Congratulations to Dr. Javier Cardona Otero for winning the Arts and Inquiry in the Visual and Performing Arts in Education SIG Dissertation Award titled, “Taxonomía of a Spicy Espécimen: A Public Performative Pedagogy,”

Dr. Cardona Otero will present and perform an aspect of his dissertation at the Arts & Inquiry SIG Business Meeting in Denver, Colorado on Friday, April 25th, 7-8:30 pm, The Colorado Convention Center, Meeting Room 113.

 BIO

 Javier Cardona Otero

“We study, we learn, we teach, we know [, we perform] with our entire body.”

Paulo Freire, Teachers as Cultural Workers: Letter to Those Who Dare to Teach

Javier Cardona Otero is a Puerto Rican interdisciplinary artist, critical educator, and facilitator of artistic experiences as a praxis for teaching and learning. His hemispheric artistic and pedagogical work intersects multiple literacies to investigate sociocultural capitals, particularly concerning matters of race, gender, class, education, and environment. As an artist-educator who specializes in using the arts as both an aesthetic form and a dialogic medium, Javier investigates artistic creation in performance and the performing arts as both a process and a product of research.

Javier’s embodied public performative pedagogy, enacted in classrooms, theatres, museums, prisons, outdoor spaces, and academic venues, becomes an aesthetic platform for activating students’ and audiences’ bodies and minds as “spect-actors” to critically read, write, and rehearse a more equitable, just, and plural world. His art and pedagogy act as responsive tools and decolonial tactics for problematizing the hegemonic imposition of Euro-American taxonomies on various aspects of life.

He is currently engaged in a new performative research project with the working title "Ancestral Flights." This multimodal research and performance in development embody dreams, memory, testimonios, myths, diasporic mobilizations, migration, and ideas of flight. Javier teaches in the Art Education Program at the Indiana University School of Education in Bloomington.