WHAT ART CAN DO - LEARNING WITH ART AS A PROCESS OF COLLECTIVE REPAIR AND FUTURE MAKING IN TIMES OF CONFLICT AND RECONSTRUCTION

Abstract

Aim: To investigate how Syrian artistic practices (SAP), developed during and after the conflict, afford resilience and contribute to informal sustainability education in transitional contexts. Theory: Affordance Theory and Resilience Theory are used to illuminate how AP enable learning, adaptation, and collective repair. AT is used to analyze the action possibilities embedded in AP; RT frames these practices as cultural infrastructures that sustain communities through disruption. Together, they offer an understanding of art as a site of meaning-making, resistance, and future oriented sustainability learning. Method: A qualitative, case study methodology informed by arts-based inquiry was employed to analyze seven Syrian artistic initiatives. The research drew on visual and textual data from digital archives, artist media, and public documentation. A tripartite analytical framework, Artistic Affordances → Resilience Pathways → ESD Learning Potentials, guided the analysis. The study integrates reflexivity and ethical sensitivity throughout, recognizing the political, affective, and representational dimensions of research in post-conflict settings. Results: The analysis reveals that SAP afford multiple, overlapping modes of transformation. Materially, they repurpose scarcity into symbolic acts of reclamation. Socially, they create communal spaces for storytelling, care, and intergenerational learning. Epistemically, they sustain alternative, culturally rooted ways of knowing. Pedagogically, these practices align with ESD by fostering experiential, affective, and critically engaged learning. Collectively, they function as infrastructures of resilience and informal education in times of rupture and reconstruction.