Prompt-Text/Service Reflection:"Republic of the Imagination" and "New Urban Arts"

I always try to remember the great critic Theodor Adorno's claim that the "highest form of morality is to not feel at home in one's own home." That, of course, is what great works of imagination do for us: They make us a little restless, destabilize us, question our preconceived notions and formulas. (Azar Nafisi, "The Republic of the Imagination", 2)

Quite plainly, no matter if we come from financial poverty or the spiritual poverty sometimes rampant in affluent communities, we only reproduce the life we know unless we are able to imagine a different way of living and a different role for art. (Peter Hocking, "I Wish I Had a Place Like This When I Was Growing Up: New Urban Arts and the Cultivation of Creative Practice", 51)

Both these authors speak to the ways in which art, be it visual or works of literature, challenges us to think and see differently. Hocking describes a "community of practice . . a space in which participants are known, feel safe, and understand that their voice, affinities, and questions are respected and heard" (50). When he speaks of the importance of dialogue, respect, reciprocity, and acknowledgment of the "complexity of experience" (52), you hopefully also hear echos of Paolo Freire and Howard Zinn:

For much of human history it has been the making of such sites— physically, intellectually, relationally, personally, and situationally—in response to human needs and questions that enables the kind of social change that acknowledges and enables the sanctity and dignity of us all. (56)

Nafisi starts her piece with a powerful plea for the curiosity that drives our imagination. For Nafisi our capacity to imagine is a also a source of empathy (to imagine the experience of others) and a challenge to broaden our world, to see from new perspectives:

It is this process of dehabitualization, of discovering the magic in what another person might consider mundane, that presents the world anew, washed and clear, evoking that sense of ecstasy that only a great work of the imagination can provide. (1)

If we are to create the type of social change that these and all our authors this semester urge, we need to be able to see what is difficult as well as what is joyful. If we can't see what is hard or painful, how can we change it? Both these authors speak to the way in which art is a crucial vehicle for reminding us of our shared humanity, our interconnectedness while it also presents a challenge to act.

You can use these quotes but also find other places in both pieces that resonate with you and can also illustrate through our experience thus far in this colloquium with art, each other, the MCCS students--are we creating a community of practice? Also, use this as an opportunity to start to think about the Speak Out project that we start next Friday. What do you want to say about education, about the current state of democracy, about??????????

Note: although I am not an artist, both these pieces describe what philosophy is for me--thinking and ways of seeing that allow us to wake-up, to question, to reflect--- in order to act in more just ways on a larger collective level or as an individual who doesn't shy from the complexities, contradictions, ambiguities of what it means to be human. We can always strive to be more humane, to challenge the forces that work against our shared humanity and interconnectivity.