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Cuestiones Pedagógicas, 1(34), 2025, 31-46

Adult education and the aesthetic turn:
(Re)Imagining for a troubled world

La educación de adultos y el giro
estético: (Re)imaginando un mundo en problemas

Darlene E. Clover
University of Victoria (Canada)

clover@uvic.ca

Sema Kaya
University of Victoria (Canada)

semakayaoman@gmail.com

Abstract: Resumen:
We live in a deeply troubled world of global
patriarchal capitalism that has put lives in peril
and made critical adult education work
extremely challenging. Grounded in theories
of the imagination and the need for a different
imaginary, we explore the aesthetic turn in
adult education, and specifically how arts-
based and creative approaches are being
mobilised by adult educators in Canada and
across the globe to address social issues and
(re)imagine who people are and what they are
able to see, hear and know. We concentrate
on varied examples of work with marginalised
populations in diverse settings and institutions
including communities, museums, libraries
and universities. We explore how aesthetic
practices reshape perception, disrupt
silences, look back to think forward, dislodge
fixities of commonsense, encourage cultural
democracy and democratise culture. By
exploring a diversity of practices and
locations, we illustrate the range and scope of
aesthetic pedagogical practices and
emphases. While aesthetic educational work
cannot change the world alone, we argue that
it is upholding the critical social purpose of our

Vivimos en un mundo profundamente
perturbado por el capitalismo patriarcal global
que ha puesto vidas en peligro y ha hecho que
el trabajo crítico de educación de adultos sea
extremadamente difícil. Basándonos en las
teorías de la imaginación y la necesidad de un
imaginario diferente, exploramos el giro estético
en la educación de adultos y, concretamente,
cómo los educadores de adultos de Canadá y
de todo el mundo están movilizando enfoques
creativos y basados en las artes para abordar
cuestiones sociales y (re)imaginar quiénes son
las personas y qué pueden ver, oír y conocer.
Nos centramos en diversos ejemplos de trabajo
con poblaciones marginadas en distintos
entornos e instituciones, como comunidades,
museos, bibliotecas y universidades.
Exploramos cómo las prácticas estéticas
reconfiguran la percepción, interrumpen los
silencios, miran hacia atrás para pensar en el
futuro, desalojan las fijaciones del sentido
común, fomentan la democracia cultural y
democratizan la cultura. Al explorar una
diversidad de prácticas y lugares, ilustramos la
variedad y el alcance de las prácticas y los
énfasis pedagógicos estéticos. Aunque el

Recibido: 12/02/2025 | Revisado: 14/02/2025 | Aceptado: 01/03/2025 |
Online First: 01/06/2025 | Publicado: 30/06/2025

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Darlene Clover | Sema Kaya

field by encouraging new competencies of
seeing, knowing, identifying, visualising,
historicising and democratising in the interests
of a just world for all.

Keywords: aesthetic turn, imagination,
(re)imagining, arts-based practices, culture,
democracy

trabajo educativo estético no puede cambiar el
mundo por sí solo, sostenemos que defiende el
propósito social crítico de nuestro campo al
fomentar nuevas competencias para ver,
conocer, identificar, visualizar, historizar y
democratizar en aras de un mundo justo para
todos.

Palabras Claves: giro estético, imaginación,
(re)imaginar, prácticas basadas en las artes,
cultura, democracia

Introduction

We live in a deeply troubled world. Global patriarchal capitalism has put the
entire life support system peril. It has reduced democracy and collectivism, given
unfettered licence to racism, misogyny, sexism, xenophobia and neocolonialism, and
manufactured large-scale poverty and violence. This colossal failure of the imagination
has nearly disappeared truth and analogue reality under a maelstrom of intolerance,
greed, and a technical rationality of innovation and artificiality and hampered our
efforts to assist people to develop the critical competencies required to change course.
For Haiven and Khashnabish (2014) if there was ever a need for the imagination “it is
now” (p. 3). Without the opportunity to imagine this world differently, people are left to
the self-serving dreams of the powerful and in danger of retreating into a fatalist,
immobilist state of acceptance. Capitalist ideology as failure of the imagination begs
for opportunities to reimagine together who we were and who we are and to become
co-creators in setting the directions for how we can be seen and who we might
become. For Alder (2006) it begs for art, because “art, after all, is about rearranging
us, creating surprising juxtapositions, emotional openings, startling presences” (p.
490).

