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My main interest is in Lacanian psychoanalysis and its applications to visual culture and pedagogy. This interest overlaps with Deleuze and Guattari's critique of Lacan and a search to find a way to perform a negative dialectic on both.

Below are the general categories that I am interested in:

Art education; media education and its applications to the classroom; the development and educational impact of feminism; linguistics and psycholinguistics; postmodernity and its impact on education; perception; representation; fantasy in children; aesthetics and a new foundation for visual arts education; children and television;

Youth Fantasies: The Perverse Landscape of the Media (2003)    View the table of contents.

There is something ironic about adults attempting to write a book on youth fantasies, whatever "adult" might mean today. It is impossible to "attain" our kids; to somehow turn back time and become a high school student once again like thefigure of Josie Geller (Drew Barrymore) in Raja Gosnell's comedy Never Been Kissed (1999). Josie "Grossie," who is now 25, goes back to her old high school as an undercover journalist to do a story, and ends up facing her own repressed traumas with disatrous results. To "attain" our children; that is, to hold them captive for our own misguided ends turns them into monsters of our own creation-mommy's boy who is not permitted to grow up; daddy's boy who doesn't grow up being quite like him. Or mommy's girl who grows up being frighteningly just like her mom and daddy's girl who is always trying to please him. Youth has its own differentiations and struggles for recognition. It is a complex phenomenon, and for us to pretend that we have somehow "captured" it all is the worst kind of arrogance. Thre are many teens and young people whose knowledge is infinitely more detailed than our own, whose passionate attachments to their iconic musical stars infinitely more committed than ours. It is precisely because we cannot "attain" our children; a theme encountered once envery so often throughout this bok, that such a book has to be written. Parents have always scratched their head when it comes to youth, and the thesis of this book is nothing but another head-scratching. If it weren't for such head-scratching, the commitment and responsibility adults have to youth would be surely lost.  Our head-scratching comes form a particular perspective, that of Lacanian psychoanalysis.........

Deconstructing the Oral Eye 

The Anamorphic  I/i      View the table of contents of the book;  Order the book here; 
 

 Issues surrounding sexual and gendered identity politics remain a heated area of debate in the culture of postmodernism. Feminism(s), men's studies, queer politics, gay and lesbian representations, and the transgendered bodies of transsexuals and cross-dressers form a destabilizing matrix of constant semiosis as these bodies struggle for their rights and recognition against a patriarchal and homophobic society. The 'anamorphic I/i presents an 'impossible' attempt at seeing oneself seeing oneself in this complex of events by stepping onto the playing surface of this (my)nfield where there is no net of safety. Writing in this area virtually guarantees that someone will take offense to what is being offered as it is read from various subject positions. The result of putting the body at risk is (hopefully) to cast the readers into a hall of theoretical mirrors, to experience a mise en abyme effect where oblique glances present odd glimpses of familiar problems as to what is 'normally' perceived as the masculine/feminine and male/female binaries.

Postmodern Dilemmas: Outrageous Essays in Art&Art Education    View the table of contents.
 

This book presents a series of essays covering a timespan of approximately 10 years. These essays chart the theory and practice of art & art education as it relates to issues of postmodernity and poststructuralism concerning representation, identity politics, consumerism, postmodern architecture, ecology, phallocentrism of the artistic cannon, pluriculturalism, media & technology, and AIDS.

As a former editor of the Journal of Social Theory in Art Education and a founding member of the Causus on Social Theory in Art Education, the author attempts to deconstruct the current art education paradigm, which is largely based on modernist tenets, and to reorient art education practice to social isues as developed in both media education and cultural studies. Part of the intent in these two volumes is to undertake a sustained critique of the 1982 Art in the Mainstream (A.I.M) statement, which continues to be considered as the core values for art education. The distinct intention of this critique is to put forward a new value base for art & art education in these postmodern times.

Many of the essays raise the need to be attentive to sex/gender issues in art & art education and the need to read the artistic discourse "otherwise". There is a sustained critique of the art programs developed by Getty Center for the Arts, whose arts curriculum presents the paradigm case of late modernist thinking. Some essays are written in a provocative form which tries to accommodate such content. This is particularly the case in Volume 2, where architecture discourse is deconstructed, and which includes an "artistic performance" given by the author in 1987.

