Keywords

We met in 2006 in Helsinki, Finland, and planned our first transculturalFootnote 1 dialogic arts-based collaboration using media arts. Ugandan artist, art educator, and scholar Richard Kabiito was in Helsinki as part of an exchange program partnership between Makerere University and the University of Art and Design Helsinki (UIAH). Kabiito was pursuing a doctoral degree in Art Education. His investigation focused on Indigenous knowledge and how it could be applied to meaning-making practices in visual culture within specific cultural groups. As Professor of Art Education and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the Pennsylvania State University (Penn State), Karen Keifer-Boyd, a white woman about twenty years older than Kabiito, was in Helsinki as a Fulbright Research Scholar. She taught a course in which Kabiito enrolled at UIAH. Keifer-Boyd had the opportunity to create media arts and art pedagogy curriculum in her courses for students pursuing K-12 art teacher certification and for students currently teaching art in K-16 schools.Footnote 2

We began our first global media arts project once we returned to our respective home countries and universities. Kabiito returned to Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda, and Keifer-Boyd returned to Penn State in the United States (US). Kabiito, concerned with the loss of Uganda’s Indigenous knowledge systems,Footnote 3 sought to challenge the colonial system of art education at Makerere University, which was entrenched in British imperialist perspectives, theories, and practices. Keifer-Boyd, concerned that most of her preservice art education students had minimal experiences with people different from the Pennsylvania communities in which they were raised, sought to provide opportunities for her students to engage in dialogic arts-based projects with Makerere University students raised in Uganda.

In this chapter, “we” refers to Kabiito and Keifer-Boyd. In the autumn of 2020, we met for two hours on two consecutive days to discuss the nature of our transcultural dialogic media arts collaboration. We discussed how and why we began and continued our collaboration, as well as how and why the collaborative projects change. We recorded our conversation and used the transcript to inform the text in both form and content. This chapter is based on our dialogic reflections about more than a decade of collaborating together and with students in our courses via various media arts platforms. We begin by situating our collaborations within the sociocultural environment of each of our respective institutions to develop our analysis of the changing opportunities and challenges of sociotechnological interfaces of media arts from our first foray in 2007 to the most recent in 2020.

Uganda: Makerere University’s Media Arts Forays

Kabiito: In the early 2000s, Makerere University’s strategic goals were to modernize with new technologies. Since 2018, Makerere has provided a platform for online teaching, which has improved accessibility to media arts technologies. In reflecting on how we began, I remember attending your class “Virtual Learning Communities” at the University of Art and Design Helsinki, which was known in Finland at the time as TaiK and is now part of Aalto University. I had piqued my interest in initiating collaborations, especially as I had seen advantages of collaboration between the two continents of Africa and Europe. When immersed in unfamiliar cultures you begin to reflect on your own culture and nuances in life. I was interested in initiating collaborations between Makerere University’s art school and the US for cross-cultural pollination. The class you were teaching at TaiK was an eye-opener, and I wanted to know how to continue these conversations.

When I met you, you were focused on feminism but in your recent work and our recent conversations, you also emphasize social justice, which is new to Makerere scholarship. I have begun to understand how they are connected. When I finished my PhD, I began to work with minoritized people in Western Uganda. Your views have continued to influence my work in addressing issues of injustice toward women and other minoritized groups. Our Indigenous cultures are marginalized groups, so there is a strong connection to our earliest dialogues and vision of our collaboration.

United States: Penn State University’s Art Education Media Arts Forays

Keifer-Boyd: I fondly remember the course I taught at TaiK in 2006 and the wonderful group of students. One student traveled each week to my course on a public transport jet boat from Estonia. I recognized the benefits of being in person with a group of students, for example, and how our conversations continued in the hallways and beyond the classroom. I also invited each student to meet with me, individually. However, you reached out to me as a student in my course and we met in my office and you showed me a PowerPoint presentation, educating me about Makerere University’s art school named after a British white woman, Margaret Trowell. You presented in a very proud way about your art school at Makerere University. On the other hand, you also shared your interest in the stories and oral histories that you grew up with and how to bring these Indigenous ways of knowing and knowledges into your art and research. By doing so, you were challenging some of the very basic notions of the art education system at Makerere University.