Our article focusses on an important global response to this failure of the
imagination – what Wildermeesch (2019) called ‘the aesthetic turn’ in adult education.
This ‘turn’ includes the mobilisation of arts-based and creative approaches as well as
an emphasis on what people are able, allowed or being made to see, hear and know
about themselves, each other and the world. I (Darlene) have played an active role in
the aesthetic turn, beginning with my work in the 1990s with International Council for
Adult Education (ICAE) in Toronto and then as an activist feminist scholar at the
University of Victoria. I have evaluated community projects, facilitated workshops,
taught courses, published widely, created zines and visual essays and co-produced
artworks and exhibitions. I have studied the visual storytelling pedagogies of
museums. This work has given me what feminists Gardner and Gray (2017) call a
‘view from somewhere’ which I bring to this article.

My view from somewhere concurs with scholars such as Adorno (1997) and
McCormack (2021) that art and aesthetics are neither inherently nor universally good.
They have been used as tools of patriarchal power, sexism, colonisation, racism,
social and cultural exclusion, nationalist propaganda and capitalist enterprise.
Museums as public educational institutions have played a critical role in this although

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my view from somewhere also shows me that change is afoot (e.g., Clover, 2024). My
view from somewhere further tells me that although the aesthetic turn is powerful, it is
not powerful enough to undo centuries of destruction. Borrowing from feminist Olufemi
(2019), turns are only as effective as we make them. And what we see being made in
the aesthetic turn, and explore in this article, is a wielding of the imagination to
challenge unjust power relations and expose how they are produced and to encourage
new and different ways of seeing and knowing as resistance, agency and renewal.

We begin this article with a discussion of the imagination. Our discussions are
not meant to be exhaustive but to illustrate how scholars are theorising and positioning
the imagination as a critical cognitive, affective and visual force. We then explore
examples of arts-based and aesthetic adult education work with different marginalised
populations and in diverse locations including communities, museums, libraries, and
universities and how they mobilise the imagination. As this work is expansive, we
concentrate on aesthetic practices that address key competencies of concern to adult
educators: (re)shaping perception, disrupting silences, looking back to think forward,
dislodging fixities of commonsense, encouraging cultural democracy and
democratising culture. By exploring distinctive settings, practices and emphases, we
draw attention to the diversity and range of aesthetic pedagogical work and the
contributions it makes to the critical social purpose of our field. In essence, the
aesthetic turn not only helps to carry people through troubling terrain but encourages
competencies of imagining and reimagining, seeing, knowing, identifying, being,
remembering and working together in the interests of a more just and dignified world.

The imagination and imagining

For feminist Olufemi (2019) the critical question of how we think about the world
“remains one of the most important” (p. 8). So too are questions of how we can “to
reimagine the world we live and [work] towards a liberating future for all” (p. 6) and just
where “we begin to reimagine?” (p. 6)?. An obvious question for us was: What is the
imagination and reimagining? Scholars provide a number of theories which respond
to these queries and lie at the heart of the aesthetic turn as our examples that follow
will show.

The imagination is both “an individual possession” that everyone has and
therefore, can be tapped into and a “collective process”, something we do together
(Haiven & Khashnabish, 2014, p. 2). Sarbin and Juhasz (1970) outline two discrete
processes of the imagination. The first is forming pictures – the process of imaging --
and the second is creative innovations - the process of imagining or making. While
drawing on the individual imagination if vital to any efforts for change, Graeber (2011)
argues that it is the collective process of imagining that holds the promise of ‘possibility’
because it is this ‘collective dream machine’ that gives us alternative futures and
enables everyone to flourish.

Riceour (1979) argues that what is most critical to understand about the
imagination is that it is a ‘cognitive power’, a way of thinking embedded in cultural
meaning and power, that has two other distinctions. The first is the ‘reproductive’

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imagination which relies on memory and mimesis (representation). Remembering is a
critical act because it aids “the organisation of social and cultural life by endowing [it]
with meaning, a communicative currency” (Pickering, 2006, p. 176). Representation is
always a matter of power – the power of seeing, hearing and believing. Ricoeur’s
(1979) second idea is the productive imagination which he positions as generative.
Similar to Sarbin and Juhasz’s (1970) idea of creative innovation, the productive
imagination generates new ideas by grasping together multiple and scattered pieces,
disparate and complex ideas and integrating them into intelligible significations.

Building on this, Whitton (2018) identifies five key types of knowledge as
imagination. The first is as factual, what we imagine and make as fact or truth. The
second is conceptual - how we perceive ourselves and the world around us. The third
is procedural which includes processes or acts of making. The fourth form of
imagination as knowledge is metacognitive which is intentional and “implies the
agency of the learner” (p. 6). This conceptualisation of the imagination for Graeber
(2011) has “real effects on the material world” and is always changing and adapting
(p. 53). Finally, Whitton (2018) positions the imagination as ‘affective knowledge’. This
includes inquisitiveness (curiosity, wondering, questioning), persistence, and a greater
tolerance for uncertainty as well as emotions that form appraisals and value
judgements that ascribe importance to people and things. Emotions “orient and guide
behaviour because [and] affect the goals we aim for and the issues we should address”
(p. 35).

