Dear Kate,
Many thanks for this highly informative post. As I am currently preparing a talk on "knowledge production" and exhibiting research in the museum (to be held in dialogue with Shuddhabrata Sengupta from Raqs Media Collective at MMK at Frankfurt this Thursday - http://www.mmk-frankfurt.de/de/vermittlung/veranstaltungen/), it arrived most timely.
Concerning Bruno Latour's école d'art politique one can retrieve more information from betonsalon's site:
http://www.betonsalon.net/spip.php?article218&lang=en
"Sciences Po School of Political Arts
Opening scheduled in 2010. Founded by Bruno Latour and Valérie Pihet
“This school is not about science, nor arts, nor politics. No matter the initial calling — research, politics, the arts — the task lies in front of these disciplines, it does not belong to any of them in advance. This is why we will be able to host so many different professions and professionals: what they already know is far less important to us than the trajectory that we will effect with them. We will not join science, art and politics together but rather dissemble them first and, unfamiliar and renewed, take them up again afterwards, but differently.” BRUNO LATOUR, Director of The School of Political Arts
The School of Political Arts is the first course of its kind: combining the social sciences, humanities, and the arts broadly considered, breaking down disciplinary barriers, and overcoming the artificial divide between the arts and the sciences, between the academic and the professional. The School is open to young professionals from around the world—academics, artists, architects, designers, curators, journalists, entrepreneurs, etc.—seeking to hone their skill set, advance their academic expertise, or even actively reassess their careers. The school’s aim is to provide artists with a high-level training in the social sciences (methods for empirical inquiry), and, conversely, to confront social scientists and public or private sector professionals with the qualities and methodologies of the arts. These two fields will not be studied side by side; but rather will converge through teaching experiments and an innovative curriculum grounded in common objects of study. The public sphere will be taken as the focal point of this convergence. For, indeed, the question at the heart of this project is the crisis of representation (in the largest possible sense). This crisis can only be overcome by associating three practices of representation that have as yet been relatively separated: political representation, scientific representation, and aesthetic representation. The School’s pedagogical program is grounded in project development and production. Participants will have to work in groups on a specific project throughout the year, with a particular emphasis on fieldwork. A considerable number of the proposed courses will be in direct resonance with these projects; the remaining teachings will provide core curricular knowledge in keeping with the spirit of the school.
The main teaching body will be decisively international, composed of renowned artists, social scientists, art historians, and new media theorists, etc. Their contributions can take on a variety of formats and tempos (periodic or regular teachings, from a one hour master class to an entire trimester’s coursework)."
Certainly another instance of the pedagogical turn in the arts, complete with the PR lingo of inter/transdisciplinary confrontation/convergence/experiments and the notorious urge "to work in groups".
All best,
Tom
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