You sounded appreciative of Margaret Trowell and her support for launching the school of art and design, but you also recognized the colonialism of the United Kingdom and the European educational system in which the Indigenous knowledge systems that you grew up with in your village were absent. I noticed in that conversation, in our first meeting, you held concerns about humanity. I perceived that you were challenging colonialism and how there are different kinds of knowledge systems. I heard your concern that much of the knowledge about language, culture, and oral histories are lost in Uganda’s formal art education. I heard these ideas in our first meeting, which interested me to collaborate with you.

I understood the formal structure of positioning two universities so both become known to each other and would advance the international recognition of the universities, particularly the art programs. However, such recognition is not what attracted me to collaborate; it was you and your philosophy. I found parallels to your concerns in how women’s art in history worldwide, and certainly in the US, has been erased or hidden. Art by women is not what people have studied (Pollock, 1995; Stankiewicz et al., 2004). I was a full professor in 2006 and had been doing research in these areas but also drew from my lived experiences. I questioned why Picasso, why Leonardo, why still-life paintings only by male artists from the seventeenth century were important to study in art history classes in the US when I knew there were women artists in all the different movements and periods of art history (see, e.g., Parker & Pollock, 2013). I had been questioning this for some time, how women, of all races and ethnic heritages, were erased out of history. I shared your concerns about the exclusion of art histories not being taught. I don’t know if I could have said all this to you at that time because feminism is often considered the “f” word, a dirty word. People have misperceptions of feminism because most of what we learn about feminism is from patriarchal-controlled media. Feminist scholars, educators, and artists challenge the institutional academic control of what knowledge is considered important and what is not, what is valued and what is not (Acker & Wagner, 2019; Atkinson & Standing, 2019; Jaganathan et al., 2020; Mandalaki & Daou, 2021, Presley, 2020; Sheriff & Wiesner-Hanks, 2021). This is very much where my work is situated. We discussed how a feminist lens helped to illuminate views of women through the Indigenous narratives passed down in communities.

Your presentation educated me about the Trowell art curriculum. However, when I asked questions, not only at that meeting but throughout the course, I would hear about local materials and oral histories in your art. You shared some of those stories and that’s what I got really excited about, and probably the more enthusiasm I expressed, the more you shared and felt comfortable doing so. This is my perception, that you felt encouragement from me to share the oral histories embedded in your art as I was attentive and, at times, probed deeper. Our dialogic first encounters continued when I invited you to Penn State to share the oral histories that were integral to your art. You continued to create more art, drawing on Uganda’s oral histories.

Kabiito: I had not looked at our first meeting from that perspective and now have a different outlook. I was focused on the nature of the collaboration and how it would work because for me that was very important—how do we create these networks, and how would we make it work. Now I can see the connections between what I was talking about and what you cite as your interest then and now.

Technological Challenges

Keifer-Boyd: When I was in Uganda in 2010 there was talk about a cable that was going to be laid down in the Indian Ocean to improve broadband, which is now a reality (Song, n.d.).

Kabiito: Since 2018, Makerere has had a new media platform used for online teaching, the need for which was heightened due to the pandemic in 2020 with students off campus. In 2020, all teaching and learning at Makerere University used the university’s platform. I continue to explore how to use these technologies to express our Indigenous knowledge systems. New technologies and new media can help us to understand the meanings of Indigenous systems, which are still relevant to Ugandans today. Media arts technologies provide opportunities to look afresh and rethink learning, teaching, and artmaking strategies. Therefore, I have invested in learning new technologies to bring Indigenous ways of knowing into my work.

Keifer-Boyd: Your exploration of how media arts can be useful to teaching, learning, and creating art based on Indigenous knowledge systems has some parallels to my explorations, since the 1990s, of how media arts and its applications can be developed from feminist perspectives, values, and theories. As we entered the twenty-first century, universities in the US were encouraging the development of online courses because they could make a profit from large classes and a preset curriculum. I contested about profit over pedagogy, yet I thought online was a good thing but not because universities were pushing online education. Nevertheless, as most of my colleagues did not want to have anything to do with online teaching, it gave me an opportunity to explore feminist pedagogy in online teaching that valued the lived experiences, differences, and strengths that people could bring to their learning.

