Journal article
Settler Colonial Misrecognition in Story Collection Socially Engaged Art
Studies in art education, Vol.66(3), pp.349-364
07/03/2025
DOI: 10.1080/00393541.2025.2507537
Abstract
Story collection—the practice of generating art or research by gathering participant narratives and combining them into a single product—is a popular method used by socially engaged artists and art education researchers. This ethnographic case study germinated with the examination of a story collection artwork executed at a gallery in a co-governed Indigenous–settler community in northern Canada. It expanded to consider how both my ethnographic methods and social practice art enact extractive, settler colonial approaches to knowledge. Working from Indigenous studies scholarship, particularly Sean Glen Coulthard (Yellowknife Dene), I show how repeated misrecognition of what Indigenous (and even settler) residents valued contributed to a local phenomenon of storytelling fatigue. This is a form of exhaustion brought on by excessive requests from outsiders to contribute to a project or artwork. These findings signal the need for artists, galleries, educators, and researchers to scrutinize how their undertakings are informed by the settler colonial politics of recognition.
Details
- Title: Subtitle
- Settler Colonial Misrecognition in Story Collection Socially Engaged Art
- Creators
- Allison Rowe
- Resource Type
- Journal article
- Publication Details
- Studies in art education, Vol.66(3), pp.349-364
- DOI
- 10.1080/00393541.2025.2507537
- ISSN
- 0039-3541
- eISSN
- 2325-8039
- Publisher
- Taylor & Francis
- Grant note
- Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada
This article builds on research originally presented in my doctoral dissertation, The Social Throughout, completed at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 2021 under the generous supervision of Tyler Denmead. I thank the three anonymous reviewers and senior editor, Kryssi Staikidis, for their thoughtful feedback, which has strengthened this article.
- Language
- English
- Date published
- 07/03/2025
- Academic Unit
- Center for Social Science Innovation; School of Art, Art History, and Design; Teaching and Learning
- Record Identifier
- 9984964235202771
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