Scholars such as Mills (1959) and Haiven and & Khashnabish (2014) take up
the imagination more politically. The imagination is never neutral because it operates
within and is influenced by our socio-cultural contexts and practices. Mills developed
the idea of the ‘sociological imagination’, a form of imagining that helps people who
have traditionally been excluded and oppressed to understand the social world in
terms of its impact on their lives and their abilities to make different conscious and
informed decisions. Opportunities to exercise the sociological imagination connects
private troubles to public issues to stimulate deeper understanding of inequalities,
power dynamics, and systemic oppressions. Most specifically within this is seeing
what and whose interests the world currently operates, questioning this status quo,
challenging or own assumptions to cultivate a new sociological landscape. Haiven and
Khashnabish (2014) build on this with their idea of the ‘radical imagination’ which they
define as the ability to imagine “the world, life, ourselves and our social and cultural
institutions not as they are but as they might be otherwise…to think critically,
reflexively and innovatively about the social world” (p. 3).

Culture, art and imagination

Other theories of the imagination are centred in culture and the arts. For Hall et
al (2013) culture is critical because it is the complex system of shared meanings and
practices that influence how individuals and groups perceive and interact with the
world. Harkening back to Graeber (2011), culture is not static but dynamic; it is
constantly constructed and negotiated through social processes. It is culture, Hall et

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al argue, that plays the most important role in shaping identity and society and it is
always influenced by historical, economic, and political contexts and ideology. This
makes culture both a site of domination and resistance, an exercise of “power over
how people think of themselves and their relationship to society and to others” (Giroux,
2004, p. 62). Although Hall et al (2013) remind us that culture is not simply art, the arts
do serve as powerful tools of culture and are central to the imagination and imagining.

Similar to theories of the imagination, the arts are understood by scholars to
play a critical cognitive role. For Arnheim (1969), for example, artistic activity is a
critical form of reasoning, “in which perceiving and thinking are indivisibly intertwined”
(p. v). He goes on to say that “truly productive thinking” will always take “place in the
realm of artistic activity and its ability to provide a new imagery (p. v). Grounding his
work in a troubled and rapidly evolving world, Wyman (2004) argues that fostering the
imagination through the arts is one way to develop the new competencies we require
to think differently about our current realities. For Wyman (2004) and Greene (1995)
using art is how we unlock the subconscious and allow it to help us to understand
abstract concepts, visualise new worlds and challenge preconceived notions. Artistic
activity for Arnheim (1969) encourages explorations, transcends the mundane, and
creates deeper connections. Greene (1995) places art into the realm of ‘collective
process’ when she argues that “participatory involvement with the many forms of arts
enables us to see more in our experience, to hear more on normally unheard
frequencies to become conscious of what daily routines and thinking have obscured,
what habit and convention have suppressed (p. 123, emphasis in original).

Building on this, Rose (2001) reminds us that we live in a highly visual where
knowledge is increasingly “visually constructed” (p.6). Images are how we define,
produce and reproduce reality although they are never neutral nor “transparent
windows onto the world” (p. 6). Paying attention to the visual – sight – and to visuality
– perception is critical to how we understand ourselves and the world. In a patriarchal
capitalist world, images have produced gendered and other social differences
including hierarchies of ability, class, and race (Haraway, 1991). This ordering of
difference depends on images that create “a distinction between those who claim to
see with universal relevance and those who are seen and categorized in particular
ways [that are] intimately connected to oppressions of tyrannies of capitalism,
colonialism, patriarchy and so on” (Rose, 2001, p. 9). Just as perilous as what we see
is where this seeing is done. McCormack (2021) reminds us that art and cultural
institutions matter because they mobilise visuality within and beyond their walls. For
example, “images of rape and sexual violence that adorn gallery walls suggest these
violations are not only normal and acceptable, but glorious in their gilded frames” (p.
12) and this idea materialises in everything from magazines, album covers, and
posterboards to television shows and advertisements. What people require is visual
literacy, a visual competency that allows them to read and interrogate images, rather
than simply absorbing their power to define reality.

With these theories in mind, we turn now to how adult educators are mobilising
the imagination in all its forms to address the issues of our time.

