Enabling Media : Infrastructures, imaginaries and cultural techniques in Swedish and Estonian visual arts education

Abstract: This dissertation explores the media environments of visual arts education in Sweden and Estonia and how educators understand, negotiate and enable this infrastructure. Based on the notion that the ongoing digitalization of the educational system in these countries makes established practices appear, it further discusses how visual arts education as a school subject is shaped in relation to different technologies for image making and school administration. The comparative perspective makes visible how these practices have emerged in specific cultural settings, including the historical development of compulsory education and the organization of teacher training in each country. The two-way relation in which media technologies used in education to some extent condition pedagogical practice at the same time as being dependent on the work of educators, is conceptualized in the title as enabling media.Theoretically, the dissertation draws on infrastructuralism, suggested by Peters (2015), as a unifying concept for media studies interested in the logistical qualities of media. By using this perspective to study schools as media environments, the dissertation builds on an established interest within medium theory on the relation between compulsory education and media technologies. This tradition is developed here through theoretical perspectives and concepts from media philosophy, German media theory, infrastructure studies and science and technology studies.Infrastructure studies also informed the methodological approach of this dissertation, a combination of short time ethnographic field work, site visits, interviews, and visual methods.The results of the dissertation indicate that it is not only established media literacy competences such as the ability to interpret and create media content that visual arts education can contribute in our contemporary media society, but also the ability to recognize, visualize and reimagine the infrastructures and technologies involved in the distribution of media. This ability is conceptualized here as infrastructure literacy (Parks, 2010) and concretized in a tentative curriculum, including lesson plans and assignments designed to facilitate historicizing, explorative and material approaches to media in school art education.