Professor Ross says that her “title is taken from the Artists’ Manifesto proclaimed during the 1871 Paris Commune, and in my talk I return to that event in order to reexamine ideas developed by the Communards regarding education and the status of the artist from the perspective of our own moment, a context that includes the contemporary assault on higher education as well as the world-wide uprisings of 2011. What resonance might Communard practices in direct democracy have for people engaged in social movements today? I will touch on questions of internationalism, the insurrectional or anarchist city, and anti-productivism, but focus primarily on a kind of Rancierian-inflected discussion of art education and the figure of the artist.”

This is the second of two “Humanities on the Edge” lectures during spring semester (the other is February 21). The topic for what is the series’ third year is “Aesthetics/Performance/Politics.”