Bittersweet: Witnessing, Performance, Complexity

Karen Keifer-Boyd; Deborah L. Smith-Shank

Karen Keifer-Boyd The Pennsylvania State University
Deborah L. Smith-Shank The Ohio State University

Abstract

This year, our authors consider witnessing, performance, and complexity of trauma (Kwon), mental illness (Richardson), and women artists who have been all but forgotten (Han and Weida). Witnessing can be of your own life, of others' lives, or witnessing the act of witnessing itself (Pérez, 2011). Witnessing is performed and can be especially powerful when shared with others. Performance witnessing is public pedagogy.

Author Biographies

Karen Keifer-Boyd, The Pennsylvania State University

Karen Keifer-Boyd, Ph.D., is Professor of Art Education and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the Pennsylvania State University. She is the 2015 Outstanding Research Awardee from the National Art Educa - tion Association (NAEA) Art Education Technology caucus, the NAEA Distinguished Fellow Class of 2013, the United States Society of Art Education's 2013 Ziegfeld Awardee, the 2012 Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Gender Studies at Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt, Austria, Fulbright awardee for research in Finland in 2006, and NAEA Women's Caucus Connors Teaching Awardee (2005). Her writings on feminist pedagogy, visual culture, inclusion, cyberart activism, transcultural dialogues, action research, social justice arts-based research, and identity are in more than 50 peer-reviewed research publications, and translated into several languages. She co-authored Including Difference (NAEA, 2013); InCITE, InSIGHT, InSITE (NAEA, 2008); Engaging Visual Culture (Davis, 2007); and co-edited Real-World Readings in Art Education (Falmer, 2000). She served as president of the NAEA Women's Caucus from 2010-2012, and is the coordinator of Curricular Encounters with Holocaust Heroes: Fierce Females－Tapestries & Sculpture by Linda Stein and the Judy Chicago Art Education Collection .

Deborah L. Smith-Shank, The Ohio State University

Deborah L. Smith-Shank, Ph.D., is a Professor in the Department of Arts Administration, Education and Policy at The Ohio State University and Emeritus Professor of Art at Northern Illinois University. Her research is involved with material culture and social justice examined through semiotic and feminist lenses. She has published and presented her work nationally and internationally. She is Past-president of NAEA's Women's Caucus and LGBTQ Caucus, she served on the Executive Board of InSEA for more than a decade and is currently President of the Semiotic Society of America. With Karen Keifer-Boyd, she is co-editor and founder of Visual Culture & Gender, an international, freely accessed, multimedia juried journal (http://vcg.emitto.net/).