By the time I was in Helsinki with my Fulbright, in 2006, I had established knowledge and expertise in feminist theories and practices in teaching and creating art with digital technologies and was able to offer a course about new media arts, technologies, and online collaborations. I knew TaiK, by inviting me, valued the feminist perspectives that I brought into the course, but I also knew most students would have learned about feminism from patriarchal media. I knew to be careful about when and how I referred to feminism. After facilitating a learning experience and during the debrief, I explained what we had just done was feminist pedagogy. Then feminism was not deemed so scary, avoiding negative reactions before students experienced feminist practices of agency and seeking multiple and different perspectives. Writing and creating art from lived experiences offers contextualized insight into challenges, discrimination, and obstacles to self-determination (Mandalaki & Daou, 2021; Presley, 2020). Moreover, distributed leadership, or at least recognizing the hierarchies (e.g., the power dynamics that are involved in teacher-student relationships such as when we began our collaboration), is important to diminish power imbalances and foster agency as well as to illuminate the contributions of all stakeholders in a project.

Kabiito: While I grew up living Ugandan Indigenous traditions, it is not something that I considered when I started serious academic work. However, one of my late professors, Dr. Ssengendo Pilkington Nsibambi, when I was working on my master’s degree, encouraged me to draw upon Indigenous cultures, especially the material objects, and explore how to revise them in contemporary contexts. Upon reflection, I realize that Dr. Ssengendo introduced me to remix theories by asking students to recreate the histories of traditional objects. I thought that even though they cannot regain their original purposes, they can be used in new ways. I am continuing the traditions by choosing and keeping the Indigenous knowledge systems alive through storytelling, a very good educational tool. I, along with Ugandan students, learn about the US from movies, television, news, and mass media, which impact our perceptions of the US, such as wealthy and greedy people and cities filled with violence and everyone speaking English. When I arrived in New York, I was frightened although no one was violent to me but rather friendly; the bus driver and passengers from New York to Penn State did not speak English, which surprised and challenged my preconceived notions of the US.

Keifer-Boyd: There is the functional technological part that you and I are always trying to figure out, and even in the Mashup article (Kabiito et al., 2014), which was written closer to our early collaborations, when I returned to Penn State and you returned to Makerere. Some of our conversation had to do with the technology and what could happen, and that was part of what I introduced in the 2006 course at TaiK—using the tools of the time such as Second Life, a way to embody avatars and interact together. The broadband was not strong at Makerere University in those first years of collaborating, so we had technical hurdles to work out. However, more importantly, each project went deeper into how in both groups, both classes, students you work with and students I work with, could recognize their misperceptions—such as those that students in my class held about people on the African continent based on movies and advertisements to contribute to charities that claim to improve the lives of “African children” they had seen. I strive to facilitate learning experiences beyond students’ own lived experiences and familiar visual culture to broaden and, at times, challenge their views. As a feminist, I believe that knowledge is not neutral, and teaching is political. The choices in what we make and what we show, the artwork we choose, the content we choose, the questions we pose, what we say and what we don’t say—this all influences students. In working with you, we have always been very open and candid. Your views of feminism, where you began with those views and then after knowing me, maybe they have changed. I would be interested in hearing that because, again, I think most people have misperceptions of feminism, such as assuming feminism refers to white women taking charge, thus equating feminism with white supremacy. In my view, feminism is about distributed leadership, valuing all people, prioritizing historically marginalized groups—all notions I brought into our collaborations, and the purpose behind our collaborations. We always start with setting our goals and mission for each project without prescribing what will develop from our collaborative projects.

Transcultural Dialogic Arts-based Collaborations

Dialogic arts-based projects, in our collaborations, involve designing the technological functionality and underlying ideas about marginalized groups or knowledge systems that have been ignored or misunderstood. Key to our process is an emphasis on dialogue. From the beginning we referred to our collaborations as transcultural dialogues.

Dialogue has taken different forms and different shapes in our collaborations; however, dialogue is always central to our projects. In our dialogic arts-based projects, dialogue is the content for the artmaking, and the artmaking is a collaboration in and of itself. In what follows, we discuss why we perceive dialogue as important to our collaborations.

