by Kai Syng Tan
It’s nearly Valentine’s, and I’m looking for love.
Don’t be silly, you scoff. Love doesn’t exist.
Silly Lovers
Silly, then, for one Paulo Freire (1921-1997) to claim education as an act of love. Evoking the four-letter word no fewer than fifty times in the English translation of his Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970) the Brazilian educator and philosopher links love with solidarity, humanisation and liberation, to clarify education’s mission as building a world where it is easier to love, and where educators must risk acts of love.
Laughable, too, that his contemporary James Baldwin (1924-1987) analysed love in its full range of possibilities, including erotic, platonic and familial, as well as relating to racial justice and the arts. The queer black author-activist is popularly understood to have compared the role of the artist to ‘exactly the same as the role of the lover. If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see’.
One generation on, bell hooks (1952-2021) took things further. For the poet-professor, love is a ‘practice of freedom’ to ‘move against domination, against oppression’. More than an act of resistance, hooks is asking for a re-positioning of our very being, which demands a shift that is both ontological (how we are), as well as epistemological (how we think). ‘The moment we choose to love we begin to move towards freedom, to act in ways to liberate ourselves and others’ (1994). Critically, diversity is key – not contrary – to this love. The same way opposites can attract, a ‘beloved’ community is formed ‘not by the eradication of difference but by its affirmation, by each of us claiming the identities and cultural legacies that shape who we are and how we live in the world’ (1995).
Laughable Academics
Sure, love might exist, but these are marginalised lovers, movers and shakers from the last century. So woolly and passé, you scoff. Serious academics today do not talk about love. Nor do they laugh (much), you kindly warn. If you want to be taken seriously, grow up. Act professional.
Cheers, but I’m not just an(y) academic.
I’m an artist. It’s my job to be dotty. That’s why when the pandemic hit, I discussed how the queen of dots Yayoi Kusama gives form and direction to unknowns, and called for the governments to embed artists to strategise bold exit strategies and to curate new visions. I called this ‘artful leadership’, where artists catalyse change beyond the remit of art and design.
I’m also flagrantly hyperactive and dyslexic. I connect dots in novel ways. I love mixing and mis-matching things, to see what happens. Like running with the arts and humanities, which has helped catalysed a movement (pun fully intended) of creative ‘running studies’ and running artists as change-makers.
Although neurodivergence is over-represented in art and design, what makes my approach a-typical within HE and HE art and design includes my background as a working-class migrant. Others may laugh or mock, but my autism and thick-skin make me as impervious as the most wrinkled elephants. I laugh back, by calling upon the octopus to confront the elephants in the ivory tower with ‘tentacular pedagogy’. Driven by the art school ethos of creativity, courage, curiosity and change-making, but with its hearts in neurodiversity, decolonisation and intersectionality, this teaching and (un-)learning framework rallies art and design to play a pro-active leadership role to remove barriers in HE, update art and design’s mission to serve ‘society, the economy and the environment’, and fulfil UNESCO’s vision for HE to prioritise care, solidarity and social justice by 2050 (easy-peasy).
Out of Love
Easy now, dear, you say. We’re all grown up and sophisticated. Like the woolly mammoth, slavery, sexism and the lot are extinct. Move on, I hear you say. Why does your kind like dwelling about the past?
Well, no more than those who like to reminisce of the mythical ‘good old days’, I shrug. Also, like the crafty Covid virus, far from being wiped out, the worst of us is alive and kicking, and have mutated to multiple guises.
