Developing a Politics of Attunement in Art Teacher Preparation: Documentation and Collage in a Precarious Present

Abstract

This article is situated amid the ongoing effects of multiple crises in the United States—the COVID-19 pandemic, pressing calls for racial justice in the face of continued police violence against Black Americans, and the storming of the U.S. Capitol building at the incitement of Donald J. Trump in the final weeks of his presidency. In addition to these crises, our present time is marked by an environmental crisis that has led anthropologists to use the term Anthropocene to define the current “epoch in which human disturbance outranks other geological forces” (Tsing, 2015, p. 19). Given the cumulation and intensity of these multifaceted issues facing society, scholars like Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing (2015) have recognized a pervasive sense of precarity, described as the condition of being vulnerable to human and nonhuman others at a time when “we can’t rely on the status quo; everything is in flux, including our ability to survive” (p. 20). Yet, in the face of all of this, Tsing proposed that we should move toward understanding precarity as something other than a state of being provoked by crises that are exceptions to an otherwise smooth unfolding of life. Instead, she suggested that precarity, in fact, describes the ongoing condition of our world—a world that is always in process and that rests on the uncertain. According to Tsing, each moment of experience is characterized by the continuous coming together of elements and forces past and present, human and nonhuman entities gathering and entangling to produce life as infinitely contingent and unpredictable—but also always open to the possibility of something new. In Tsing’s view, precarity, as a state of being, presents us with conditions ripe with possibilities for new understandings, new ways of being, and the potential for change.