why
Float
I was sitting on the beach drinking in the ocean air on the first day of a desperately needed 4-day vacation when I got the call, and they threatened my job the first time.
Two years and legislative cycles later, our jobs were tangled in a morass of real and anticipated new and emerging state law that articulated vague rationale for dire consequences for faculty employees who teach or use theories on race, gender, or sexuality in the classroom.
In the College of the Arts, we were three years
into a strategic plan that unflinchingly called
for an assessment of our curricula and
teaching methodologies in the interest of
racist, and post and anti-colonial evolutions.
We had, for four years, been hiring a cohort of faculty
distinguished particularly by their change-making
activist work in the interest of systemic and cultural
justice and the capacity to meet paradigmatic
with generative catalytic action.
We wrote the following:
“The University of Florida College of the Arts intends to be a transformative community, responding to and generating paradigmatic shifts in the arts and beyond. As artists and scholars, we embrace the complexity of our evolving human experience and seek to empower our students and faculty to shape that experience fearlessly through critical study, creative practice, and provocation.
We seek a colleague who identifies as a change-maker.
We seek a colleague who will prepare students to access and unsettle centersof power in a radically changing world.
In the face of what appeared, to many of us, as the most naked expression of white supremacy and unadulterated assertion of state dominance that we had seen in our lifetimes, there was something like a collective gasp, a suspension of our breath, of our momentum. Like a shock.
FLOAT is a project conceived in collaborative visioning with members of the COTA community of artist educators and its diaspora. Funded by the Mellon Foundation, it was meant as an pilot intervention, an experiment in the sustaining of academic and artistic freedom, and a capacity to continue the work toward liberator and humanist education...in spite of (or perhaps inspired by) an oppressive political context.
FLOAT is built with various layers of experiences in mind.
This format responds to the urgent need for communities in polarized sociopolitical spaces to:
Create
safe spaces
to gather.
Strategically overlap with novel or
different ideals & values to create or
boost a culture’s immune system.
Create a stronger body of influence
that can withstand the hypercritical
nature of a skeptical general public.
Collect and consider examples
of how artists past and present navigate
political and social polarization.
