Controlling the Art School: Ideologies of Materials and a Speculative Vision for Hybrid Arts Education

In responding to the special issue’s call to examine the shifting space of materiality, this article uses creative writing, hand-drawn comics, and speculative fiction/design as a form of research by practice to critique changes in UK Higher Arts Education in relation to art materials. It shows how embedded neoliberal structures that have been documented to negatively impact HE staff and the arts in general, also now extend to prioritising and excluding some art materials over others. A speculative vision is offered as an alternative in which a nomadic higher arts education is put forward, one that encourages the use of hybrid art materials. The means chosen to make the arguments presented are analogue methods of drawing, cutting, printing, sewing and writing to strengthen the point that digital materials are currently prioritised in UK arts education due to HE’s entanglement with agendas entwinned with Big Tech and most recently the military. The format is also deliberately experimental to move away from common ways of presenting research and theory that have become formulaic as academics are pushed to meet the ideals of the Research Excellence Framework, another neoliberal rubric.