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Now you see us: Reimaging and shaping identity

One of the central concerns of the imagination and adult education is
perception. For Kramer (1994) perception is “seeing what is going on” (p. 50) but it is
also not seeing or being able to what is going on because that seeing is influenced by
prevailing ideologies and cultural beliefs. Our perceptions of ourselves, our own
identities, and of others can reflect reality, but they can equally be interpretations or
expectations, of that reality. Rasmussen (2021) argues that an important ability people
need today is ‘identity competence’, defined as “a competence of self-perception and
perception of others” (p. 23).

Our first example of reimaging identity and perception is Camp fYrefly, a
university-community initiative in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. The camp is a lesbian,
gay, bisexual, trans-identified, two-spirited, queer, and allied (LGBTTQ&A) project
adult education facilitators Grace and Wells (2007) describe as ‘arts on the ground’
that is aimed to help young adults to move from “hiding and feeling ashamed about
their differences to owning them, feeling them, embracing them and living them” out
loud (p. 80). The camp employs a variety of arts including poetry, narrative vignettes,
dance and cartoons. Improvised popular theatre practices are used on one hand to
facilitate difficult conversations about oppression and personal and collective pain. On
the other, they provide a means to think through performatively, queer being,
becoming and belonging and to “imagine who you would like to be once you deal with
all the queer baggage” (p. 77).

Another important artistic tool used is graffiti, specifically in the form a creative
mind mapping project with participants to respond visually to the difficult questions of
what it means to be sexual minority and to create a more empowering representation
of ‘being me’ and ‘being us’. For the adult educators the art is what makes the camp
a safe and also dynamic learning and imagining environment as it is through the art
that people encapsulate their senses self-resilience and agency. Like many projects
we discuss in this section, the creation of the artworks do not simply remain with the
producers but are used for connecting and public communicative purposes. For
example, the finished graffiti became an art installation to which others in the camp
were able to contribute and was used in television network’s programming “as a
vehicle for public consciousnesses raising” (p. 74).

Representation

As alluded to in Camp fYrefly, central to perception is the issue of

representation. To represent is to depict, to make something visible and it is always
political because issues of “power, ownership, authenticity, and meaning” are always
in play (Kidd, 2015, p. 3). In other words, whenever people create representations of
themselves or the world “there are agendas at play, and particular sets of ideas,
values, attitudes and identities assumed and normalised” (p. 3). Because
representation is critical to what comes “to be seen as common sense and accepted”

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(p. 3) it is a powerful educative force that can be used against people, but also, as a
means of control over who they are and want to be.

An example of an adult education project that tackles representation as a force
is the work of Iroquois-Mohawk artist-educator Lindsay Delaronde who uses different
artistic genres to address colonialist and gendered identities. The project In Defiance
aimed specifically to respond to decades of misrepresented and highly derogatory
representations of Indigenous women in Canadian society. Penn Hilden and Lee
(2015) speak to this as the ‘Pocahontas loop’, an idealised ‘tough femininity’ that
places them outside the norm by positioning them as either sirens or duplicitous
others. Using photography as a practice of representation, Delaronde worked with a
group of Indigenous women to reframe their own senses of identity and agency.
Specifically, the participants disrupted how they were ‘made to be seen’ by
representing who they really were through their own self-portraits. As a project of
identity reclamation, the women represented and exhibited “their natural sovereign
powers of strength, vulnerability, eroticism and sensuality” (Clover et al, 2017, p. 85).
These representations, to borrow from Rose (2001), are never innocent because they
do not simply make identities visible: they actually make those identities.

To encourage a different imaginary in the general public, in essence a different
way of seeing that allows them to query past assumptions, the portraits were curated
into an large exhibition at the Legacy Gallery, University of Victoria in the city centre.
The exhibition was used by professors in their classes, in art-making workshops and
as the basis of public talks about everything from the power and seduction of
visualisations and images to indigeneity, settler-colonial relations, and systemic
violence and discrimination.

Delaronde continues to build her impact by designing new spaces to imagine
and reimagine. One example is ACHoRd, a performance art piece co-created with a
group of Indigenous and non-Indigenous women who perform in public spaces such
including the steps of British Columbia Legislature to challenge colonial nationalistic
identities. Her 2025 project titled Walking into consciousness uses movement and
images to encourage students of all genders to journey through anti-racist and
decolonial approaches towards an ‘awakened’ consciousness able to decode the
hierarchies of difference they naturalise.

