Art, Passion, Politics, Praxis with Deborah Barndt - Community Arts Practice Co-ordinator, Professor of Environmental Studies at York University. Deborah was a student of the 60s in the U.S. civil rights, anti-war, and women's movements; studied in comparative sociology in the U.S., France, and Peru; plunged into 25 years of social justice activism in popular education programs in Nicaragua, the U.S., and Canada; taught at universities in the U.S., Quebec, and Ontario; has a passion for the arts and her work as a photographer.
In her work she is drawn to the issues of knowledge, power and identity within a diverse, diasporic population, and what new ways knowledge and culture can be created. She has consistently used photographs as research tools to stimulate collective analysis, to make visible marginalized groups and processes, and to communicate to a broader public. She completed a BA in comprehensive social studies at Otterbein College in Ohio which included a year abroad at the Université de Strasbourg in France. She worked on an MA in social psychology (on the time consciousness of Guatemalan peasants) and later a PhD in comparative sociology at Michigan State University. After completing participatory research for her doctorate on the ground-breaking theory and practice of the Brazilian educator, Paulo Freire, in Peru in the mid-70s, she chose to work in the field of popular education rather than just study it. Nonetheless, over the next 20 years as a community-based educator, she kept one toe in the academic world, teaching psychology at a U.S. community college, community development at Concordia, adult education at OISE, and photography and society at the University of Toronto.
She began a cross-border research project that explores the dynamic and contested development of community arts in Toronto, and an exchange with people engaged in popular communications and popular education in Central America. She sees the arts, and in particular, community arts and activist art, as perfect sites for examining the creative tensions of process/product, aesthetics/ethics, cultural reclamation/cultural reinvention, and the spiritual/political. Deborah has authored and edited many books. She edited Women Working The Nafta Food Chain: Women, Food and Globalization in 1999, Wildfire - Art as Activism (with grad students who were artists/activists) in 2006, and authored Tangled Routes: Women, Work and Globalization on the Tomato Trail in 2008. She is currently editing VIVA! Community Arts and Popular Education in the Americas which will be published by SUNY Press in 2011. Deborah will also be speaking at the inspiring 2010 Bioneers Conference in October on a panel entitled Teaching Art as a Subversive Activity: Cultural Democracy Meets Eco-Art.