Abstract

This submission explores the concept of aesthetic justice pedagogy, and advocates on behalf of it. In contrast to aesthetic injustice, which denotes any harm done to a person’s aesthetic capacities, aesthetic justice pedagogy aims at facilitating the development of students’ imagination, perception, and feelings, wherein narrative and story-making are prime locations to contest coloniality and oppression. We emphasize the practice of this philosophy, refusing to see it as only as metaphor or theory. In our attempt to build a praxis of philosophy, education, and art, we lean upon diverse thinkers such as Augusto Boal, John Dewey, Paulo Freire, and Ursula K. Le Guin. We maintain that aesthetic justice pedagogy requires spaces of liberation whereby initiates can practice, rehearse, and perform new realities and create counter-narratives through various modalities of story-writing. Boal’s Aesthetics of the Oppressed, Dewey’s understanding of dramatic rehearsal, Freire’s work in Culture Circles, and Le Guin’s critique of the father tongue combine art, re-storying, and imagination in ways that are unique to the traditional practices of arts education. We conclude by reemphasizing the liberatory ways in which practice (aesthetic work that is done alone), rehearsal (art work with others), and performance (imagination’s accomplishment) come to identify unique qualities and practices of an aesthetic justice pedagogy.