Educating ‘Local Cosmopolitans’: the case for a critical regionalism in art education?

Song and the Presence of Absent Communities

“…Consequently, I understand these artists as deliberately refusing to make categorical 'either/or' choices between the very different, often apparently contradictory values, memories, goals and understandings that underpin the different types of community and location to which they relate. For reasons that I have set out elsewhere (Biggs 2005(Biggs , 2001 and will return to here in a somewhat different context, I understand them as adopting a position of psychological (as distinct from theological) 'polytheism'. It is this that links our mutual concerns to the old quasi-pagan Borders ballads.…”

“…This allows the professional to move freely and relatively comfortably across the globe and between a plurality of cultures and locations because he/she is insulated within a highly localized sense of 'at-home-ness' derived from specific professional practices, norms, discourse, and lifestyle choices. This 'at-home-ness' is physically grounded in those globally dispersed institutional networks and metropolitan environments where the transnational professional identity can be played out with maximum efficacy (Biggs 2001). While this characterization must always remain an oversimplification, it serves well enough to identify the underlying psychic parochialism (however intellectually sophisticated) that sustains those who, like Miwon Kwon and her peers in the art and academic communities, can speak of measuring 'the success and viability' of their work in terms of 'the accumulation of frequent flyer miles' (Kwon 2002: 156).…”