Thinking education with an awareness of reparative politics: Strategies, tensions, and negotiations in engaging with the colonial past

Abstract

This article proposes a reflection on the possibilities of aligning education in artistic and cultural institutions with reparative politics. Drawing from a case study of the Programa de Incursão à Galeria - PING!, at the Galeria Municipal do Porto, the article analyses educational strategies mobilised by the program in its work with the archives and memories of the First Portuguese Colonial Exhibition (1934). Based on a situated and engaged methodology, the research uses episodic analysis of situations observed over three years of fieldwork with the educational program. The study identifies a set of learnings, displacements, and strategies that can contribute to an ethical practice in art education, namely: decenter white protagonism, pedagogically engage with discomfort, and tension the colonial archive. Thus, the article contributes to the broader effort of building reparative practices within non-formal education, in dialogue with Post/Decolonial Studies, Critical Whiteness Studies, and the Pedagogy of Transgression. In this way, the episodic analysis adopts an implicated stance, recognising the entanglements of whiteness in knowledge production, and conceives mediation and education as spaces for transgression and reinvention of relationships with colonial history