Susana Oliveira

I'm an artist and researcher at CeiED, Universidade Lusófona, completing a doctorate funded by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology. I trained as a designer at IADE and worked in interior and graphic design before teaching visual arts in Portuguese secondary schools for sixteen years.

My doctoral research sits in philosophy of education and examines the experience of being a teacher under curricular autonomy in Portugal, through an arts-based approach that uses photovoice and fragmentary writing as epistemological devices. What I am after more widely is attention and gesture, aesthetic experience, and the relation between self and world in education, working from phenomenology and Japanese aesthetic philosophy.

Alongside the thesis I keep a practice I call Quiet Cartographies: returning to a place again and again, and staying long enough for it to raise its own questions, through writing, drawing and small printed objects. I spent six months as a visiting researcher at the University of Edinburgh, and have taken postgraduate training in artistic research at Stockholm University of the Arts and the University of Agder.

I am now developing a screen-based project on how communities know the places they live in, and I am looking for collaborators in film and in the study of vernacular knowledge of territory.