Exploring the effect of inequality-themed artworks on Academic Support teaching

Paper delivered at the UAL Education Conference on 1st July 2025. The paper discussed the outcomes of the Academic Support workshop that Sidney ran in 2024-25 titled 'Analysing and Reflecting on Artworks'. This workshop was designed as part of their PgCert Academic Practice in Art, Design and Communication qualification.

Abstract
Academic Support teaching can address inequalities experienced by learners by adopting innovative pedagogies that enable students to explore a key skill – analysis in this instance – through the analytical potential of politicised artworks that themselves address inequalities. In Sidney’s taught sessions students undertook practical art-making activities that were inherently analytical: they redacted in response to Lubaina Himid’s use of it in her artwork, made personally significant photographs in response to Félix González-Torres’s billboard artwork and produced creative text captions for provided images that disrupted the relationship between image and text – as Martha Rosler had done in her artwork.

Session and activities
The session will be a paper with accompanying slides delivered by Sidney Hope that is derived from the final assessment presentation of their Action Research Project as part of the PgCert Academic Practice in Art, Design and Communication course they recently concluded at UAL. The final Action Research unit required that students undertake a small-scale social/climate/racial justice-oriented action research project. Sidney is an Academic Support Lecturer at Chelsea college and their paper is about the 4 taught Academic Support workshops they delivered in the Autumn term 2024 that used interactions with inequality-themed artworks to support students’ learning of analysis. The sessions were for BA and MA Fine Art students. The chosen artworks used were Lubaina Himid, Negative Positives, 2007-2017, Félix González-Torres, Untitled, 1991 and Martha Rosler, The Bowery in two inadequate descriptive systems, 1974–75. Students were asked to make their own artworks using the methods of each artist. Part of Sidney’s final PgCert project was the analysis of data drawn from the taught sessions: this focused on the students’ responses to Lubaina Himid’s artworks which redacted The Guardian newspaper – the students were asked to do the same. The data showed that students’ engagement was diverse, encompassing a range of methods of both highlighting and redacting text and images, suggesting that they were critically engaged in the task and wanted to respond thoughtfully to the news stories. The data is presented using methods drawn from K. P. Brehmer’s politicised and data-driven artwork.