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Title: Rubble Walls of Contingency: Language, the Self and the Mediterranean Imaginary
Date: Tuesday 2 November
Time: 18:30
Venue: 

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The Mediterranean Institute in collaboration with the Institute of Maltese Studies at the University of Malta are organising Rubble Walls of Contingency: Language, the Self and the Mediterranean Imaginary a Public Lecture by Professor John Baldacchino, University of Wisconsin-Madison.

The Public Lecture will be held on Tuesday, 2 November, at 18:30, .

Meeting ID: 963 8241 6189

Passcode: 993382

Though Professor Baldacchino is not a linguist by trade, writing a book “of” (rather than “about”) literary philosophy in Maltese with the intent of exploring the interrelationship between the experience of the contingent self, displacement, and the pain of beauty, became, in many ways, a linguistic affair. In this lecture, Prof. Baldacchino will explore how doing philosophy in Maltese brings one to engage with disciplines in which one was entirely educated in other languages (in this case, primarily in English and Italian), and how this opens up new opportunities that move inwards as well as outwards. This aspect of directional thinking, as it were, also enters those immanent and external spheres by which phenomenology and aesthetics are put in play. Here, Baldacchino is referring to how the “musk” of one’s language (a term whose linguistic use he first encountered in Seamus Heaney’s take on poetry’s indigeneity) is bound to carry one’s philosophical and literary imaginary onto a wide horizon whose boundaries could only be likened to the porousness of rubble walls. Such walls—these ħitan tas-sejjieħ—tend to mark territories while facilitating a high degree of fluency between them, to the extent that here we could speak of bocage as a contingency of meaning just as bricolage implies an act of an intentional weaving. With this in mind, in this lecture Prof. Baldacchino will reflect on the process of writing in Maltese as a means by which contingency as an approach to living and thinking, remains core to the understanding of how the self is immersed in what we broadly identify with the poetics (and therefore, the making) of the Mediterranean imaginary.  

John Baldacchino is Professor of Arts Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he also served as the Director of the Division of the Arts between 2016 and 2019. This year he has also been appointed Professor II at Western Norway University in Bergen. A graduate of the Universities of Malta (B.Ed. Hons.) and Warwick (MA and PhD) he was a member of faculty at Columbia University in New York, and the universities of Dundee, Falmouth, Robert Gordon and Warwick in Britain. A specialist in art, philosophy and education, he is the author of many journal articles, reviews and catalogue essays, and journalistic contributions.

To date, he has published fourteen books which include Education Beyond Education: Self and the imaginary in Maxine Greene’s Philosophy (Peter Lang 2009); Makings of the Sea: Journey, Doubt and Nostalgia (Gorgias 2010), Art’s Way Out: Exit Pedagogy and the cultural condition (Sense 2012), John Dewey: Liberty and the pedagogy of disposition (Springer 2014) and Art as Unlearning: Towards a Mannerist pedagogy (Routledge 2018). He is the editor of Histories and Philosophies: The International Encyclopaedia of Art and Design Education (Wiley-Blackwell 2019). His first two books, Post-Marxist Marxism and Easels of Utopia, originally published in 1996 and 1998, have now been recently republished by Routledge in 2018. In 2020 he published two new books, Sejjieħ il-Ħsieb: Limitu u Ħelsien (KKM/Midsea) and Educing Ivan Illich: Reform, Contingency and Disestablishment (Peter Lang). 

He is currently working on two new volumes, one on art and belonging (Brill 2021/22), and a book on Giambattista Vico and the pedagogy of form (Springer 2022/23).

For further details about the Public Lecture, kindly contact the Convenor, Dr Norbert Bugeja.