Parysa Mostajir is a Teaching Fellow at the University of Chicago in Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science, with degrees in philosophy, history of science, and archaeology and anthropology. Her interdisciplinary research analyzes the relationship between the cognitive processes of science and the aesthetic processes of art, and frames them as distinct, complementary, and mutually irreducible practices in human life. Inspired by John Dewey’s aesthetics and philosophy of science, she is currently developing a concept of ‘aesthetic technology’ to describe the methods by which art can serve crucial functions in democratic societies, including communicating the lived experience of diversely situated citizens and conducting powerful critiques and transformations of shared institutions and concepts.

Canadian national newspaper, The Globe and Mail, has featured The Jeffrey Rubinoff Sculpture Park among its list of eleven sculpture parks of Canada.

Link to Globe and Mail article published May 12, 2021

Aimed at early career researchers anywhere in the world, Postdoctoral Awards offer $7,000 CAD (roughly $5,300 USD or £4,100) to support research leading to one or more publications on any subject relating to art and knowledge. Themes might include but are not limited to the connections between visual art and: cognition and understanding; ethical or political issues; other fields of knowledge; and the sacred or numinous.

More application information available on our awards page.

The  Jeffrey Rubinoff Sculpture Park is the permanent site for over a hundred works by sculptor Jeffrey Rubinoff. Rubinoff spent over three decades reshaping the land to best showcase his artistic output.

He established the Sculpture Park to ensure perpetual access to and interpretation of the collection. The Park was also founded to promote the study and understanding of art as a source of knowledge.

Rubinoff believed that ‘art was an act of will in accord with a mature conscience’, and that the knowledge it contained and expressed could play an important role in the evolution of ideas, as well as its viewers’ consciences.

Dr. Allan Antliff honours Rubinoff’s work in Anarchist Studies journal
As Antliff writes: “I had the pleasure of getting to know the artist before his untimely passing, and quickly realised his views regarding art aligned with those of the American abstract expressionist movement’s anarchist founders (Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Clyfford Still). Like them, he sought to evoke the experience of the sublime, which he associated with a critical consciousness of our being in the world.” 

Click here for a link to the Journal