This singular set of volumes combines scholarship in the areas of gender studies, aesthetics, art history, art education, poststructuralism, and cultural studies in a unique blend of theory and practice for rethinking the field of art education.

Pun(k) Deconstruction: Experimental Writings in Art & Art Education      View the table of contents
 

In Pun(k) Deconstruction: Experimental Writings in Art &Art Education and Postmodern Dilemmas: Outrageous Essays in Art&Art Education, jan jagodzinski presents a series of essays covering a timespan of approximately I 0 years. These essays chart the theory and practice of art &art education as it relates to issues of postmodernity and poststructuralism concerning representation, identity politics, consumerism, postmodern architecture, ecology, phallocentrism of the artistic canon, pluriculturalism, media & technology, and AIDS.

As a former editor of The Journal of Social Theory in Art Education and a founding member for the Caucus on Social Theory in Art Education, the author attempts to deconstruct the current art education paradigm, which is largely based on modernist tenets, and to reorient art education practice to social issues as developed in both media education and cultural studies. Part of the intent in these two volumes is to undertake a sustained critique of the 1982 Art in the Mainstream (A.l.M.) statement, which continues to be considered as the core values for art education. The distinct inten­tion of this critique is to put forward a new value base for art &art education in the these post-modern times.

Many of the essays raise the need to be attentive to sex/gender issues in art &art education and the need to read the artistic discourse "otherwise." There is a sustained critique of the art programs developed by Getty Center for the Arts, whose arts curriculum presents the paradigm case of late modernist thinking. Some essays are written in a provocative form which tries to accommodate such content. This is particularly the case in Volume 2, where architectural discourse is deconstructed, and which includes an "artistic performance" given by the author in I 987.

This singular set of volumes combines scholarship in the areas of gender studies, aesthetics, art history, art education, poststructuralism, and cultural studies in a unique blend of theory and practice for rethinking the field of art education.

Music in Youth Culture: A Lacanian Approach View the table of contents
 

Music in Youth Culture examines the fantasies of post-Oedipal youth cultures as displayed on the landscape of popular music from a post-Lacanian perspective. jan jagodzinski, drawing on the Lacanian psychoanalytic paradigm, maintains that a new set of signifiers is required to grasp the sliding signification of contemporary "youth." He discusses topics such as the figurality of noise, the perversions of the music scene by boyz/bois/boys and the hysterization of it by gurlz/girls/grrls. Music in Youth Culture also examines the postmodern "fan(addict)," techno music, and pop music icons. jagodzinski raises the Lacanian question of "an ethics of the Real" and also asks educators to re-examine "youth" culture for the 21st century.

Pedagogical Desire: Authority, Seduction, Transference, and the Question of Ethics    
View the table of contents
 

A Strange Introduction: My Apple Thing

Not the ego but its lack
Not behavior but jouissance
Not imagination but fantasy
Not knowledge but ignorance
Not regurgitation but transformation
Not motivation but object a as cause of desire
Not the exam but the subject in process and on trail  

The Journal of Social Theory in Art Education
 

This year's journal explores a number of social issues that continue to reassert themselves on the postmodern landscape. How can social and cultural justice assert itself in arts based education? What is our responsibility to "at risk" children when it comes to a critical pedagogy? The first two essays use innovative approaches to arts based research by incorporating a critical autobiographical methodology. James Sanders and Diane Conrad, drawing their theoretical base from criticial autoethnographic inquiry, attempt to examine themselves within the context of their investment as administrator, teacher and researcher.

The Journal of Social Theory in Art Education, Number 25, 2004
The Journal of Social Theory in Art Education, Number 24, 2004
The Journal of Social Theory in Art Education, Number 23, 2003
The Journal of Social Theory in Art Education, Number 22, 2002
The Journal of Social Theory in Art Education, Number 21, 2001
The Journal of Social Theory in Art Education, Number 18, 1998
The Journal of Social Theory in Art Education, Number 12, 1992
The Journal of Social Theory in Art Education, Number 10, 1990
The Journal of Social Theory in Art Education, Number 9, 1989

jan jagodzinski (2005). 9-11: A deleuzean Approach. Kultura Popularna: Kwartalnik nr3 (13)