In this text, Joseph Baan reflects on the practice of artistic research within an academic context. Drawing on their own experience as an artist and educator, they outline a ‘radical pedagogy’ capable of establishing a dialogue – one beyond window dressing – between the production of knowledge and the material conditions under which it is produced. This contribution is part of a series produced in the run-up to the infoclio.ch 2026 conference, 'New Humanities'. The series showcases recent projects and reflections, particularly in the fields of posthumanism, relational approaches in the humanities and social sciences, and alliances between the arts and sciences.
Nobody knows what artistic research is—not even me. I say this as an artist who is about to complete a PhD in artistic research, and as a person who is committed to artistic practice as a form of knowledge production worthy of defence. Artistic practice has its own intelligence, its forms often generating critical inquiry, learning, and ways of understanding without neatly quantifying nor qualifying as knowledge per se, and certainly not as formulated by academic standards. Still, academic discourse can—and increasingly does—appropriate artistic practice as a pedagogical method, even though from the vantage point of scholarship, practice tends to lose.
For the past decade, my artistic and pedagogical work has developed largely through collaborative, grassroots practices of experimental learning across academic and non-academic contexts. I have consistently worked on developing spaces that allow for different forms of collective study, and that interrogate the ways in which we understand knowledge production, educational hierarchies, and learning in general. Through this, I have cultivated and engaged in practices that can be loosely categorised as forms of “radical pedagogy”, which include, but are not limited to, self-organisation, decentered knowledge production, embodied experimentation, and collective responsibility for the conditions of learning. Questions of socio-economic access to education have been integral to this work, as have attempts to redistribute resources and accommodate different capacities to participate. My interest in these practices emerges from an understanding that the processes through which something is learned cannot be separated from its material or relational structures, and that the conditions that shape these encounters provide the grounds for political consciousness to emerge.
Some of these practices have become increasingly familiar, if not coveted, within mainstream education and academia. Their familiarity produces a recurring problem: what happens to the desire to organise learning differently when its forms can be incorporated without transforming the material or relational conditions that sustain them? And what happens to pedagogy's radical potential when it begins to mimic the very structures it claims to depart from? These questions have accompanied my work across various contexts, where the possibilities of experimental learning have been shaped by their differing degrees of institutional autonomy and the conditions under which they operate. Moving between these contexts complicates any account of radical pedagogy that locates its politics in pedagogical form alone. The economic, political, and organisational structures that make such forms (im)possible are not incidental to what happens pedagogically, but inseparable from the circumstances of their production. The question, then, is whether institutional recognition of alternative forms of learning can be distinguished from a reconfiguration of the relations through which knowledge is produced and legitimised. To examine these questions more closely, I want to reflect on some of the different environments in which I have worked, and the contradictions that have emerged through them.
1.
Since 2016, I have been involved with SOHERE, an organic research collective founded by wolf engelen, which develops horizontal learning environments in ever-changing compositions of thinkers and doers. Its maxim, “first the practice, then the theory!”, expresses a commitment to artistic practice as method, allowing theoretical inquiry to emerge through the doing itself. Working across institutional and non-institutional contexts on a project basis, SOHERE has no permanent institutional affiliation and is precariously financed through public arts funding. Its organisational independence allows for considerable freedom in determining the conditions of collective inquiry, yet this autonomy depends on the very labour and material resources that its independence leaves unsecured.
2.
Between 2019 and 2022, I co-ran School of Commons, a grassroots initiative situated within and primarily funded by the Zürich University of the Arts. Dedicated to the study and development of decentered knowledge, School of Commons cultivates practices of peer learning, self-organisation, and interdisciplinary exchange. The COVID-19 pandemic forced most of its endeavours online, broadening its reach towards an international and more diverse pool of participants while limiting the range and scope of what could be practised. With SoC, we sought to develop forms of collective study capable of challenging established educational hierarchies from within the infrastructure of a formal academic institution. While institutional support enabled experimentation that would have been difficult to sustain independently, it also imposed a continuous demand to legitimise our work through demonstrable “outputs”, subjecting organisers and participants alike to the very expectations that our pedagogical experiments sought to undermine. The autonomy afforded to SoC became circumscribed by the institution's authority to determine the terms of its recognition, including which processes of collective inquiry could acquire legitimacy as knowledge production.
3.