Disputing silence: Speaking and multi-voicedness

The issues of voice and silence are central to adult education and the aesthetic

turn because, like identity and representation, they are embedded in relations of power
of who is entitled to speak, who is silenced and who is heard. Adult educators ‘give
voice’ “by creating opportunities for those whose perspectives are actively silenced,
unheard” to tell their own stories (Manicom & Walters, 2012, p. 11). Equally important
is creating space “to speak the unspeakable”, that which “cannot easily be articulated”
and translating this into a mode of expression that can be engaged with in broader
contexts (p. 11). While individual stories matter McIntosh (2016) calls for practices
that encourage ‘multi-voicedness’, the coming together of multiple perspectives,

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voices, or viewpoints in order to work across difference, to be heard and to listen to
each other with “humility and wonder” (Manicom & Walters, 2021, p. 12).

Our first example of multi-voicedness is Words, movement and colour:
Remembering and learning through narrative and visual art, an arts-based project by
feminist adult educators Bethany Osborne and Shahrzad Mojab at OISE/UT, Toronto.
Participants in this project were both men and women who had come to Canada at
different times due to violence in the Islamic Republic of Iran and many had been
actual political prisoners (Osborne, 2014).

The project included a series of workshops that used a variety of creative and
arts-based educational strategies such as composing their own personal testimonies,
watching and discussing films and reading prison memoirs of former political prisoners
which provided new “historical background information about Iran” (Osborne, 2014, p.
81). The educators also brought in artists to work with the participants with expertise
in photography, collage and painting. Artists are important in the aesthetic turn
because they enable to people to express themselves as ‘artists’ and creative beings
and teach them how to create visual artworks of quality that will be taken seriously by
the public and therefore, better communicate their messages of atrocities and
oppressions (e.g., Clover, 2012). Although many former political prisoners faced
language barriers in talking about their experiences the art provided a channel to
speak and a safe way to express themselves (Archive of Defiance website).

Narrative and poetry workshops were also used to offer people the opportunity
“to write part of their stories to learn to how to express themselves in English” (p. 82)
whilst workshops on drama and creative movement helped them to perform their pain
but also their resilience and hopes for the future. These acts of remembrance and
future power culminated into a public event called Talking Prison. At the conclusion
of the workshops participants chose to continue to continue speaking collectively
against state sponsored violence through artistic mediums. From this work has come
the website titled The Archive of Defiance, defined as “an aesthetically inspired
resource for transnational feminist teaching, research, and activism”

Our second multi-voicedness example comes from museums in Japan and
Korea. Although silenced for decades, and still highly contested, the Women’s Active
Museum on War and Peace (WAM) in both Japan and Korea have created exhibitions
and spaces that powerfully render visible the lives of the so-called ‘Comfort Women’
who were held prisoner for the sexual gratification of Japanese soldiers during World
War II.

The exhibitions and spaces have three primary educational goals. The first is
to make available for the first time, public documents from the International War
Crimes Tribunal on Japanese Military Slavery that show the damage and trauma
inflicted on women during that period (Watanabe, 2019). A second is to bring into view
the actual faces and stories of the hundreds of women who were sexually abused.
Upon entry to WAM Japan visitors are met “with 179 faces of Comfort Women
survivors who [gave] their permission to have their photographs displayed at the
museum” (Watanabe, 2019, p. 256). All images are accompanied by ‘testimonial
panels’ “written in the first person…to give visitors the feeling that they listening to the

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women’s testimony” (p. 256). Another pedagogical element of the exhibition is the
juxtaposition of “women survivor’s testimonies of their ordeals with accounts by
Japanese soldiers…and official documents” (p. 256). One aim is to show how
“divergently an event is remembered and recorded” (p. 256) and thereby disrupt
notions of a fixed truth. It also challenges persistent narratives that brand the comfort
women as liars by producing ‘fact’.

To add an experiential ‘affective knowledge’ component, WAM Korea created
a suite of cells that replicate the military brothels known as ‘comfort stations’, where
the women who were forced in sexual labour were kept. In the shadowy confined
space of the comfort station visitors feel a sense of the isolation, fear and helplessness
which the women would have experienced. One challenge for both WAM’s was how
to showcase violent histories without reproducing the violence on the bodies and
minds of survivors of sexual trauma. With this population they create theatre and music
pieces that enable them to share their own stories. As history is always with us, public
talks and seminars based on the content carry people forward to current practices of
sexual enslavement and trafficking.

