Welcome to Arts Gen’s eLearning! This is an online self-directed series of elearning modules in community engaged practice. You’ll hear from artists and about Arts Gen’s recent projects.
Often people with lived experience are invited to share at the start, followed by minimal consultation during the process of community engaged research. They are kept at arm’s length through advisory groups, and/or translation at the end of a project. This pilot, developed a partnership between the Victorian College of the Arts and Arts Gen, seeks to develop a community engaged research module for researchers in the creative arts, design and media fields; that goes beyond extractive methodologies.
Through working with artists Arts Gen hopes this eLearning module will provide a snippet of the variety and vastness of creative practice as research in the context of community.
Modules are as follows:
Each module’s content takes approximately 15-30min, with additional time for tasks, and will offer plenty of opportunities for further readings. Modules can be done as one-off’s or as a suite. Each module will have a different voice and tones, including guest artists, which builds into the ethos of multiple voices. This eLearning doesn’t seek to be the singular answer but hopes to open up some critical questions and some frameworks to work through when thinking about practice in community. Hear from the artists who will be guiding you through the eLearning, sharing their knowledge, practice and experiences below.
Hoang Tran Nguyen is a Melbourne/ Naarm-based conceptual artist, most known for site-specific and socially-engaged participatory projects that address overlapping cultural histories and politics of place.
Sophia Cai 蔡晨昕 is a curator and arts writer based in Narrm/Melbourne, Australia. She currently teaches as a sessional lecturer in Critical and Theoretical Studies, Victorian College of Arts at the University of Melbourne, while also maintaining an independent curating and writing practice. Sophia is particularly interested in Asian art histories, the intersections between contemporary art and craft, and feminist curatorial methodologies and community-building as forms of political resistance. For the last two years, Sophia has been researching the connection between fandom and curating as dual practices rooted in care.
Cher Tan is an essayist and critic. Her work has appeared in the Sydney Review of Books, Kill Your Darlings, Overland, Cordite Poetry Review, Runway Journal, and elsewhere. She is an editor at Liminal and the reviews editor at Meanjin. Her debut essay collection, Peripathetic: Notes on (Un)belonging, is forthcoming in 2024.