and hold open the conditions under which learning, relation, and knowledge might otherwise become possible.