Public pedagogy in the creative strike: Destabilizing boundaries and re-imagining resistance in the University of Puerto Rico

Abstract

In this article, I examine key symbols and strategies mobilized by students during the first system-wide strike in the University of Puerto Rico's history. I argue that these acts of creative cultural production not only supported the growth of participatory politics within the mobilization but that they also were tools for enacting public pedagogy. In particular, I examine the spatial dimensions of these practices, showing how strikers disrupted the normative boundaries between protest space/public space, and actor/spectator by engaging police officers in innovative ways. I suggest that by performing this spatial reconfiguration, pedagogues were implicated in the process of transformation as much as their targeted learners/spectators. In the conclusion, I reflect on the ethical implications of public pedagogy, arguing that artistic expressions facilitate a flexible and dynamic mode for becoming otherwise in ways that cannot be anticipated.