Transforming curatorial practice : envisioning and nurturing ethical-creative-archival ecologies of connectedness

In my dissertation, I uniquely and through sustained public reasoning develop a rationale and vision for curation as an ethic of care and connectedness responsive to the transformative and ethical power and potential of creativity. I envision and illuminate my ethical re/membering and re/orienting of curation beyond the dictates of the artworld-academic post/industrial complex while critically and creatively addressing many of its narratives, practices and formations. I delineate connectedness as reverence for creative-archival intelligence and preciousness of our shared humanity with the earth and cosmos—all life. Through connectedness as an ethic and framework, I open up the experiential and epistemic bases of curation, from artworld and scientism-shaped grounds of thought to narratives of culture and technology. I illuminate curatorial processes and relations pertaining to internal journeying, relations with others, and the earth, inclusive of and going far beyond museological and art historical concerns, by expanding contexts and modes of personal and social cognition of creativity, culture, and archiving. This illumination is achieved by holding together participatory understandings of consciousness and ethics and interrelational conceptions of creativity and archiving. Experientially connective ecologies of creativity, culture, and archiving are explored to elaborate the world-involving, embodied bases of cognition, and how materiality, empiricism, emotions and value are entangled. I clarify the intersections of science as a lens of modernity and hegemonic notions of archiving to make the case that opening up delineations of science, ethically and epistemologically, is as integral to transformative curatorial practice as the rethinking of culture in integrative and connective terms. My grounding of science within human experience and thus value and the elaboration of the moral agency of the body and senses grids my elaboration of meaningful connection between modes and forms of archiving, scientific and artistic, psychic and physical, including key constructs utilized to understand and shape knowledges. In making a case for emotionally healthy, sensuously alive, intellectually non-coercive creative-ethicalarchival ecologies, I correlatively develop a vision-practice of curation as a transformative ethic of care. Such an ethic affirms learning and growth, purpose and passion, connection and responsibility.Graduate and Postdoctoral StudiesGraduat