Juuso Tervo: Intimacy with a Stranger: Art, Education and the (Possible) Politics of Love (01.06.2016)
Abstract
“Intimacy with a Stranger: Art, Education and the (Possible) Politics of Love” offers a theoretical investigation of love in the context of art, education, and politics, particularly focusing on the question of completion. It is Plato’s The Symposium that provides one of the most well known description of love as a unity of two violently separated parts: that love completes us by turning dualities into unities. The idea that we always need something or someone to complete us has also a strong place in political and educational thought, especially among art educators. Vis-à-vis this tradition, how could we understand love (together with art, education, and politics) not merely as a means of completion, but as a possibly radical opening to strangeness that disrupts all predetermined unities?
Info
Juuso Tervo is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Art at Aalto University, Helsinki, Finland. He received his PhD from the Department of Arts Administration, Education and Policy at the Ohio State University in 2014 and his MA and BA in art education from Aalto University. His research focuses on the philosophy of art and education with a specific interest in political philosophy, critical theory, and literary theory. He was the recipient of the Elliot Eisner Doctoral Research in Art Education Award in 2015 with his dissertation “Corrosive Subjectifications: Theorizing Radical Politics of Art Education in the Intersection of Jacques Rancière and Giorgio Agamben”.