Controlling the Art School: Ideologies of Materials and a Speculative Vision for Hybrid Arts Education

Yamada-Rice, Dylan ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3917-9197 (2026) Controlling the Art School: Ideologies of Materials and a Speculative Vision for Hybrid Arts Education. Arts, 15 (4). ISSN n/a

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Abstract / Summary

In responding to the special issue’s call to examine the shifting space of materiality, this
article uses creative writing, hand-drawn comics, and speculative fiction/design as a form
of research by practice to critique changes in UK Higher Arts Education in relation to art
materials. It shows how embedded neoliberal structures that have been documented to
negatively impact HE staff and the arts in general, also now extend to prioritising and
excluding some art materials over others. A speculative vision is offered as an alternative
in which a nomadic higher arts education is put forward, one that encourages the use of
hybrid art materials. The means chosen to make the arguments presented are analogue
methods of drawing, cutting, printing, sewing and writing to strengthen the point that
digital materials are currently prioritised in UK arts education due to HE’s entanglement
with agendas entwinned with Big Tech and most recently the military. The format is also
deliberately experimental to move away from common ways of presenting research and
theory that have become formulaic as academics are pushed to meet the ideals of the
Research Excellence Framework, another neoliberal rubric.

Item Type:	Article
Identification Number:	doi.org/10.3390/arts15040073
ISSN:	n/a
eISSN:	2076-0752
Subjects:	Art History & Theory
Department:	Academy of Innovation and Research
Depositing User:	Dylan Yamada-Rice
Date Deposited:	16 Apr 2026 11:53
Last Modified:	16 Apr 2026 11:53
URI:	https://repository.falmouth.ac.uk/id/eprint/6439

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