Creative Learning Hub
Creative Learning Hub
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We are delighted to welcome Dr Marquard Smith and teresa cisneros to the Creative Learning Hub. This gathering will introduce Marq and teresa's extensive contributions to building inclusive, responsible and socially engaged practices in museum and gallery education, and organisational design.
Join Marquard and teresa in a discussion of the topics raised In Spite Of.... the Journal of Education in Museums, how the framing of the publication was developed and what do we learn from the companionship fostered through shared commitments.Your voice and experience is valued in this open discussion.
Here is an extract from their introduction:
The issue began with a simple but urgent question: how do we keep making, teaching, organising, and imagining in a world that keeps trying to shut those possibilities down?
Across museums, galleries, archives, classrooms, artist-run spaces, and community infrastructures, cultural workers continue to create, make, teach, organise, and imagine otherwise; often in conditions marked by austerity, censorship, political hostility, burnout, and institutional fatigue. These are environments increasingly hostile to the very possibility of public culture. And yet, in the cracks where institutions both challenge and fail us, people persist. In spite of… it all, they continue to build spaces of learning, connection, and cultural possibility. It is work that is generous, critical, and transformative.
This issue brings together contributors from around the world who are doing precisely that: sustaining cultural, creative, and educational work not because conditions are favourable, but because the work is necessary.
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‘In Spite Of…’ is a testament to the ingenuity, courage, and imagination of cultural workers who continue to create worlds in a world that often undermines their efforts. It reminds us that cultural work is not a luxury; it is a form of survival, a method of resistance, untold futures that the walls of institutions cannot contain. Because cultural work is never neutral: it is shaped by histories, politics, and power, and it has the capacity to challenge, unsettle, and transform.
The contributions gathered here show that even in moments of profound crisis – ecological, political, institutional, personal – people continue to build, teach, organise, remember, and create. We hope this issue offers readers not only insight into the diverse practices represented here, but also a sense of companionship, a recognition that across borders and contexts, many of us are engaged in parallel struggles and shared commitments.
In spite of everything, cultural work continues. And because of everything, it must.
Read the full introduction here
Dr Marquard Smith is Academic Director, AHRC's London Arts & Humanities Partnership, Founder and Editor-in-Chief, Journal of Visual Culture. He works with MA and PhD students at UCL IoE and is a contributor to the Emerging Curators Programme, delivered in partnership by CVAN London and Brent Council.
teresa cisneros is an equity‑centred practitioner working at The Law Society (EDI Manager) and as Curator of People via sensemaking.org.uk. Her practice supports organisations to navigate complexity, culture change and ethical decision‑making through collaborative, reflective and care‑led approaches. Drawing on work across the arts, culture, biomedical health research and higher education, she focuses on building inclusive, responsible and socially engaged organisational practices. She has worked at Wellcome Trust, Wellcome Collection, The Showroom Gallery and Iniva.
Read more about GEM and join via https://gem.org.uk/join-gem
ABOUT
The Creative Learning Hub is part of CVAN London’s Education programme and brings together creative learning professionals, aspiring creative learning professionals, freelance participatory artists and practitioners engaged in creative learning pedagogies in online conversations.
We are working towards and campaign for inclusive and equitable arts education, and the promotion of lifelong cultural learning opportunities for all.
From early years, compulsory and higher education, gallery and museum creative learning, through to professional development and leadership via informal and non-traditional programmes, we support diverse and expanded ways to access and engage with the arts.
The education programme is underpinned by the Anti-Racist and Equitable Visual Arts (AREVA) programme