Theories, Policies & Practices Reflective Journal

Figure 1 Blistered palm from micro-teaching session by Tanya Noor. February 5, 2025. London College of Communication. Photo is author’s own.

We began our collective session by making blisters on our palms. Tanya, who teaches make-up and special effects at LCF, prepared her microteaching by handing out palettes of wax and paints, initially demonstrating to us the process of creating these grotesque wounds (fig. 1). In my own research I am interested skin and the openings of porous surfaces; and the act of making this wound filled me, and seemingly the group, with joy. This was followed by a session experimenting with different yarns and cords, making our individual interpretations of fabrics. Without the constraint of needing to develop a desired outcome, the session’s timed limitation was creatively freeing. I identified what I was missing and yearning for: play.

Transported to my own childhood classrooms, I remembered the tangible skills that I developed through touch-based learning. In my own session, I explored the scopic regime of modernity. As a concept and theoretical framework, modernity sets the foundation for modernization through a logic that privileges linear progress through rationality, sciences, and technologies. The framework is complicated, but I derive my understanding from decolonial scholars that see this as inextricable from coloniality (see Mignolo and Walsh, 2018). Modern development was driven by resource exploitation, genocide, and human enslavement, setting the foundation for world as we know it today, through the invention of racial capitalism, gendered inequalities, class disparities, able-bodism, and so on. Modernity sought to privilege the visual, losing sense of touch-based, emotional, and other knowledge systems (see Jay, 1988). 

The feedback to my session was encouraging and illuminating. This session was adapted from methodological sessions I run on object analysis, thus it was helpful to receive feedback on the connection between experiencing objects and theory. Comments also noted the desire for the session to be longer as the information was quite dense, and the alienating potential of working with familial histories. In my own teaching practice, the family history component is one theory amongst several that are offered as frameworks to further explore, but it was a helpful comment nonetheless to highlight the need for inclusive sensitivities. As part of the Cultural Studies team, and contextual history/study component, my work is often framed as a theoretical component. However, I was a practitioner in my previous life, and I had forgotten how much creativity and play delighted me.

I conclude this reflection with a desire to investigate play in pedagogy. Importantly, how integral the role of this is to creativity in learning itself. While a survey of Google Scholar reveals research that explores the relevance of play in early childhood education, I aim to explore further the radical potential of the term. Perhaps otherwise known in its adult form of leisure, it seems to be an antithesis to the outcome-driven capitalist society of today.

Works Cited

Jay, M. (1988) ‘Scopic Regimes of Modernity’ in Vision and Visuality. Ed by. Foster, H. Seattle: Bay Press.

Walsh, C., and Mignolo, W. (2018) On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Accessibility is an important aspect of social justice teaching. According to our presentation slides: social justice seeks to identify and address ‘systemic inequalities and barriers that can affect individuals or groups based on factors such as race, gender, socioeconomic status, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and other dimensions of diversity.’ Meaning that social justice in higher education should aim to accommodate a variety of backgrounds, and people who may have been historically disadvantaged due to marginalisation. These issues of inequality still clearly exist in the classroom today. It was brought up that some students are unable to attend classes because they had to work part-time jobs and were marginalised in an institution that seemed to favour a community of people who wore designer clothes. I interpreted this as a shorthand for an international student community that is undeniably East Asian, but there are language issues that underlie the colonial inequalities, which reflects what Xine Yao identifies as ‘the continuation of colonial inequalities’ which take from historically colonised places to reinforce the ‘postcolonial global leader’ (Yao, 2021). 

The difficulties of being a foreigner were illuminated in Polly Savage’s essay. For the Mozambican students who migrated to Moscow to receive an education, many sought to escape a war-ravaged economy only to feel a sense of dislocation (Savage, 2023, p. 1084-5). These circumstances are perhaps not the same as our own student body, but diasporic movements are shaped by coloniality. The British university sector is an expression of the historic relations, as money is extracted from newly emerging/emergent economies to effectively reinforce the power of the European metropole through knowledge (as product). Cejuma, one of the interviewed former students from Savage’s essay describes how the students had to complete a ‘“very difficult” year-long Russian language course’, alongside modules of art that were ‘Russo-centric’ (Savage, 2023, p. 1084-1086). Discussions in my group highlighted the ideological nature that was apparent in these supposed anti-colonial teachings. But is this not sometimes reflective of our own pedagogical practices?

These apparent differences in the experiences of the classroom, between the working-class students who often work to support their studies and the international students who may have difficulties with finding community and language barriers, are co-relational problems of social justice. The neoliberlisation of our institutions sees increasing profiteering and less support, further siloing us into our respective experiences of marginalisation as resources become more finite. Our grievances should be collectively experienced, or at least identified. As Savage’s essay illuminated, we should likewise hope to build the ‘alternative transnational network’ of ‘emotional, affective bonds [to] communities from the ground up, regardless of ideological affiliation’ (Savage, 2023, p. 1085). 