Looking back to think forward

Building on above, Little (2020) reminds us that history matters because it plays

a critical role in human thought. To learn historically means gaining “a better
understanding of ourselves in the present, by understanding the forces, choices, and
circumstances that brought us to our current situation” (n/p). Rasmussen (2021) calls
for an ‘historical competence’, defined as “the ability to remember previous historical
situations and conditions as an important precondition for the ability to imagine lives
and communities different from the ones experienced today” (p. 24). It is, however,
difficult to imagine the world differently from a historical platform that has been
exclusionary or misrepresentative (e.g. Clover, 2024; McCormack, 2021; Olufemi,
2021). For this reason, Giroux (2004) calls on educators “to blast history open” to
rupture its silences and limitations and make visible “the legacy of the often
unrepresentable or misrepresented” (p. 68).

Our first example of blasting history open comes from the Zambian Women’s
History Museums whose pedagogical mission is to address women’s exclusion from
the past and their limited representations. This online museum has created a new
imaginary of African women’s history through an animated podcast called Leading
Ladies. As the website notes, the podcast fills a gap in “knowledge and information in
mainstream historical narratives of African women and from an African woman’s
perspective” (n/p). It is an imaginative bringing to life women who “walked before us
and those to come…. Those who fought for peace and danced to the drum.” The
podcast tells stories of diverse African women who lived between 17th and 19th
centuries and their roles not as wives and mothers, but as military generals, warriors,
feminists, peacemakers, diplomats and more. Through its creative animations, the
podcast not only brings history back and to life but challenges assumptions that
women are “incapable of being leaders” and playing roles beyond the reproductive

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(n/p). Using animation was necessary because images and stories did not exist save
in oral form, in the stories that women tell but which were “in danger of passing out of
contemporary knowledge” (n/p). This animation offers new role models for young
women and provides a platform for broader discussions aimed to disrupt gendered
‘natural order’ narratives and replace them with conversations about patriarchal
colonialism and its present-day impact.

Moving to Scotland, to increase the visibility of women, and particularly, lesbian,
bi and queer women the Glasgow Women’s Library and Museum (GWL) has designed
a selection of accessible resources and practices titled Touching the past. The GWL
found that it was difficult to see a future when people could not easily touch records of
our pasts because they had not been preserved or created. Touching the past seeks
to undo some of that imbalance by caring for and presenting the rich variety of
materials which is also a vital record of the collective organising done by these lesbian
women – covering not only homophobia and sexism but also racism, class
consciousness, disability activism and the need for childcare to enable mothers to
attend events. The archives are used for seminars, arts-based workshops and
other education activities including the Women’s Heritage Walks. These tours, as
noted on the website, offer “a unique and inspiring insight into the hitherto unsung
women who made Glasgow such as pipe-smoking forewomen, revolting
schoolmistresses, suffragettes and other brazen women who threw off the shackles of
a restrictive femininity.” This historical project, like the one above, illustrate
Rasmussen’s (2021) idea historical competence and what Graeber (2011) called
possibilities, in this case by showing how women have lived in decidedly ‘other ways’
thereby expanding and but also, offering role models and inspiration for the future.

Dislodging fixities: Visualities of common sense

Building on the above, another central aim of the aesthetic turn is to address

in creative and visual ways the often-hidden ideologies that construct commonsense
and maintain assumptions about people and society. Hall and O’Shae (2013) describe
common sense as a “form of ‘everyday thinking’ which offers a framework of meaning
people use to make sense of the world” (p. 8). As a “compendium of well-tried
knowledge, customary beliefs, wise sayings, popular nostrums and prejudices” (p. 9)
common sense is able to cement the status quo as a ‘natural order’. Chollet (2022)
calls on us to shine a light on the ‘immutable truths’ embedded in common sense to
show their arbitrary nature and replace that “with others that allow us to live fully
realised lives” (p. 38).

A highly imaginative project aimed to illuminate common sense making comes
from a museum in Toronto, Canada. A four-month exhibition titled All Dolled Up:
Fashioning Cultural Expectations at the Bata Shoe Museum used dolls from around
the world to make visible gendered, race and cultural assumptions and how they make
us see and believe certain things. The background of the exhibition is black and white
which may at first appear that things are true and simple. The exhibition is also part
objects, animated cartoon and part restricted enclosure with dolls from around the

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world standing caged behind glass that discourages play or any form of tactile
interaction. While there are many different themes and issues running through the
exhibition, three stand out. One is how dolls have been used to fashion femininity and
masculinity. The Barbie doll is a central feature of this narrative positioned as she is
as a cultural icon that represents the female ideal. The exhibition visually tells stories
of, for example, how Barbie’s feet were shaped historically to only fit stilettos and
despite her array of bathing costumes she is suited for the fashion runway rather than
a walk on sand. While this may be something that many know a striking contrast is
created by visually juxtaposing stories of Barbie with those of Action Man who, as the
exhibition label notes is “not seen as a doll”. Men’s ‘dolls’ are not feminine playthings
but rather, adventurers whose feet are shaped to fit footwear that ranges from naval
boots to scuba flippers.