Kabiito: Our dialogic arts-based projects are exchanges between artists from different parts of the world. For example, with the theme of house in several of our early collaborations (see, e.g., Paatela-Nieminen & Keifer-Boyd, 2015), students exchanged ideas and inspirations based on their backgrounds and environments in which they lived.

Keifer-Boyd: Collaboration is not only involved in planning, which often needs to happen three to six months in advance; we fine-tune our plans as we get closer to beginning the project with students, and we adjust during our teaching due to world and local events, such as the pandemic, electricity outages, and protests/strikes in academia. Even though we plan, we adjust our plans together, which is part of the collaboration. We set things in motion based on goals with curriculum designed to be open to unexpected and unplanned outcomes. We conceptualize and enact a process. We put a process in motion shaped largely by the semester timetables, which has been a challenging aspect of our collaboration. While we engage in dialogue to plan and set the project in motion, we have always designed and valued collaboration between the students in each semester project. We planned that students would collaborate in making art together, a process that involves communication and negotiation as there are many decisions involved, and dialogue can be intimate and culture-rich in the sharing of lived experiences.

Over time, we have learned that for students to create art together they need to have meet-and-greet dialogues. In our 2019 Narratives of Places collaboration, students prepared questions to ask the other group. We scheduled time for the groups to get to know each other. We have done this in various ways, such as students sharing familiar idioms. We have had prompts which initiated the conversation. In the past, in the earlier years, we used a program (Dabble) for a group exchange in which students could initiate threads. VoiceThread, for instance, allowed audio-recorded comments surrounding the art that students created together, which gave a sense of embodied presence to hear each other, quite different than reading words.

In recent years, group video calls with Zoom became available. While challenging with the different time zones, we figure out times for students to talk together. Also, recording allowed for those who weren’t present to be able to view later. We have always included a process for a meet-and-greet dialogue with whatever technologies were available. For the Fall 2019 project, we planned for three conversations between students—at the beginning, middle, and end of the semester. When I entered the classroom after the first meet-and-greet dialogue, students had gathered around one person’s laptop—viewing and discussing the recording motivated them to reengage in the dialogue, which became the content for artmaking.

Kabiito: The dialogue happens at two levels. The first level is the dialogue that takes place between me and you—the preparation, the things we discuss, the things we think about—how are they going to work, and how are the students going to receive this information, how are they going to use it, how will it be useful to them. At the second level, students join the dialogue, which is valuable to learn from each other and shed misinformation and misunderstandings, in which the impact is beyond the collaborative project’s time frame.

Two Transcultural Dialogic Arts-based Collaborations

In what follows, we discuss two recent dialogic transcultural arts-based projects in 2019 and 2020. Particularly, we reflect on why we were motivated to do them.

Keifer-Boyd: I am motivated to explore the potential of media. For example, I was curious what watercolors could do that oil paints could not, and vice versa, a type of dialogue with the medium. The medium speaks to me about what I can do with it; and instead of attention to its weaknesses, I sought to extend the medium’s strengths. I also bring my philosophy about medium into how I perceive and work with students as “interdependent” rather than independent entities (Kraft & Keifer-Boyd, 2013). I encourage students’ divergent knowledges from their lived experiences. Together, in a class, students help each other find the strengths that they could bring into a collaborative project, which I refer to as “empowered by difference” (Keifer-Boyd & Kraft, 2014).

My teaching philosophy drew me to feminist literature, theories, practices, and principles and to consider potentials of online to connect people that normally might not connect. We could not have continued our dialogic transcultural media arts projects without online communication platforms that could connect people at a distance. My engagement with digital and social media technologies was with a feminist pedagogical perspective to include perspectives from marginalized groups and to build distributed leadership. I had access to robust technologies and reliable internet, so I had to consider how I could use such privileges without controlling the project. I listened to you. I listened to what you had in mind.

