*This Is Not A Drill*

FEATURED EVENT: OPENING RECEPTION FOR *THIS IS NOT A DRILL* EXHIBITION

The opening reception for the *This Is Not A Drill* exhibition will celebrate the artworks of the nine inaugural *This Is Not A Drill* Fellows whose work focuses at the intersection of technology, equity, and the climate emergency.

The reception is open to the public and will feature brief remarks after which the artists will present their works. Refreshments will be served.

Note: Registration and proof of full COVID vaccination status are required to gain entry to the event. Masks must be worn unless food or drink are being consumed.

At the dawn of the new 20s, we are seeing a major shift in public perception around issues of equity and the climate emergency, paired with the reckoning that traditional ways of approaching these kinds of issues have led to failure. There is vast potential to shape not just policy interventions, but to help birth new and more equitable ways of knowing what the issues are, where they come from, and how they can be addressed.

We need a new public pedagogy to combine technology, the arts, critical thinking and activism to address the intractable social problems that are entangled with both the rise of technology and the climate emergency. Artistic imagination and creative ways of learning and knowing are crucial for avoiding the binary traps of techno-optimism or -skepticism which so often lead to paralysis.

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A public pedagogy is an emerging assemblage of forms, processes, and sites of education and learning that occur beyond formal educational practices. This assemblage often brings into focus cultural, artistic, performative, critical, and activist pedagogical approaches to learning in the public sphere. A public pedagogy also sets out to redefine education by exploring posthuman reconceptualizations of pedagogy that push beyond anthropocentric modes of performative rationality, binarism and colonialism.

ABOUT

The *This Is Not A Drill* program on technology, the climate emergency, equity, and creative practice collaboratively develops such a public pedagogy. It is led by Director and inaugural FIC Fellow Mona Sloane and explores what Arturo Escobar has called “designs for the pluriverse”: designs that account for the pluralities of being, that dismantle the harmful hierarchies that were created between human/non-human and culture/nature, and that reorient us towards sustainment, maintenance and care for each other and for the planet.

Each year, the *This Is Not A Drill* program convenes five NYU faculty fellows and five to ten NYU student fellows. Faculty fellows receive a research-focused reimbursable stipend to develop their *This Is Not A Drill* project. They convene regularly as the *This Is Not A Drill* working group. Student fellows receive project-focused reimbursable research stipend to work on their project over the summer. All fellows exhibit their work at the annual *This Is Not A Drill* exhibition.

GET INVOLVED

If you are interested in learning more about *This Is Not A Drill*, please email Program Director Mona Sloane at mona.sloane@nyu.edu.