Ethical Constellations in Teaching and Collaborating

Amber Hawk Swanson will speak about the ethics of her art practice—one that resists the capitalist mining and extraction of collaborators and instead engages the visibility and representation of a community of silicone doll owners at the margins of the mainstream. In this way, her work becomes a platform for members of the doll community who identify as “hetero-outsider” and—for reasons of forced anonymity surrounding their relationships with dolls and their relationship to a trans-feminine spectrum—have not previously pursued public avenues of self-representation. She will describe the relevance of her orientation toward and with collaborators as it translates to her inclusive teaching practice, beginning with a self-organized community building initiative and ending with the application of these practices within institutions of higher education. In both her teaching and art practices, Hawk Swanson engages collaborators and students in intersectional terms, with reverence toward myriad identity markers such as race, class, gender, and ability that often dictate proximity to the social and cultural capital that permit one to fully express oneself. In this process, she openly presents her working class-ness, queerness, and disability as factors that make her own art and teaching practices possible. The context for Hawk Swanson's often unlabeled labor in institutions begins with student artists from marginalized communities reaching out to her to express a need for guidance and support in navigating a range of challenges including feeling tokenized by their institutions, placed in an educator-role by their cohort, and assumed to be making identity-based art.