Look around us. We are out of love. Pledges of EDI or DEI during BLM 2020 that have now all but DIED. Persecution of Black ‘supertokens’. Apologists insisting that such ‘policing serves democracy, not white western supremacy’, interesting given UK’s ‘democratic backsliding’. Systems that have ‘love only for the rich’, and where ‘only the rich dare fall in love’. Creating a false dichotomy between STEM and STEAM subjects by prioritising certain subjects, and letting others face ‘bonfires’. Funding bloodbaths, bullying bosses and toxic cultures in the arts, just like its counterpart in HE which remains elitist, racist and ableist. Poverty of imagination. Research and global bodies waxing lyrical about neurodiversity and creativity, but ignoring practitioners and those with lived experience. The double-edged sword of the declaration by the new freedom of speech tzar on how universities will be fined for curbing the rights to expression, because the insistence of neutrality applies to the powerful with trans-exclusionary views, too.
All amid the small matters of an ongoing double pandemic, (support for) killings, and (culture) wars.
Love Sick
If this makes you feel sick, stick with me.
I’d love to work together, not divide us further.
After all, Baldwin had grasped that love is hard work. Love ‘does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does’, and is instead ‘a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up’ (1960), of individuals, of societies.
Building a beloved community, and building a community that gets the value of a beloved community, is hard work. You’d agree that to get there, to catalyse any form of meaningful change, education is key. It’s just as well that, like love, hooks considers education a practice of freedom, in her tantalisingly-titled book Teaching to Transgress (1994).
This brings us back to Freire, who states that, to foster change, love, as well as dialogue, are ‘indispensable’ (1970). Dialogue ‘cannot exist’ in the ‘absence of a profound love for the world and its people’. Founded upon ‘love, humility, and faith’, ‘dialogue becomes a horizontal relationship of which mutual trust between the dialoguers is a logical consequence’.
Love Letters to the Future
That’s why myself and many others involved in social justice and decolonial work in art and design have been opening up spaces for dialogue and action within and outside of HE centred on love.
I’ve been theorising a love-centred form of leadership. Rather than a trait or talent hinged on individuals, hierarchy, organisations, positions, genes or luck, I re-imagine leadership as a diversified, beyond-colonial, neuro-queered and (co-)creative practice, outlining ‘neuro-futurism’ as a multi-faceted toolkit within this. Care, compassion, kindness, joy, thriving and empathy are key in this (ignore the boffins who claim that autistic people don’t get empathy).
But armchair pontifications are too cosy. Which is why my book draws on my own trial and (many) errors. They include my ongoing attempts to embody and test out modes of change- and future-making, as well as to foster such possibilities for others.
That was why I created a performance and installation last November, where I ran speed-dates with people from all walks, who also share their wishes for the future in the form of red tags that they tie to a staircase, which a visitor has termed ‘love letters to the future’ (Figure 1):
Figure 1: ‘Peace and Love’ for 2050 (Tan 2023)
That was also why, as a jury member for the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival in Japan last October, we awarded the top prize to an anonymous filmmaker who had been imprisoned by the Myanmar military junta. We get how life- and career-changing such a prestigious award can be for the filmmaker, and what a powerful message of solidarity for other creative makers equally imprisoned – actual and otherwise – such a move sends.
That is also why, despite extensive challenges, I have remained thick-skinned as trustee board member of an arts and social justice charity, and helped to steer radical transformation in its governance, by embedding co-creation and anti-oppression policies and practices, leading to the appointment of its first, black neurodivergent female Artistic Director.
Love Seek
For the new year, I’m doubling down on my insistence on love. I’ll do so through a new project, entitled FAB PALS.
In the pilot, I will travel to different parts of my new adopted home of Hampshire, to look for artful leaders amongst hard to reach easy to ignore. This includes the Nepalese community who had made immeasurable sacrifices during the ‘good old days’ of the British Empire, but whose courage and creativity are now all but forgotten. I will volunteer at each site, to learn about their efforts on social and climate change, and how they survive and thrive within structures not built for and often designed to harm them. We will co-create stories set in the future, to visualise alternative, better realities that they aspire towards. These stories will irritate the dominant narratives of Hampshire as a twee stomping-ground of the elite, consistently ranked UK’s most desirable place to live in, and/or the best place to escape from a zombie apocalypse. Festivals are fab, so we will showcase this in a festival called Futures Artful Biennale (‘FAB’).
