LiberArte (Revista Inactiva)

LiberArte is a magazine of the Liberal Arts Department of the Universidad San Francisco de Quito. Our objective is to raise a transdisciplinary debate, open to all types of publics, on the mission and destiny of education in the Liberal Arts in the contemporary context.

LiberArte insists on the need both for the collective elaboration of the critical task that is indispensable in any educational project and for the unavoidable task of rethinking teaching practice in the light of the new global order. We aspire to systematize the critical and educational thought that is generated around the university but we are also open to new languages, approaches and approaches to contemporary issues from multiple fronts.

Liber Arte is an annual publication that is generated from within the applied space of the Liberal Arts in a specific university; however, the opinions, observations and assertions poured from within its pages are the responsibility of each of its contributors and do not necessarily reflect the policies or positions of the magazine or of the Universidad San Francisco de Quito.

Liber Arte is organized in three segments: Libertinage, Free Radicals and Free Fall. The first of these assumes a thematic challenge, the idea is to approach a particular topic from multiple viewpoints, some of them, not all, disciplinary, others, not all, playful or alternative. The second segment fundamentally deals with the subject of teaching and seeks to present concrete experiences in this field from different places, spaces and sites of enunciation. The third segment publishes texts of cultural criticism of different kinds and presents alternative projects.

DEBAUCHERY

Debauchery is a space to do what in May '68 was projected as a slogan: penser autrement, think alternatively (but also, think to the other). In this section we propose a specific theme (in this issue the intersection between music and Ecuadorian culture) and we try to approach it from multiple places; the objective is to project glances that may be of interest to think about a certain phenomenon, we also seek to decenter those glances by means of the import of a playful text, capable of opening a gap of astonishment (of freedom) within the formal discourse of the academy.

FREE RADICALS

This section asks about the conditions of possibility of a pedagogy without guarantees ; that is to say, a teaching exercise that does not bet in the last instance on the argument of individual or collective progress. Having seen the global "failure" of many highly educated societies, their stampede towards crisis, we want to think about the practice of teaching as an enigma, as a space for dialogue where everything can happen and where everything is to be (re)discovered. With this objective in mind, we present interviews with practising educators on various fronts and receive testimonies on their views, hopes and judgements, as well as diagnostic information on the state of education today.

FREE FALL

This miscellaneous section is composed of texts of cultural criticism. The explicit objective is to explore multiple cultural manifestations in the light of a policy of understanding our concrete circumstances. Cultural analysis operates here as a kind of compass for the better understanding of the hallucinatory global coordinates that we progressively occupy today. The contributions range from a rigorous analysis of the new global geopolitics through texts in the mass media to the exploration of local objects and media that establish novel positions for understanding what is ours. The segment also includes a space for letters to the editor, a guest blogger and institutional news related to cultural projects related to the Liberal Arts.