Works Cited

Savage, P. (2022) ‘“The New Life”: Mozambican Art Students in the USSR, and the Aesthetic Epistemologies of Anti-Colonial Solidarity’, Art History 45(5), p. 1078-1100.

Yao, X. (2021) ‘The Flexible Capital of the Figure of the Asian International Student: A Wedge For or Against Antiracism?’, Los Angeles Review of Books. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/antiracism-in-the-contemporary-university-2/#_ftn12 [Accessed 20 January 2025]

Reading teaches us to develop critical thinking skills, situating ourselves in a world that is shaped by the creative practice of learning itself. According to Paulo Freire (1983), reading the word is reading the world. Rather than memorising descriptions, the point of reading and learning is to understand the underlying significance. It is fundamentally a political and creative act that transforms the world by a means of ‘conscious practical work’; in doing so, it leads people to critically perceive culture by developing an understanding of ‘how human practice or work transforms the world’ (Friere, 1983, p.8-11). It is the act of reading that helps us to critically reflect on these processes of how we imagine, interpret and transform the world around us. When we, and should we, distribute these duties to a bot, we not only reinforce the power relations of an industry that shape algorithmic coding, but we rob ourselves of the creative act of learning. We read through the lens of AI (and its programmers) of what it deems as important, reinforcing a singularity and universality promoted by existing power structures, instead of embracing the potential for multiple interpretations, imagining that there could be one reading. We no longer engage with the emotions of struggling with language, connecting with words, being moved by narrative or even hating language, which is part a productive act of situating ourselves within a conversation. Sometimes recognising our marginality in relation to understanding allows us to see how power itself works. Afterall, the university and knowledge has been constituted and shaped by Anglo-European hegemonic values (Walsh and Mignolo, 2018, p. 198), which are also classist. The pretention of academic language is part of an elitist practice. Or reversely, being moved by a paper could reflect upon our own positionalities in relation to the authors; sometimes it makes us feel less alienated in the world as it creates empathetic communities of thinking and feeling. 

What this prompt to use ChatGPT has illuminated for me is the challenges of facilitating parity in the classroom, which I reflect upon in my third post. More disturbingly, it also reveals that under neoliberalism, we do not have time to learn, and worst, that there is no value to learning – for the seeming solution to our struggles is to reinforce a tool that makes all our jobs in the learning sector precarious and erodes our critical capacities. As Keir Starmer presses on with AI as a national initiative, and my team meetings are filled with theoretical queries about how to reconsider teaching with AI, I imagine this is an opportunity to develop my own pedagogical practices to consider what learning itself is or should be. Importantly, I need to position myself as an activist in the institution, highlighting and troubling the neoliberal working conditions that will only be further exacerbated by these supposed technological advancements.

Originally written on 14 January 2025

Works Cited

Brown, W. (2003) ‘Neo-liberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy’, Theory & Event 7(1) https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/tae.2003.0020 [Accessed 14 January 2024]

Freire, P. (1983) ‘The Importance of the Act of Reading’, translated by Slover, L. The Journal of Education 165(1), pp. 5-11.

Li, P., Yang, J., Islam, M. and Ren, S. (2023) ‘Making AI Less “Thirsty”: Uncovering and Address the Secret Water Footprint of AI Models’ arXiv. https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.03271 [Accessed 14 January 2025]

Luccioni, A., Viguier, S., and Ligozat, A-L. (2022) ‘Estimating the Carbon Footprint of Bloom, a 176B Parameter Language Model’ arXiv. http://arxiv.org/pdf/2211.02001 [Accessed 14 January 2025]

Quijano, A. (2000) ‘Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America’, Nepantla: Views from South 1(3), pp. 533-580.

Ren, S. (2023) ‘How much water does AI consume? The public deserves to know.’ OECD AI Policy Observatory. https://oecd.ai/en/wonk/how-much-water-does-ai-consume [Accessed 14 January 2025]

Savage, P. (2022) ‘“The New Life”: Mozambican Art Students in the USSR, and the Aesthetic Epistemologies of Anti-Colonial Solidarity’, Art History 45(5), p. 1078-1100.

Vincent, J. (2024) ‘How much electricity does AI consume?’ The Verge. https://www.theverge.com/24066646/ai-electricity-energy-watts-generative-consumption [Accessed 14 January 2025]. 

Walsh, C., and Mignolo, W. (2018) On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Fig. 1. Photograph of data centre growth from Nicholson, R. (2024) ‘Data centre growth seen in scaled schemes and retrofits’, Construction Journal. Available at: https://ww3.rics.org/uk/en/journals/construction-journal/data-centre-demand-retrofit.html [Accessed 14 Jan. 2025].