A second theme is how dolls reinforce notions of ‘the other’. A portion of the
exhibition is dedicated to souvenir dolls. As the exhibition notes, “a principal feature of
souvenir dolls or dolls depicting ‘other’ cultures is the use of costumes from the past
that highlight difference.” The dress has little to do with historical fact or accuracy and
works to cement preconceived notions of ‘the other’. The exhibition also stories how
cultures get mixed up due to racism and/or in the interests of sales, with a doll from
one culture wears the fabric of altogether different culture. There are far more female
souvenir dolls than male.

A final central theme is ‘gender fluidity’. Mattel released a doll that is supposedly
gender neutral. These dolls are dressed in clothing that aims to challenge prescribed
gender norms suggesting that gender is constructed, rather than natural. However,
when one pays attention to the clothes and shoes labelled as ‘unisex’ it becomes clear
that historically, these styles are by and for men. What is presented as gender neutral,
the exhibition show us is a universal ‘maleness’.

Culture and Democracy and Democratising Culture

The ideas of cultural democracy and the democratisation of culture were first
championed in adult education by Williams (1958). He argued, in his case, that
working class people needed to participate in all aspects of cultural life and for cultural
forms to reflect a wider range of human experiences. In the aesthetic turn cultural
democracy is the belief that culture is not merely something to be consumed and that
everyone has the right to participate in cultural/artistic creation and influence its
directions (e.g., McGauley, 2016). At its heart, cultural democracy is about people
making art as a right, a means to (re)imagine and express their own experiences and
to engage in an unintimidating and accessible way with the public. An example of
cultural democracy in action comes from Brasil.

For many years adult educator Bruno de Oliveira Jayme (2016) has been
working with a group of people known as catadores (waste pickers) who function as
recyclers of the discarded but are the most marginalised and discriminated populations
in Brasilian society. One of his major projects has been to work with the catadores to
create a series of abstract and impressionist paintings and mosaics which were

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curated into seven art exhibitions in different cities across the country. The artworks
produced reflected fine art techniques which the recyclers had to learn and shared
their stories of poverty and social exclusion as well as they ways they have better
themselves and each other. The process of creating the paintings strengthened their
artistic and visual literacy skills as they (re)imagined a different reality for themselves.
Exhibiting was used to showcase their artistic talent and engage the general public in
a ‘culturally’ mediated conversation – through the artworks -- which has shifted
perceptions away from the catadores as simply a social problem towards a more
fulsome idea of who they really are: artists and contributors to the ecological health of
society (de Oliveira Jayme, 2016).

The basis of democratising culture is to make culture accessible to a wider
group of people. This is seen as problematic when used solely to educate the working
classes, for example, to be more valuable to the wealthy or to address a perceived
lack of morality (e.g., McGauley, 2006). But for adult educators to democratise culture
is about knowledge creation, growth and agency.

Our example of this is the work of adult educators Hyland-Russell and Groen
and the programmes at the University of Calgary called Storefront 101 and Humanities
101. The intent of these programmes is to offer new and critical experiences to
marginalised adult learners. They were conceived to address the socio-cultural
barriers that push people to the margins of society creating “not only the financial
impoverishment that circumscribes daily choices” but intellectual and cultural
impoverishment (Hyland-Russell & Groen, 2013, p. 46). Until these programmes many
marginalised adult learners felt they had no right to access museums, theatres and so
forth because they were not good or smart enough.

To overcome these feelings of inferiority one activity included a visit the
Glenbow Museum. Far from what was expected, students were able “to explore
immigrant experiences, lives of the Aboriginal Blackfoot peoples who occupied this
territory before European colonisers, settlers and immigrants, and the artistic legacy
of modernist painters” (p. 48). The curators played an active role in providing
information and facilitating reflexive conversations in relation to the experiences of the
peoples represented in the exhibits. One method was a creative writing exercise that
“elicited lively dialogue from the students on their personal backgrounds and how their
history had affected the people they had become and how they understood their sense
of belonging or not belonging in the world” (p. 48). Other classes have attended
feminist exhibitions as well as theatre performances, and lectures on literature or
Indigenous arts. These cultural events were selected to resonate with social justice
and aesthetic themes that were threaded throughout the course. In some cases,
exhibitions “offered a counterpoint or juxtaposition to texts studied in class, while in
other cases they offered an interpretation of a text students had studied” (p. 49). As
Hyland-Russell and Groen note student responses to these cultural excursions were
“keen and engaged…offering perceptive comments and questions relating to their
personal experience as well as to broader concepts of social construction and
negotiation” (p. 48). In a conversation following a dense scholarly lecture at an artist’s
work students queried if there would be the same ability to engage with the work if

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academics “had spent a night sleeping on the streets” (p. 49). These programmes
have encouraged intellectual growth and the skill of critique, and have had meaningful
impacts of people’s lives:

She had been up since dawn and waiting on an outdoor bench near the theatre
for three hours, unable to contain her excitement and anticipation of attending
her first-ever live theatre. She was 45 years old and never imagined that she
would be permitted to pass through the doors of the theatre, a doorway in which
she had huddled more than once during her days of homelessness (p. 49).

