Attentive outrage and fine art higher education: a manifesto of the liminal

ABSTRACT This paper outlines the concept of attentive outrage as a potential underlying principle for a manifesto of the liminal for fine art higher education in the UK. Crystallized from past activist experience and scholarship in the face of the here and now socio-political context of the UK and beyond, it defines attentive outrage as an optimistically evocative, critical attitude with momentum that can be inspired via studio-based fine art teaching. It proposes that attentive outrage in fine art higher education depends upon six intricately linked commitments to be shared equally by academics and students which capture: the nuances of intersectionality, managing dominant embodied social matter, critiquing cultural presences in the curriculum, recognizing the productive-conflictive tensions between cultural essentialism and cultural apporiation within the discourse of academic standards and artistic merit, fostering radical wilfulness and pragmatic wisdoms, and articulating the impact of this in terms of the outcomes of students’ programmes in a manner that can address the needs of higher education governance mechanisms.