Following Cathy Burke (2021, 11), a long-time contributor to EERA’s Network 17, in this paper I take up a challenge presented to historians of education by António Nóvoa (2015, 49, 50), who invited them to engage in “risk-taking and transgression” and “broaden the repertoire of (...)[their] studies” so as “to discover new problems (…) left hidden, in silence, by (…) educational historiography”. From a combined interest in “troubling time/s” (Barad 2018; Thyssen 2018a,b) and reimagining historiography (Thyssen et al. 2021), studying informal “embodied enculturation” (Thyssen and Grosvenor 2019), and placing “communities” – however diverse (Grosvenor 2018) – front and centre of research, I here draw together knowledge on education “street-wise”. My interest is not per se in the street itself, often figured as a “place and space” (Smith 2001) and/or “object” (Watt 2016) of educational relevance, but in various instances, from roughly the start of the twentieth century onwards, in which education has been emerging with “street art” – particularly “street music”. My interest is further in historiography “taking to the streets” (that is, implicating itself in a materialising present) as well as “mining the archives” (engaging with matter often figured as “objects” of “the” past). Drawing on Karen Barad’s (2003, 2007) posthumanist theory, I figure expressions of education entangled with street music beyond imagined boundaries (such as those between past and present, the human and nonhuman) as inherently indeterminate “phenomena” that have come to matter through a range of “apparatuses” implicated in them, stabilising their very nature to differential effects. I further figure such apparatuses as forces producing “patterns” of informal education marked by a “syntax”, just as in formal education contexts (Smeyers and Depaepe 2014), and likewise stabilising implicated objects, places and spaces – as such and as instrumental to the process. Using Porto (Portugal) as a case whilst drawing on scholarship from a wider European and/or international perspective (e.g., Smith 2001; Watt 2016, 2019), in this paper, then, I analyse education involving street art and particular objects, places and spaces, starting from the question of precisely to what different, potentially exclusionary effects such education has come to matter (cf. Barad 2003) and shape “vernacular cosmopolitan subjectivities” (Goodman 2017).

In terms of methods, I thread tools of archival and textual analysis, and visual (Edwards 2009) and multimodal (Thyssen and Priem 2016) analysis, through interviews with street artists and more “streetwise” tools of analysis including the filming of street art performances. With Barad (2007, 2014, 2018), I thus figure my methodology as a “diffractive” one, tangling approaches and analysing results through each other, attentive to differences that matter, without drawing artificial borders between past and present, human and nonhuman, and the like. Among archival collections considered are those held at the Historical Municipal Archives of Porto (Arquivo Histórico Municipal do Porto), secondary sources in turn including self-reflective academic work by street artists themselves (Garcia 2021).

In taking a risk and transgressing by expanding the remit of educational historiography beyond the study of the past to that of ongoing enfoldments of temporality and education, and here street art, I hope not only to shed light on the importance of an informal area of activity underexplored even in musicological research (Watt 2016, 2019) but also to help renew the history of education, by broadening current notions of historiography, history, and education. Historiography thus need not be about the “writing of history” or about accounts of “the past” (Thyssen et al. 2021, Barad 2018), nor need history be about just “humans” (Domanska 2018). Likewise, education – conceived in whatever form– need not be figured as having determinate boundaries, as indeed it always bears the marks of the particular yet entangled spacetime contexts as part of which it emerges (e.g., Gustavsson 2013).

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