The Prosthetic Pedagogy of Art: Embodied Research and Practice

Uses autobiographical and cultural narratives related to art research and practice to explore, experiment, and improvise multiple correspondences between and among learners’ own lived experiences and understandings, and those of others.

By beginning each chapter of The Prosthetic Pedagogy of Art with an autobiographical assemblage of personal memory and cultural history, Charles R. Garoian creates a differential, prosthetic space. Within these spaces are the particularities of his own lived experiences as an artist and educator, as well as those of the artists, educators, critics, historians, and theorists whose research and creative scholarship he invokes—coexisting and coextending in manifold ways. Garoian suggests that a contiguous positioning of differential narratives within the space of art research and practice constitutes prosthetic pedagogy, enabling learners to explore, experiment, and improvise multiple correspondences between and among their own lived experiences and understandings, and those of others. Such robust relationality of cultural differences and peculiarities brings about interminable newness to learners’ understanding of the other, which challenges the intellectual closure, reductionism, and immutability of academic, institutional, and corporate power.