This work is an example of the difference between an education from above

that aims to fit people into an ‘elite’ cultural system and an education of equals and
discovery that uses culture worlds believed to be off limits as a platform of
empowerment.

Building on this is our second example of democratising culture which comes
from my own (Darlene) work with museums. As noted above, museums tend to enjoy
immense cognitive authority and a high level of trust in what they show and tell as
historically inclusive as well as truthful or factual. Yet many of these institutions are in
fact extremely biased and their visuals and stories prop up problematic commonsense
assumptions (Clover & Sanford, 2024; McCormick, 2021). As Cramer and Witcomb
(2018) remind us, museums are extremely adept at teaching people “to see what we
are being taught to see and to remain blind to what we are being taught to ignore” (p.
18). To illuminate both these teachings I developed the Feminist Museum Hack (FMH).
I take students or community groups into museums and using a series of questions
ask them to ‘really’ look at what the visuals and labels show and tell. Questions ask
them to count the number of artworks by women and by men, consider the languages
being used in the descriptions of artists, to whose history matters, to notions of beauty,
gender, identity and class. Participants also explore how museums use ‘stagecrafting’
- positioning and lighting - to teach them certain things.

To take seeing into action, participants use coloured Post-it notes to write their
findings which they place next to labels, artworks, objects and so forth. Other visitors
have read and queried the notes which gives participants the opportunity to discuss
their findings. Seldom do visitors get angry but when they do, it is a teachable moment
to explore people’s beliefs about ‘truth’ and these institutions as well as issues of
sexism, colonialism, white privilege, and racism often inherent in their remarks.

Aesthetic experiences like this, Greene (1995) reminds us, encourage
conscious participation, energy and a renewed “ability to notice what is there” (p. 125).
It also encourages noticing what is ‘not there’ for that too shapes what we think we
know about ourselves and others. The FMH aims to sharpen visual literacy and
discourse analysis skills and equally, disrupt the authority of museum. It also involves
imagining solutions as based on our visit we formulate ideas for changes the museum
can implement. To date, we have managed some important changes in sexist and
racist language and expanded historical narratives.

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Final thoughts

Our aim in this article was to explore the aesthetic turn and more specifically,

how adult educators in Canada and other parts of the world were (re)centring the
imagination to help people to respond to our current failure of the imagination. The
imagination is critical, Helmore (2021) reminds us “because control over the
imagination is control over the future” (n.p.). For this reason, “the imagination is the
most subversive thing a people can have” (Mohanty, 2012, p. xi). Central to the power,
subversion and control of the aesthetic turn is the development of critical
competencies not as things ‘measurable’ but rather, as seeing, identifying,
remembering, visualising, speaking, producing, animating, knowing, and learning in
the interests of a different future for all.

The imagination, when liberated through engagement with cultural expressions,
is how adult educators are helping people to see beyond belief, to defy the constraints
of expectation, and to uproot the hidden assumptions and immutable truths that control
their lives. The imagination is how adult educators do not simply disrupt silence and
but encourage a visual multivoicedness. In critical and creative ways, this work allows
people to look back historically to blast history open by showing its exclusions and the
limitations it has placed on our present and future (Giroux, 2004). Arts-based practices
of imagining and reimagining are also how adult educators make culture ‘ordinary’
(Williams, 1958), how they place production in people’s hands and challenge elitism
and authority.

The aesthetic turn is neither the full nor only answer to this troubled world.
Moreover, small activities seldom lead to immediate and dramatic social change.
However, work like this does allow for collaborations and networks to develop, which
are key to future collective actions to address oppressive social relationships and
dynamics of power. The turn keeps the critical social purpose of adult education alive
by reimagining a more just and dignified world. It is a space, to borrow from the poet
Lawrence Ferlinghetti (2007), where one can trust in the imagination and re-fertilise it.
Instead of trying to escape reality, we can plunge into the flesh of the world and never
let a sluggish imagination drown out their hearts.

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