In this talk, I’d like to consider festivals as resonant, if largely underacknowledged, sites for advancing social justice through the arts. I’m interested in how best, as arts presenters, we can build the curatorial capacities of arts organizations so that they might participate meaningfully in enabling generative forms of community-making, critical thinking, and social practice. What might it mean to consider festival organizers as community-based educators and activists? To understand festivals as alternative pedagogical institutions? To recognize the work we do at our festivals as a vital form of activist arts-based practice? I’ll argue that festivals are not simply about programming; rather, they are complex sites for practicing the social, for activating diverse energies of critique and inspiration, for making a difference in their communities by creating time and space to sound, and to stage, new forms of social organization. They are public-facing pedagogical interventions that frequently question static relations of power, that seek to build alternative models of community and social cooperation, and that often explicitly set out to challenge taken-for-granted representations. Curatorial decisions, in other words, are far from neutral: they involve choices that are connected in complex and important ways to broader struggles over resources, identity formation, and power.

My work on (and my vision of) festivals takes its primary cue and inspiration from creative and critical practices that seek to define broader pedagogical priorities in terms of an activist and community-based orientation. Critic and educator Doris Sommer suggests in her book The Work of Art in the World that what may begin as an artistic practice doesn’t necessarily stop there. It can, as she puts it, “ripple into extraartistic institutions and practices. Humanistic interpretation,” she continues, “has an opportunity to trace those ripple effects and to speculate about the dynamics in order to encourage more movement.” Celebrating a growing interest in community-engaged pedagogy, Sommer tells us that “[i]n the best cases, engagement combines with public scholarship to identify underrepresented creative partners who test, stretch, and refine what we learn and teach.” Building on such outward-looking prompts—and inspired by Sommer’s call for an engaged pedagogy that can test, stretch, and refine our teaching and learning practices—I will use this talk on festivals to prompt consideration of how alternative pedagogical institutions function in our communities, and with what impact.