            A prompt was sent via our Moodle page about how to prepare for Workshop 1A: if the reading activity was challenging, it suggested that we ‘also try [to] run the text through ChatGPT and ask it to summarise and/or clarify it for you.’ Academic papers are often dense and difficult to read, rife with theoretical terminology that can seem alienating. There were words in my assigned reading that I had never encountered: ‘metanoia’ (Savage, 2022, p. 1081), for one. But I illuminated in the class my problem with this advice. Someone else reflected that learning should embrace challenges, and difficulty should be welcomed. Whether the difficultly was warranted was also highlighted as a critique. Some academic writing is confusing. Our ability to communicate, however, is a crucial aspect to both writing and design practices, and thus feeding readings through ChatGPT is not an ideal solution. It masks the underlying institutional problems around time and compensation, further degrading the university’s directives toward decolonising and sustainability. 

ChatGPT is a synthesiser, it can condense and reduce a 23-page text into 2. It can condense hours of reading into 10 minutes. But what gets lost in this process? What is the point of reading (these essays at all)? The issue of sustainability is a glaring problem, but the materiality of digital and internet technologies is often concealed to its users. Once up on ‘the cloud’, digital information and processing seems to magically appear/happen on our small computer devices. The Verge noted that ‘[t]raining a large language model like GPT-3, for example, is estimated to use […] as much power as consumed annually by 130 US homes.’ (Luccioni, Viguier, Ligozat in Vincent, 2024) Other research also reported that it takes ‘2,200 gallons of Ultra-Pure Water (UPW)’ to produce a microchip, and ‘500 millilitres of water’ for GPT-3 to produce 10-50 queries (Ren, 2023). Academics highlight that by 2027, global AI will be need as much water as 4-6 Denmarks or half of the UK (Li et al., 2023). While ‘the cloud’ is not immediately visible to us as users, it has a material component, which is housed in massive data storage facilities (fig. 1) requiring energy to run and freshwater to cool down its processors. 

In addition to the environmental costs to run AI, we are also witnessing the rise of the tech-billionaire. Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos, will continue to profit off these technologies, while racing to develop space travel (as the world is burning, which will be further exacerbated by these technologies). The reality of neoliberalism has eroded the authority of national governments, given rise to the dominance of multinational corporations without taxation, and thus solidified capitalism as a global hegemony (see Brown, 2003). This is coloniality at play, where this system of profiteering privileges the few, while also continuing to destroy the environment and dehumanise already marginalised populations (see Quijano, 2000). These aims of corporate profiteering and minimal institutional intervention now shape our high education systems. In practice, it places the onus on the individual to both learn and teach under these conditions, where maximising institutional profit means that our time in relation to learning is continually minimised. For those that do not have the time to read the text then, ChatGPT seems to be a solution, but this masks the underlying problem: that there is simply no time to read and teach all the components of the course, but then why assign reading at all?

Monday, 9 December 2024

Hello, welcome to the blog and reflections of Christin Yu. I am a Lecturer of Cultural Studies at Central Saint Martins, teaching on the Jewellery, Textiles and Fashion programme, as well as in the MA Fashion Histories & Theories course. I am also an Associate Fellow of the Transnational Art, Identity and Nation Research Centre, and the Secretary of the British Association of Korean Studies. 

Not sure if it’s helpful to list all these credentials, the practice of writing this blog feels like I am positioned in an overlapping space between performing a public persona and reflecting upon private matters. A few weeks ago, our team delivered a module about Web 1.0 transitioning into Web 2.0, and I was reminded of platforms such as livejournal. This blogging platform was a precursor to the public lives that Instagram, and TikTok have now produced, but there was a seemingly ‘authentic’ vulnerability in those posts. I think maybe it helped that we were not posting our images, but our thoughts – it was an embodied versus solely visual practice. Anyway, I find it difficult to mediate between what I should be writing as an earnest reflection of my thoughts, or as a performative profile of myself. Do I write to an audience or as I did in my adolescent diaries? I write this interjection in a space of privacy, which lends itself to a personal reflectivity that I did not feel comfortable accessing in a classroom yesterday. Perhaps this speaks to accessibility and temporality in learning…

My pedagogical practices are informed by decolonial feminist aims that include seminar-led discussions, and collaborative writing practices to imagine and re-exist toward an otherwise. I am a design historian, and material cultural specialist that is interested in the non-visual world, and embodied practices of being, alongside generative practices of knowledge making that privilege communal and polyphonic stories.

As I embark on this PgCert course, I look forward to generating strategies and practices that can inform my teaching as we move through an increasingly polarised world. My difficulties of experience thus far have included questions about how to mediate controversial worldviews (although these instances have been few and far between). I hope to learn more strategies toward my own resilience, as I teach a student body undoubtedly afflicted by anxieties, and perhaps worse, an apathetic worldview. As a marginalised person in a position of power, I want to undo the historical relations of authority, while also maintaining some protection over my own integrity.