For an ecology of adult lives and learning: bringing feminist pedagogies in museums

The paper elaborates a practical theory bridging educational studies with social sciences, humanities, and arts, and reinterpreting the role of feminist pedagogies in adult education as democratic transformative practices. Feminist pedagogies offer several principles for educational settings: reciprocity, shared responsibility, community building, individual voice, respect for diversity, and challenging fixed ways of doing or thinking, such as clichés, normalization, etc. We are all exposed to stereotypes and closed narratives; we can learn from each other how to build freedom from anti-ecological discourses, interrogating our own interdependence in learning and unlearning. This is not only a ‘women affair’: it regards all citizens and involves the individual, relational and social levels of systemic life. The present proposal discusses some research experiences using embodied narrative methods to illuminate the experience of diverse actors and sustain transformative relationships, beyond traditional boundaries in cultural institutions. Participation entails coexistence with ‘otherness’ and critical reflexivity about its construction. The study involves unexpected audiences in contemporary art museums: adults who may feel excluded from art and culture, namely for the persistence of unequal gender representations and discourses. Museums are public spaces that shape their audiences’ experiences related to gender, class, etc. Are these intersectional identities represented in equitable ways? How can new ecologies for life and learning be established? In these participatory research projects, the museums can be partners in constructing alternative spaces of encounter for feminist practices, connecting social sciences, humanities, and art as a performative way of building knowledge and embodied awareness of the affordances of spaces.