Intersectional and Decolonial Perspectives on an Incorporeal Materialism: Towards an Elemental Philosophy of Art Education

Abstract

Considering art and its educative potentials as a living experiment with the body's elemental constitution and modes of organisation, this article engages water, earth, air, and fire as milieus through which a body learns to sense, move, and act in the world differently. This leads to a series of propositions for an elemental philosophy of arts education, which recognises the intersectional and decolonial potentials of bodies, and strives to amplify and proliferate these potentials through creative pedagogic practices. If, as Elizabeth Grosz (2017) proposes, “the chain of evolutionary emergence is unbroken not only materially but also conceptually” (p. 250), then arts education offers an expression of the body's incorporeal and material potentials as they change and evolve through time. Further to this position, we argue that arts education has the potential to radically reframe relationships with water, earth, air, and fire in ways that resist their co-option as tools of colonialism and intersecting categories of oppression.