Melina Scheuermann

Portugal (residence), Germany (citizenship) °1992
research interests: archive, arts education, visual culture, artistic research methodology, history of education, unlearning
affiliation: i2ADS - Institute of Investigation, Arts, Design and Society
en

Melina Scheuermann (she/her) is a PhD candidate in Arts Education at the Faculty of Fine Arts  at the University of Porto. She holds a Master’s degree in Cinema Studies from Stockholm University, (Sweden) and a Bachelor degree in Cultural Studies (Major) and Arts-Media-Aesthetic Education (Minor) from the University of Bremen (Germany). In her research, Melina Scheuermann integrates studies in visual culture, visual history of education and arts education with arts-based practice.  She inquires the relations of images and imaginaries of Nature and childhood in picture books (1870-1910) that circulated in Imperial Europe from a post-colonial, decolonial and feminist perspectives. Her broader research interests include vernacular photography, family archives, and visual representations of war and childhood. Currently, Melina Scheuermann is associated with the Institute for Investigation in Art, Design and Society (i2ADS) and her research is funded by the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (REF: 2022.12937.BD/DOI: https://doi.org/10.54499/2022.12937.BD).

research

research expositions

  • the archive that i imagine to unlearn the archive (last edited: 2025) author(s): Melina Scheuermann This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
    "the archive that I imagine to unlearn the archive" is both a research output and a method. Driven by the idea of unlearning as a transformative, post-colonial pedagogical practice, I began to think about whether and how an archive could become a site for critical knowledge production in arts education and in the history of education, rather than just documenting my research process. There is a slight irony, seemingly a paradox in the title of this archive: "the archive that I imagine to unlearn the archive". Unlearning while practising it? The idea is not repetition, unless it is considered repetition in variance, never settled, never fixed. It speaks to my attempt to unlearn hegemonic ways of seeing and educating and to provide pedagogical encounters that foster such unlearning in the fields of arts education and history of education. the archive that i imagine to unlearn the archive makes a contribution to research that interrogates the archives that we as arts educators inherit and raises questions about the purposes and ways of doing histories. I developed a performative-archival practice as a research methodology that combines visual culture inquiry, post-colonial pedagogy and arts-based practices. "the archive that I imagine to unlearn the archive" departs from two series of object lesson picture books of the so-called object lesson method (Pt. lições de coisas, Germ. Anschauungsunterricht) from the long 19th century that circulated across Imperial Europe as performative scores. The archive is invested in the study of visual representations of modern/colonial Nature and childhood, in the history of visual pedagogies and in how reform education was involved in producing the imperial citizen “at home”. This work was supported by FCT - Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia, I.P. under the project with the identifier DOI https://doi.org/10.54499/2022.12937.BD.
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