At ETH Zürich, where I worked as a research assistant at the Chair for the History and Theory of Art and Architecture between 2022 and 2026, I encountered a different set of institutional contradictions. Although embedded within the academic environment of the Architecture Department, the Chair, under the direction of Prof. Dr. Philip Ursprung, adopted an experimental pedagogical approach based on informal learning processes and formal openness. Artistic practice was approached as a mode of inquiry capable of generating questions and relations that could not be anticipated through established scholarly methods. Yet this approach also prompted resistance from other chairs within the department, requiring us to defend the validity of our pedagogical practices within architectural higher education. What was at issue in these encounters was not simply a disagreement over teaching methods, but a disagreement over the conditions through which certain practices become recognisable as education or professionally legitimate.
4.
My PhD in artistic research, undertaken at the Zürich University of the Arts with Mozarteum Salzburg as an affiliated host institution, has made this discrepancy particularly tangible. Although artistic research has become an increasingly established category within higher education, my PhD remains unfunded, falling between the categories of “art production” and “scholarship”, with neither arts nor academic funding organisations considering it eligible for support. The institutional recognition of artistic practice as a form of knowledge production exists alongside a persistent uncertainty concerning the material conditions through which such knowledge might be produced. Artistic research is welcomed as a means of expanding the methodological repertoire of the university, while its practitioners are frequently left to negotiate the consequences of a disciplinary ambiguity that the institution itself has helped to establish.
This contradiction extends to the epistemological claims of artistic research itself, whose potential to challenge established distinctions between practice and theory is constrained by the academic demand to translate artistic processes into recognisable methodologies and demonstrable contributions to knowledge. Practice is stupid, and needs to be, by which I mean that it requires staying with the unknown for much longer than discourse can generally tolerate. Artistic practice often proceeds without understanding what it is doing, or why, and its intelligence springs from this capacity to remain with something that has not yet acquired a recognisable form. The demand for scholarly intelligibility risks foreclosing precisely those processes through which artistic inquiry becomes possible, raising the question of who determines what can be known in the first place.
These experiences have made me attentive to the university's authority over what qualifies as knowledge, although the present political dismantling of the humanities makes the limits of this formulation increasingly apparent. Across universities, academic programmes are being discontinued and positions eliminated through assessments of economic value, while scholarship concerned with histories of racial oppression, colonialism, and gender and sexuality has become the target of direct political intervention. The repression of Palestinian solidarity belongs to this same authoritarian assault on critical education. Presented as separate developments cloaked in bureaucratic language—budgetary restructuring in one context, legislative censorship or disciplinary sanctions in another—these actions converge in the political restriction of what can be studied and of the capacity of students and scholars to act upon what they learn.
The global student encampments have made this contradiction especially visible. Students organised themselves in solidarity with Palestine and against the material complicity of their universities in its destruction, establishing spaces of collective study through political organisation often in direct confrontation with the institutions in which they took place. Their significance for radical pedagogy lies in the inseparability of educational practice from political commitment, making the organisation of education itself a site of political struggle that confronted universities with demands exceeding the forms of participation they were prepared to accommodate.
The university's willingness to accommodate experimental methods offers little assurance that it will tolerate their consequences when students begin to challenge its own authority. What is celebrated as self-organisation within the classroom becomes grounds for disciplinary action when exercised beyond its sanctioned limits. The university has never been a neutral custodian of knowledge; its disciplinary hierarchies have historically determined the terms of intellectual inclusion and exclusion, whereas its political and economic commitments shape what can be studied and practised within its walls, as well as the conditions of life beyond them. The institutional incorporation of artistic practice may diversify pedagogical methods while still leaving these relations of power intact. It follows that the possibilities of radical pedagogy remain entangled with the arrangements through which they are sustained, making those arrangements themselves a necessary terrain of political intervention.
The prospect of a “new humanities” then demands an engagement with these struggles at the level of their material consequences. The academy's investment in experimental pedagogies leaves largely undisturbed the institutional structures through which its authority is reproduced and critical inquiry is increasingly restricted. Form is not enough when the political commitments of education remain without consequence for the institutions through which it takes place. Radical pedagogy must acquire the means to intervene in these institutional arrangements, to contest the university's complicity in violence and to participate in shaping the material conditions through which other forms of education, and other forms of life, become possible.