ABSTRACT
Relational education has become a significant mode in the contemporary arts and education world, synonymous with social interaction and intersubjectivity. Many of the theories and practices that are discussed problematise this equation, and explore how critical, relational arts can produce practices that have a much more nuanced and ambivalent relation to the dominant neo-liberal ideology. Bourriaud distances himself from what it describes as 'essentialist' multiculturalism and from the standardising and homogenising tendencies of globalism but nonetheless recognises that they are the essential ground from which relational practices. Sennett proposes that innovative and creative work occurs principally through collaboration, and the instrument of creativity is 'dialogic conversation'. This means that the relational activities of our project were severely curtailed and that practices that privileged social engagement in order to consider some of the implications surfacing from critical, creative, relational conceptualisations of practice, the chapter draws on three examples from North America, Australia and the UK.
