In recent years, we have witnessed a reconsideration of the place of artistic research, artistic practices, and the formal and non-formal educational processes that accompany them in Latin America and the Caribbean. This reconsideration brings with it three demands that define the current state of knowledge production in/of the arts: 1) It is no longer possible to define "Art" according to heteropatriarchal, Eurocentric, and colonial criteria that exclude practices produced outside the limits drawn by such a definition. It is necessary to address the political challenge of developing definitions of artistic and educational practices—both within and outside the university setting—that give visibility to historically excluded ways of producing knowledge. This leads us to consider artistic productions as intersectional forms of transversal knowledge production; 2) this reconsideration implies a reworking of methodological and epistemological models of knowledge production that, in our neoliberal and globalizing context, establish criteria of technocratic effectiveness and efficiency as truth. This is not about asserting the need for an epistemology of the arts that situates them within the normalized sphere of knowledge production, but rather about establishing a heuristic of knowledge that fosters inquiry into universal yet situated themes, from and with the arts. This implies a particular form of knowledge production, where the arts are a privileged sphere for thinking about and producing non-hegemonic alternatives to the traditional mode of knowledge production; 3) It is necessary to re-inscribe artistic and research practices in the arts as situated perspectives in relation to technocratic developments, taking into account the heterogeneities that shape what we call cultures (understood as spaces of irresolvable conflict and tension, that is, as political spaces). This implies taking a stance against structures of domination, positioning artistic and arts education practices as unique experiences of political construction.

Beyond our region's long tradition of artistic training, the status of art as a means of knowledge production has not been investigated in its own right. Its role has been that of a circumstantial accompaniment to other forms of knowledge production, which found in it a mode of illustration or representation that did not constitute specific knowledge. Hence the need to investigate them today as practices of knowledge that cannot be subjected to the epistemological reductionisms of the sciences and technologies, and that allow us to consider the political nature of such epistemologies, requiring us to think of alternatives that articulate the unique characteristics of research in the arts. In this sense, we share with Carlos Paiva that "the existence of art and art education in the university, a result of the weight they acquire in the social fabric of this controversial contemporary era, as well as the social and political value that emanates from artistic activity, and the precious presence of the educational eminence of the artistic, declare the indispensability of their presence in the possibility of designing the future, as well as the urgency of clarifying the new figures of recognition of the research that integrates this field, without fear of chaos, without fear of disorder and chance, without fear of the human capacity to seek other limits."

Arts education challenges a rigid, hierarchical, and utilitarian approach to learning, proposing instead a vision of education as a shared, multidirectional, and situated endeavor. This approach fosters the emergence of new languages, new ways of thinking, imagining, and shaping the future. It is an education for the practice of interculturality, where other epistemologies, other forms of knowledge, and other ways of being and understanding the world come into play. In short, arts education and artistic creation are seen as emancipatory and political actions.

It is because of all the above that we ask ourselves:

What kind of knowledge constitutes artistic practices? In what sense does the production of this knowledge imply a questioning of epistemologies and necessitate the construction of an intersectional heuristic of knowledge? How can we foster horizontal, non-hierarchical, and transversal political connections based on the relationship between education and the arts? How can we develop evaluative criteria that take into account the transversal nature of research in the arts? What kind of evaluation is necessary to support the transversal processes of artistic production? How can we develop our own criteria for accrediting knowledge production? In what ways and to what extent are the arts a form of knowledge exchange?

This Working Group's proposal builds upon the work carried out during the 2019-2022 period by the Arts, Education, and Citizenship Working Group, with the aim of continuing the collective work undertaken in recent years. At the same time, it proposes to develop systematic collaboration with other Working Groups and CLACSO Member Centers, as well as with individuals, collectives, social organizations, institutions, and communities in the region, integrating contributions from the sciences, arts, and education geared towards research and the cross-cutting production of situated knowledge. Also central to this approach is the task of identifying, promoting, supporting, and strengthening advocacy processes in public policy and/or spheres related to the evaluation and accreditation of the arts in the aforementioned contexts.

As a starting point, we reaffirm the principles set forth in the Buenos Aires Declaration (2018) and the Chuquipata Declaration (2019), promoted by the arts departments of universities in the region, regarding the need to guarantee the human right to knowledge. To this end, "it is fundamental to recognize the strategic role of the arts and culture in the production of knowledge with social commitment, in the struggle for cultural sovereignty, sustainable development, and the pluricultural integration of the regions." We also add to this what is established in the Guayaquil Manifesto (2019): "it is essential to generate specific frameworks for legitimizing and evaluating the processes of teaching, learning, and research in the arts."

In this way, we propose to strengthen our network by advancing an agenda at the regional and international level regarding the implications of intersectionality and transversality in the arts.

