Announcing virtual book tour

As the pandemic cut short my planned travel to discuss the book with audiences in both the UK and US, I am now planning an online tour.

My virtual book tour begins in March 2021, and I will be presenting ethnographic snapshots from The Creative Underclass. You can find the most up-to-date listing of events here.

Click here to read how I discuss how the book came to be. You can read the introduction to the book for free. Purchase the book and get a 30% discount on the paperback with the coupon E19DENMD.

If you are interested in hosting a public lecture or private talk in an academic or non-academic setting, please contact me at td287 (at) cam.ac.uk. Check back here or sign up for blog updates to get most up-to-date listings and registration details!

Reckoning with the institutional amnesia of art education

Art education scholars have wrestled with the amnesia of our field, or the tendency to not account for and build upon lines of inquiry that have been previously established. In this paper, I consider how accelerated temporalities and politics of knowledge in the academy contribute to this amnesia. I discuss my own orientation to teaching graduate students in which I try to teach an anti-possessive, non-essentialist, and anti-edgy approach to scholarship.

The time to engage with literature, to allow for ideas to mature, and for new lines of time-consuming research to materialize feels like the privilege of the past.

To read and cite: Denmead, T. (2020). Forget This Commentary Too: Cultivating an Antipossessive, Nonessentialist, and Anti-Edgy Approach to Art Education Scholarship, Studies in Art Education, 61:4, 349-355, DOI: 10.1080/00393541.2020.1820839. A free pre-publication version can be read here.

Book Review of The Creative Underclass

Dr. Frances Howard, a senior lecturer at Nottingham Trent University and course leader for the Youth Studies programme, has reviewed The Creative Underclass in Cultural Sociology. Howard is the convenor of BERA’s Youth Studies and Informal Education Special Interest Group. Of the book, she writes:

“For those who are interested in cultural policy and youth programmes, this book is an important awakening for those who uncritically accept the discourse of creativity as a force for good. This study destabilizes the taken-for-granted assumption about arts activities as ‘positive activities’ through which young people can ‘better themselves’. This book is a timely reminder that youth development programmes do not solve economic problems.”

Frances Howard “Cultural Sociology.” To read the full review in Cultural Sociology, click here. The pre-publication version can be read for free here.

Book Review of the Creative Underclass

The Creative Underclass: Youth, Race, and The Gentrifying City received a positive review from welcome insights by Professor Darlene Clover, University of Victoria, in the International Review of Education:

“[This] book is written in a personal, engaging style and peppered with conversations between Denmead and the youth who offer a sense of hope through their clever, observant and deeply cognizant understandings of structural injustice. . . . It is important reading for those working with youth, in urban centers and within the context of the ‘creative industry.'”

Darlene E. Clover “International Review of Education”

The review can be read here.

White Warnings

The Journal of Cultural Research in Art Education has published three issues as a part of a collection on critical whiteness studies in visual art education. I am pleased to have an article included in this collection, titled “White Warnings.” In this article, I query the double bind in which white scholars reinvest in whiteness through critical reflexivity of whiteness itself. In the paper, I begin to theorise the need for white people to welcome embodied signals, or white warnings, that signal threat to one’s social and institutional standing and therefore point to the possibility of white divestment. The article is free to read on the Journal of Cultural Research in Art Education website.