Kabiito: I am interested in understanding Indigenous perspectives vis-à-vis these new modes of thinking. Growing up, I played Ugandan traditional instruments with my cousins, my young brothers, my sisters, and my mom. We didn’t have what I would call modern instruments like guitars, which were foreign to us. We had access to very local traditional instruments. The forms of the musical instruments fascinate me. Storytelling with music, dance, images, and objects are powerful educational tools. I was motivated to bring Indigenous narrative structures to media arts to become useful in teaching and learning.

Sensory Immersion in Narratives of Places: (Re)creating Histories (2019)

Kabiito: In my art, research, and teaching, I examine the narrative structures and adapt these to new technologies and see how they work. In the Narratives of Places project, I had students search for stories passed on from elders because these stories hold much information. Students found that people love telling their stories, which connect to the places where they live. Rather than beginning with research questions, I told students to “Go and look for stories and let people tell you their stories.”

In the Narratives of Places project, the students were engaged in returning the stories they heard in their fieldwork. The more they retell the stories, the more their familiarity grows with deeper understanding of the stories, and they can (re)tell or return the stories using media arts. For example, they used digital cameras and manipulated the images using technological tools (e.g., Photoshop & Illustrator). Others attended to structures of the stories and adapted media arts technologies with digital sound and moviemaking applications to the Indigenous story structures. In these ways, they are returning the Indigenous stories using media arts technologies. I think it was a very powerful way to approach teaching and learning. Indigenous systems offer new ways to use technologies.

Keifer-Boyd: Returning stories through adapting their structures to media arts is fascinating and reminds me how each student, as they went around the table in your course, shared with students in my course about the Ankole cow.Footnote 4 Basically, it was the same story; however, each told it differently and emphasized a different aspect of the story. When your group shared what they were doing, they shared through story, while the US students described what they were doing through topics, themes, and goals. They talked with the Ugandan students about goals and concepts and ideas and their purpose of what they were filming and how they were editing to convey their ideas. Penn State students were fascinated about the story of the cow—the painting of the cow to be able to escape, and how whoever had the best cows had the best kingdoms. Those narratives drove the media arts projects. I loved the process you described to engage in “returning stories,” to not tell stories but to return stories.

I noticed that when the students with whom you worked showed us their art exhibition at the end of the project, every media arts work was introduced through story.Footnote 5 First, you had an opportunity to teach such a class, as a professor now established at Makerere University, very different than when you were a doctoral student when I first met you. You also had the opportunity to bring in Indigenous narrative traditions, which was your history and your students’ histories.

Remix Exquisite Engendering (2020)

Keifer-Boyd: Our Remix Exquisite EngenderingFootnote 6 collaboration in 2020 produced art from remix theories and practices. Appropriation underlies theories of remix, which connects to Indigenous and feminist practices. Feminists have appropriated, talked back to the dominant narratives to bring in marginalized narratives of their lived experiences into their work. Parody is one strategy in using the media to expose assumptions through juxtapositions and overlays that are possible in remix approaches to media arts. House was a theme we worked with for many collaborative projects, broadening views about house, which also generated new stories in the art because house could refer to the body or physical shelter, something that humans live within. It was a broad enough concept that we could approach together, using intertextual theories and strategies, and, also, with our colleague Martina Paatela-Nieminen in Finland with some of those projects. Then we moved into the remix theories and artmaking practices with the Remix Exquisite Engendering project, which draws from European art history, the surrealist strategy of the Exquisite Corpse,Footnote 7 and from engendering notions of generative. The remix, the appropriations, the parodies, not only convey knowledge but produce new knowledge.

Ugandan students wrote essays about the images that they produced. I assembled the images. I made many versions and put two online for students to view. Ugandan students approached the body very differently than students in my course; perhaps, it was in part a gender difference since I had mostly women in my course, whose body drawings were often about objectification of the female body. By the time I got the images from your group, my semester had ended. Students were very excited about doing this project but didn’t have time to write, or think, or reflect, or have a dialogue with your students about the assembled images. The biggest challenge is the differing timetables of our courses, not only time zone differences. With eight-hour time zone differences, we are confined to certain times, when we are both awake and available. You and I can be more flexible than we can ask of students.