This can then be scaled-up and extended, to create a model of allyship and solidarity between HE and the community, in and beyond Hampshire. The spotlight will be on how the ‘undercommons’ within HE can find and team up with the under-dogs outside, and collaborate as artful leaders. Networks go beyond performative allyship and foster meaningful friendships, so we’ll do so through a network called ‘Partnering Artful Leaders’ (‘PALS’).
FAB PALS flips the narrative HE art and design as under-valued, as outlined in a report led by CHEAD. It does so by using EDI as a positive force and creative solution — not an appendix or problem. It will enable others, including ‘naysayers’, to learn about and from participants as consultants and collaborators. In the longer run, FAB PALS will co-develop a visual access rider with local communities about equitable ways of working with HE. FAB PALS critiques the common narrative of HE helicoptering into communities to colonise efforts, and/or confuse and harm with bureaucratic processes, contracts and forms demanded by research ethics offices thick with legalese to minimise risk for HE, then leaves, just as suddenly, once the ‘public engagement’, ‘impact’ and ‘diversity monitoring’ boxes are ticked.
Out of Love
Any discussion of the future must include the next generation, as well as education. My generation – myself included – have been responsible for much of the lovelessness and harm that we see now and for a while. Which is also why we must help to clean up after ourselves, to learn from beloved communities to push back on the push-backs. In particular, the bold interventions of queer, neurodivergent, multi-disciplinary Gen-Z artists such as Jacob V Joyce bring to live Freire’s explanation of love as an ‘act of courage, not of fear’ (1970).
In a new masters programme on arts and cultural leadership, I’ve also been calling upon hooks, Joyce and others, to not just decolonise, but love-bomb the curriculum. Rather than those offered by run-of-the-mill arts management degrees, the modules I lead on seek to dismantle the master’s story of leadership, and to build one out of love. This morning, I was more than proud to receive a 5000-word assignment entitled ‘love’ submitted by a student, which explores the role of oxytocin and power-sharing in leadership.
Sure, the academy ‘is not paradise’, reminds hooks (1995). Nonetheless, education remains a ‘location of possibility’, and learning remains ‘a place where paradise can be created’. Freire adds that if ‘education alone cannot transform society, without it society cannot change either’ (2004).
The road ahead is quite definitely not paradise. Still, I’ve observed that many in the business of teaching — and especially teaching art and design — do what we do, despite set-backs, because we believe that art and design, HE and HE art and design, can be a force for good. That’s why we work with students, who will lead the following generations to ask better questions. We continue to risk acts of love, knowing that change, like love, takes time, and that we can build a world where it is easier to love. As artist-lovers, we want to make others conscious of the things they don’t see, and to replace harmful structures, cultures and mindsets with oxytocin, justice, solidarity, humanisation, liberation and joy, and move towards freedom.
If you don’t get this, it’s because only serious, artful academics get – and want to beget – love.
I’ve outlined my seriously silly efforts to beget love. It’s only been 25 years since my first full-time HE teaching role – I moisturise, cheers, love – and I’ll keep trying.
Do tell me about your efforts, so that we can join hands.
Acknowledgements: The author is grateful to the many radical artist-lovers who have inspired her to look into love. The photograph is a detail of ‘Have a Speed-Date With Kai – Let’s Re-Imagine Our (Collective) Future Together’ by Kai Syng Tan (2023), as part of Ordinary Things, which was an exhibition curated by Professor Louise Siddons, The Winchester Gallery. The photograph was taken by Amy Hamilton.
Kai Syng Tan PhD PFHEA is a trans-disciplinary artist-curator, advisor and Associate Professor in Arts and Cultural Leadership, University of Southampton. Her book Re-Imagining Leadership with Neuro-Futurism: An A-Z Towards Collective Liberation (Palgrave Macmillan 2024) will be out in Spring. These are her personal views. @kaisyngtan
