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This paper establishes a novel niche by providing an original critical synthesis of the potentials and challenges of using public art to teach about, and "que(e)ry", sexuality, gender and space. The argument vouches for a critical pedagogy that pursues a visual politics for experiential and potentially transformative learning about processes of social inclusion and exclusion, marginalization, and empowerment. It draws from vignettes of first-hand pedagogical methods "in class" (in the form of collaborative class debates coordinated through creative educative content including an infographic and educational film) and "in the field" (in the form of a guided walking tour abroad). The vignettes illustrate how a critical pedagogy aims to instigate "awakenings" and deconstructions of norms (e.g. heteronormativity) and privileged positionalities (e.g. cisgendered, white (gay) male). The analysis indicates multi-sited levels of "praxes": critical "reflections" and critical actions that may stretch beyond the teaching space into "real-world" contexts. The paper demonstrates the value of putting personal experience central by interlocking research and teaching practices. It thereby shows the value of collaborative knowledge production for situated, nuanced understandings of self/culture. This study advocates further "first-person" investigation into the ensuing challenges of negotiating topic sensitivity and the disclosure of positionalities (of both educator and learner).

This paper investigates the political implications of public art using frameworks of conflict and antagonism. We introduce 'restor(y)ing' as an analytical scaling device for examining public art's potential to destabilise official planning processes and reclaim cities through acts of re-telling (restorying) and re-making (restoring) urban spaces. We probe how commissioned/formal and unsolicited/informal public art practices can concurrently operate as artistic activism – or 'artivism' – to subvert the status quo in urban contexts that encounter rising socio-spatial inequalities. We deploy restor(y)ing both as an epistemic and real-world commitment to challenging hegemonic powers, and thus amplify activist agendas of marginalised communities. Our argument demonstrates how such politics of restor(y)ing works as a device to unpack conflictual interrelations between 'æffects': affects and effects that political public art can invoke simultaneously, yet potentially unevenly. The politics of æffects reveal contestations around public art in urban planning contexts and policies, public communication, and reception. They foreground intended inclusions vs. systemic exclusions (politics of effects) and the emanating impacts on urban belonging vs. alienation (politics of affects). While much public art scholarship accentuates its alleged positive benefits, we attend to the (oft-ambiguous) negative, conflict-attuned æffects of public art. Ultimately, we advocate for an intersectional approach to restor(y)ing urban justice through public artivism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite growing debate about the role of monuments in diverse societies, there has been insufficient attention to contestations that have emerged involving 'gay' or 'queer' monuments. This article examines the politics of inclusion and exclusion that can stem from the social practices that evolve around these monuments, particularly as the imperatives and priorities of LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer) activism evolve while monuments, created in a particular historical and geographical context, are in some sense 'set in stone'. Drawing on an intensive, mixed-methods case study of the Homomonument in Amsterdam, the article develops a grounded critique of processes of inclusion and exclusion specifically in relation to Black, bisexual and transgender people. With a focus on dance parties organised at the Homomonument, the article calls for more research that analyses monuments as sites of practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article synthesizes original comparative perspectives of visibility, (counter)actions, and legacy regarding queer monuments: public artworks dedicated to, and questioning or queering normativities around, the lives of LGBT+ people. It pursues a dialogic, interdisciplinary, and multisite and intercultural argument, drawing from approaches and preliminary insights from a scholarly project (Queer Memorials) and artist's project (Strange Inheritance) with topical case studies covering North America and Europe. After abductive ethnography, the analysis oscillates between theory/literature and scholarly and creative practice. It attends to the critical roles queer monuments have played in engaging with how sexual "others" have fallen in and out of place through social struggles, radical politics, and collective memory. The peer exchange provides a cross-case taxonomy of queer monuments' roles, navigating between sorrowful, celebratory, provocative, and informative types and values. It advocates both arts-based enquiry and practice as grounded pathways for narrating queer monuments' activist potential to memorialize, and visibilize, sexual and gender minorities and their overlapping rights in/to space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper establishes a novel niche by providing an original critical synthesis of the potentials and challenges of using public art to teach about, and "que(e)ry", sexuality, gender and space. The argument