Arts research has become a field of possibilities for exploring comparative analyses and alternative research models that update the intersections between perception, affect, and thought. It constitutes an expanding territory, simultaneously itinerant and erratic, since it stems from highly diverse perspectives and languages, and, precisely for this reason, can erode the boundaries between crystallized and institutionalized fields of knowledge. The articulations between the arts in education and arts education challenge a rigid, vertical, and utilitarian type of learning, proposing instead a concept of education as a shared, multidirectional, and situated action. Education, conceived as a practice for freedom (Freire), opens the field to other forms of knowledge and other subjectivities; arts education and artistic creation become emancipatory and political actions.

The transformations that university institutions are undergoing when registering artistic, educational and research practices of/in art require the formulation of specific evaluation mechanisms that, at the same time, guarantee their inclusion in educational and research practices (both at the undergraduate and postgraduate levels) and allow the monitoring of the achievements reached by these heuristics not regulated by technocratic models.

We can broadly identify two positions being debated in the region: on the one hand, a critique of the increasing control over knowledge production—in terms of accreditation and evaluation mechanisms and standards—which impose their methodological frameworks and evaluation criteria on artistic research, diminishing its critical potential; and on the other, a conception that places emerging forms of contemporary art, such as performativity, immateriality, and creativity, at the epicenter of the socioeconomic transformations of the knowledge society. For both, the role of universities and art institutions must be examined in light of the impact of artistic production on the knowledge economy.

The first position describes the fundamental role that academic institutions acquire in the growing process of the commodification of knowledge: in the shift from a conception of value as the objectification of material labor to the idea of ​​innovation and knowledge as immaterial "raw material" for value creation in the new phase of capital. Artistic production, traditionally located on the margins of academic institutions and at the antipodes of the scientific model, would remain a space of freedom and resistance. Its inclusion in the dynamics of institutional research models would, according to this position, lead to an exhaustion of art's creative potential: its power to transgress and disrupt the norm.

The second position, in our view, presents the problem in a more complex and dialectical way. It involves, first and foremost, considering the implications of art—of the aesthetic regimes that validate it and the practices in which it unfolds—with economic and social processes. It involves questioning the discourse that, by positioning itself as the guardian of a supposed critical purity of the work, merely validates the ideological model that deepens its uselessness and social marginality. It involves postulating the imbrication of art with its material conditions of existence since, as Benjamin (2007) points out, there is no document of culture that is not also a document of barbarism.

All these issues loom large on the horizon of our professional practice as teachers, researchers, and university stakeholders. Indeed, higher education and artistic research must generate strategies to resist the advance of a university project subjected to the demands of the World Trade Organization (WTO). Reaffirming autonomy as a right and a necessary condition for academic (and artistic) work carried out freely implies understanding that autonomy is the condition for the critical engagement of knowledge with the social and cultural contexts to which it belongs (Torlucci, 2018).

In an international context that exhibits a radical change in its productive matrix, which has shifted the core of economic valorization towards the sphere of knowledge production, the study and discussion of the arts in education and their contribution to the construction of transversal knowledge that dethrones neoliberal utilitarian models constitutes a relevant area for problematizing key issues for the future of our countries and the continent.

This GT is part of a current of thought that revalues ​​the arts as a form of production, research and enhancement of transversal knowledge, which question the logocentric paradigm on which our educational institutions and especially universities were forged.

In this sense, we propose that knowledge is not merely the production of discourse claiming to be true (according to the principles of efficacy, efficiency, and capitalist performativity—Rolnik, Guattari), but rather implies a diaspora of actions (discursive and non-discursive) in which a culture recognizes its divergences. It is not a matter of reducing differences to a common ground, but of maintaining their tensions for the production of a political community that guarantees the disparity of interests that comprise it. This field of tensions presents us with the challenge of rethinking the modes of production, recognition, evaluation, validation, and accreditation of artistic practices in a situated manner, with the practices themselves being susceptible to further transformations. This approach allows us to consider new traditions—which Western thought has overlooked in its understanding of art—as part of a communal and politically participatory knowledge expressed through images, sounds, popular cultural practices, and the non-hegemonic ways of life of minority and/or marginalized groups—youth, children, gender collectives, Indigenous peoples—who construct knowledge that hegemonic epistemologies cannot consider. Thus, the validation of this transversal and intersectional knowledge cannot be based on quantitative criteria, but rather on methods that consider the political significance of its elaborations.

In this vein, we believe that the arts should be evaluated in a situated manner, given the political transformations they propose in their ways of rethinking community ties, in order to confront the evolving forms of cognitive and platform capitalism that shape an art market. This must be done without falling back into autonomist discourses that treated art as a self-contained sphere, disconnected from lived experience. In other words, a situated mode of evaluation can simultaneously reveal the critical and political potential of artistic practices in the face of traditional forms of market valuation.

A heuristic of artistic and educational practices aims to present itself as an intersectional alternative to the production of knowledge, one that considers its collective, transversal, non-heteronormative, and decolonial nature for economic and social transformation. The possibility of developing a new aesthetic-political community (Rancière) presupposes the elaboration of principles that are rendered impossible by epistemologies that adopt models inherited from a politics of knowledge whose ultimate goal is the production of surplus value and which continues to reproduce the economic, political, and social inequalities that characterized the 20th century and are deepening in the 21st.