Who
we are
LiberArte is a play on words. In Spanish it can be read variously
to mean, Liberal Arts (Artes Liberales, the Art of Freedom),
the mandate Free yourself (Libérate)and finally
the mandate liberate herbal tea. (liberar té).
In the present moment, where the possibility of significant social change awakens
great skepticism and unrest we wish to think about the radical possibilities
of pedagogy; if Liberal Arts education occurs at all, it takes place within
the classroom. Our desire then, is to reflect upon our own teaching practices
in order to both revitalize them and to participate in the search for other forms
of instruction and learning that might push us toward community based horizons
and citizen participation committed to change
This is the reason for the tea cup. As we understand it, the single most important
obstacle in the way of a consistent reform program is the progressive diminishment
of shared spaces for dialogue and reflection. The implacable rhythms of
social production, of capital recovery, the very speed of daily life conspire
against the possibility of collaboration, mutual understanding, civility. To
sum up : there is a plot against the tea cup.
We believe it necessary to build free and collaborative projects between students
and instructors, between workers and administrators, between those who provide
services and their clients, we desire and believe in sitting down to tea.
The historical appearance of tea as a mass commodity escorts British imperial
expansion. First imported from India as a rarity, the habit of tea extends itself
across English society like a forest fire on dry branches. Already at the end
of the XIX century , world trade in tea can be measured in millions of pounds.
A very brief time after the custom of tea drinking is established in England,
its consumption at a world level is identified as much with global British power
as with the leisure of its elites, that is, with their freedom. European artists
soon adopt the custom, both for its undeniable exoticism as well as for the spread
of tea salons, places in which artists socialize after their recent liberation
from the bonds of patronage on their way now towards the scouring experience
of newly minted professions. During all of this there is an internationalization
of the rite: once the masses develop a taste for the drink, they adopt and transform
the scene of consumption, they liberate tea, so to speak, from its submission
to the idea of economic privilege.
We propose then, a second liberation, this time, in digital form, of tea (perhaps
it is actually a third, Lewis Carroll having provided the second). This product,
already involved in a historical struggle expressed in civil disobedience in
1773 in the famous Boston Tea Party, seeks, once again to serve as pretext for
the recovery of community, for citizen participation and for intellectual
collaboration.
The Project
Liber Arte presents three different moments/segments, per issue.
The first of these is called Libertinaje, which we have translated
as Libertins; that is, someone who is “excessive in words
or deeds” according to a dictionary definition. This corresponds roughly
to the central concern for the journal, we seek here to establish a given content
and to explore it from different viewpoints and perspectives. The primary objective
is to deal with a given topic by means of a sustained, rigorous and interested
gaze which in its turn hopes to attract diverse and perhaps experimental approaches.
The second moment of the journal is called Radicales Libres (Free Radicals),
it seeks to put in circulation different and distinct pedagogic projects. Its
purpose is to make visible the vast diversity of teaching approaches that surround
us while placing emphasis on the materiality of each proposal. How is the teaching
of sculpture different than teaching philosophy? In which ways does matter (in
all senses of the word) affect teaching content? This segment invites educators
of all types to share their successes and failures, their expectations and fears
with those of us who are committed to thinking the process of teaching/learning
as a practice which is in a state of fugue, in continuous construction.
The third and last part of the journal is called Caída Libre (Free
Fall) and it is mostly a place for cultural critique of all sorts: art,
film, theatre, book reviews, letters to the editor, etc. We wish to provide our
collaborators with room to comment and disseminate those works they have reflected
upon, those commercials that they deeply reject or those books or films or conversations
that have given them pause. We are enthusiastic with the possibility that this
publication may be of interest to a wide audience and above all, with the prospect
that, amidst these pages under construction, from each semester to the next,
USFQ and an Ecuadorian and International community may find some affinity with
this project as well as the desire to collaborate with us in exploring those
unknown territories—global and Ecuadorian at one and the same time—of
freedom, community and open education. |
