Keywordsart education, contemporary culture, conference papers, research capacity, Liverpool Biennial

This issue is devoted to the Journal’s confer-ence in Liverpool, 2010, and all of the articles that are included here are extended versions of papers selected from the event. Confer-ences have always been a key component of the vigorous reproduction of an academic community, and art education is no exception. Our iJADE conference last year was one such occasion, and the singular mixture of collegial-ity and excitement, leavened with a little performance anxiety and competition, made for a memorable occasion. The turnout was high, with more than sixty contributors from around the world to be squeezed into the day, resulting in a rich if rather breathless schedule. There were many speakers new to confer-ences, and also new to presenting research and writing about it, and we were especially supportive of these delegates; we were partic-ularly pleased to welcome practitioners from schools giving papers researching into their classroom experiences. Promoting new research and encouraging new authors is one of the main purposes of holding the confer-

ence and publishing this issue of the journal. To facilitate this the day included a session on writing for publication ably led by Claire Penketh, a member of iJADE’s editorial team.

The blend of novice researchers with expe-rienced delegates made for stimulating fris-sons; having just returned from the InSEA world congress in Budapest I was reminded of the intellectual energy and vitality that such encounters can produce. The editorial team chaired many sessions of the iJADE confer-ence, which gave us the pleasure of watching and listening to a number of papers where new configurations of thought were brought to bear on familiar problems, encouraging the audience to consider the issues afresh.

The conference was on the theme of contemporary culture, to complement the Liverpool Biennial Festival of Contemporary Art that was showing at venues across the city at the time. This theme was explored in an astonishing variety of ways, reflected in the diversity of articles in this issue of the journal. When organising the conference we were aware of the way in which the Biennial was proposing to colonise the city with its site-specific works, performances and events. The diversity of cultural perspectives generated through the exhibits inspired a response in the

Editorial Conference Issue: Art and Design Education and Contemporary CultureJeff Adams

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structuring of the conference. We were reminded of the myriad ways in which art prac-tices can be responsive to the complex inter-face of culture, politics and location through the Biennial artists’ encounters with the city. In parallel to this we wanted to debate the contexts and conditions with which educa-tors, students and their communities are confronted, which not only affect aesthetic codes and creative pedagogies, but might also raise profound issues of identity, ethnicity and gender. Consequently we organised the day into themed sessions that included: ‘cultural audiences’, ‘collaboration and partnership’, ‘contemporary aesthetics’, ‘learning in the gallery’, ‘social construction of identities’, and ‘pedagogy and policy’.

There were many lively discussions around these topics, enhanced by impromptu debates provoked by the keynote speaker at the confer-ence, Dennis Atkinson, using themes that he has developed from his recent papers (e.g. 2008); and his new book, Art, Equality and Learning: Pedagogies Against the State (2011). He focused on the notion of learning as a polit-ical event, with all of the unpredictability and strangeness that the term implies. Atkinson argued for emancipatory pedagogies grounded in constantly emerging ontologies of teacher and learner. From discussions of aesthetics and materiality to debates about identity, embodiment and performance, the conference was crammed with polemics, contested and debated in every corner of our venue, the new Liverpool School of Art.

The papers chosen as articles for this issue were selected from the nominations of confer-ence delegates, based on their experiences of listening to papers on the day. This is the first time that we have attempted to create an edition of this journal purely based on the conference, and it will provide a model for future conference issues. One of the conse-quences of selecting papers in this way is that it provides some authors with an opportunity to publish their work for the first time, and has drawn in papers from a wider than usual field. All of the papers had to go through the normal

blind review process, and for some this was a new experience that was approached with some trepidation. Their fears were soon allayed, however, by the rigorous yet support-ive responses of our reviewers, who provided thorough guidance for revisions where neces-sary. We hope that the conference and this issue will encourage more new researchers and improve research capacity in the field of art and design education.

At the time of writing we are looking forward to this year’s conference at the Univer-sity of Chester (please see iJADE conference information at: www.nsead.org), in the hope that it will be equally stimulating and offer yet more new research opportunities. The theme for this year, ‘the centrality of art, design and the performing arts to education’, has been developed in response to the decline of state support for the arts in education, particularly in England. Many times in the past the case has been made for arts education to be the essen-tial, central component of the curriculum in the state provision of education. At the present moment, however, much of the Western world is facing austerity cuts in public services, imposed neoliberal market-led polices, indi-vidualism, and the dominance of audit or performance models of education, all of which are occurring within the context of major changes in the cultural politics of identity in our societies. In this emerging and complex climate, the 2011 iJADE conference in Chester asks what should now be the case for the arts of education? The discussion around this and many other questions should provide the papers for this year’s conference and the contents of next year’s conference issue of the journal.

ReferencesAtkinson, D. (2008) Pedagogy against the state, International Journal of Art & Design Education, Vol. 27, No. 3, pp. 226–40

Atkinson, D. (2011) Art, Equality and Learning: Pedagogies Against the State. Rotterdam: Sense

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