vouches for a critical pedagogy that pursues a visual politics for experiential and potentially transformative learning about processes of social inclusion and exclusion, marginalization, and empowerment. It draws from vignettes of first-hand pedagogical methods in class (in the form of collaborative class debates coordinated through creative educative content including an infographic and educational film) and in the field (in the form of a guided walking tour abroad). The vignettes illustrate how a critical pedagogy aims to instigate "awakenings" and deconstructions of norms (e.g. heteronormativity) and privileged positionalities (e.g. cisgendered, white (gay) male). The analysis indicates multi-sited levels of praxes: critical reflections and critical actions that may stretch beyond the teaching space into "real-world" contexts. The paper demonstrates the value of putting personal experience central by interlocking research and teaching practices. It thereby shows the value of collaborative knowledge production for situated, nuanced understandings of self/culture. This study advocates further "first-person" investigation into the ensuing challenges of negotiating topic sensitivity and the disclosure of positionalities (of both educator and learner). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contributes to scholarship on urban visual culture by advancing understandings of how visual imageries may become (online and off-line) sites of confrontation between dominant media perspectives and the lived experiences of urban citizens. Based on participatory photography amongst local residents in Detroit, this article provides transformative insights by contrasting sense makings of Detroiters with dominant media portrayals of a "decaying" city. Residents were asked what images they would use to "see" and represent the city. Photo elicitation interviews revealed interlaced lived experienced and narrated reminiscences of local life and the material urban fabric beyond the prevailing narratives of mere neglect and abandonment. This study develops further knowledge of how photography can simultaneously operate as a critical socio-spatial research subject and an empowering tool for research participants. Through shifting the hegemonic locus of media agents toward residents' positionalities, findings indicated potentials for redressing the misunderstood spaces of the everyday life of ordinary people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Responding to geography's digital and political turns, this article presents an original critical synthesis of the under-examined niche of networked geographies of public-art practices in today's politicised digital culture. This article advances insights into digital public art as politics, and its role in politicising online public spaces with foci on: how digital technologies have instigated do-it-yourself modes for the co-creation of art content within peer-to-peer contexts; the way art is 'stretched' and experienced in/across the digital public sphere; and how user-(co-)created content has become subject to (mis)uses, simultaneously informed by digital 'artivism' and a new global politics infused with populism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholarship has largely been conducted on publics’ ‘offline’ public art encounters, while public art practice has become increasingly integrated with virtual dimensions. This article aims to fill this gap by focusing on digitally mediated public art engagement. A case study on the travelling Rubber Duck exhibition (2012–present) interrogates how this artwork is appropriated and narrated through digitally networked spaces (mainly social media, forums and news platforms) after its repeated on-site installations. This article argues for the need to expand on ‘virtual relationality’: the communication, (re-)negotiation and (re-)siting of public art’s roles and meanings through (mainly text- and image-based) social mediations within hybrid, online-offline contexts. Public art encounters are examined along fluid cybergeographical understandings of its social and spatial publicness, temporalities and uses, which deconstruct binaries including material/digital space, permanence/ephemerality and human/non-human. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Emotions have remained under-addressed in scholarship on public memorial art, particularly with sexuality content. This case study on the Amsterdam-based Homomonument attends to this gap by differentiating emotions according to multi-scalar, multi-temporal and multi-semiotic dimensions of everyday lived experiences of sexual citizenship. Based on discourse analysis of secondary materials and social media coverage, supplemented with auto-ethnographic experience, the study explores how present-day feelings of respect, agitation and celebration around Homomonument are mediated at intersecting levels of the body, local community, broader society and especially emergent virtual community spaces. Such understanding requires critical interfaces with reminiscences, contemporary values and normativities, and future imaginaries. Specifically, this paper puts in perspective how Homomonument operates as queer micropublic: a space for intercultural encounter and 'queerying' sexual difference. This appears to be a multifaceted meaningful process, too: Homomonument ambiguously holds contesting, reconciling, indifferent and empathic sentiments alongside belongings and sexual identity expressions in quotidian life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]