Kabiito: Since 2007, many things have changed, especially the broadband is now much more reliable so we can see each other. Still the university’s internet sometimes slows down when many students are all logged on. However, in the evening we could have good conversations without interruptions, as we did in Fall 2019. The cost of data has come down tremendously because of competition from service providers and students can afford to be connected even when not at the campus and using the university’s internet. Also, there are hot spots around the campus so students can access the internet. Today, it is much easier to teach online with social media platforms like Zoom, WhatsApp, and Facebook. Most teachers are using WhatsApp groups in their courses at Makerere because they are easy to use and don’t require many resources. We succeeded in the past to collaborate, but we now have greater opportunities to collaborate together.

Keifer-Boyd: In looking at the 2020 Remix drawings from Ugandan students, there are plane wings for arms, a waterfall for the chest, a traditional Ugandan pattern for the ribs (see Fig. 16.1). One of the US students drew legs composed of whole human bodies. Some incorporated details and others had bold strokes with markers such as for robot rainbow pelvic and thighs. For the head, the mouth is a collage that a US student did, which I overlaid on the bottom half of the mask a Ugandan student made for the head. Together, the assemblage is a remix of two cultures, especially with the addition of the Ankole cow’s horns in returning story. In the figure on the right, there is a white-collar business shirt by a Ugandan student. On top is a collar that one of my students did that is a Victorian high-neck collar, suggesting women’s confinement. There are lines that suggest energy surrounding the internal organs and what’s hidden.

Fig. 16.1
Two remix drawings of human-like figures by Ugandan students. Each body part is composed of a different visual. The heads are composed of colorful collage images. The pelvis is a detailed bone structure, the arms are airplane wings. There are also thick, curl lines on the abdomen part. The leg part is colorful, and the feet are of wheels.

An Exquisite Engendering remix created by Karen Keifer-Boyd in 2020 from drawings by Makerere University students in Uganda (left) and Penn State students in the US (right).

Full size image

Kabiito: Students in my group were amazed to see how their ideas, their drawings, were assembled to create the whole. It is fascinating how you fit these different pieces to form all the parts of a body. It is meaningful and ingenious because it is a human figure but from all these different parts.

Keifer-Boyd: The style of bright colors creating divisions in the horn is similar in style to the pelvis and legs divided with bright colors, created by three different students, who did not see each other’s work until assembled. The top, middle, and the bottom sections connect in style and color but from different students from very different cultures brought together into one body. None of the students in my class dealt with male genitalia, for instance, while a student in your class used the metaphor of a faucet for male genitals. It is a fascinating addition because most students created the female pelvis. I included every single drawing from seventeen students to create two bodies.

Future Dialogic Media Arts Collaborations

While we reflected on what motivates us to bring students together in transcultural dialogue to collaborate in creating media arts, in conclusion, we discuss how to better facilitate future dialogic media arts collaborations.

Keifer-Boyd: We need to plan early to integrate the project into the courses and our assignments. Exquisite Engendering is not that difficult to explain or do. We will need to decide which classes to partner and begin early in the semester to allow for discussion and assemblage midsemester. Next time, after all students contribute drawings of sections of the body, from these shared elements, let’s ask students to each assemble a body and then a group dialogue on how those elements may change meaning according to how it is assembled. The assemblages could be an exhibition. We could add parameters such as to place their assemblages into an environment. The students are motivated to engage in transcultural dialogues, to have such an opportunity, and then to have a purpose or a task to create art together.

Kabiito: Students in the Narratives of Places project wanted to have another class, which is motivational when students are that eager. From the dialogues, students learn much about the world. It is not necessarily about what we discuss as part of the project but the simple questions that are asked in which students share about themselves. In these collaborations, students are learning new things about themselves and about other people.

Keifer-Boyd: We are sheltered in our own bubble unless we have meaningful dialogue with those different from our network, which is a way to change perspectives, or at least broaden them. I have learned about myself through these experiences. You had the opportunity to come to my home and I had the opportunity to go to your home. Yet not all students will have the opportunity to be immersed in another culture. Use of media arts to facilitate dialogue and create art together is eye-opening and impactful learning about self and others. Our reflections on what motivates us to bring our students together in transcultural dialogue to collaborate in creating media arts motivate us further to continue to collaborate through media arts.