Dr Daisy Dixon Wins Social Justice and the Arts Prize

The winner of the JAAC/ASA Social Justice and the Arts Prize is Dr Daisy Dixon for her paper "Artistic (counter)speech." She will present the paper at the ASA Annual Meeting in Portland, Oregon November 16-19, 2022. Her paper, selected by the editorial board review committee of the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, will be published in JAAC.

The abstract for her winning paper, "Artistic (counter)speech" is:

Some visual artworks constitute hate speech because they can perform oppressive illocutionary acts. This illocution-based analysis of art reveals how responsive curation and artmaking undermines and manages problematic art. Drawing on the notion of ‘counterspeech’ as an alternative tool to censorship to handle art-based hate speech, this paper proposes ‘aesthetic blocking’ and ‘aesthetic spotlighting’. I then show that under certain conditions, this can lead to eventual ‘metaphysical destruction’ of the artwork; a way to destroy harmful art without physically destroying it.

Dr Dixon received her MPhil and PhD in philosophy from the University of Cambridge, where she is now a Research Fellow. Her undergraduate degree in fine art and philosophy is from the University of Reading. For more information about her work: https://www.pet.cam.ac.uk/people/dr-daisy-dixon

This is a one-time prize for new, unpublished work on Social Justice and the Arts. The Prize was approved November 11, 2020, by the ASA Board of Trustees, following a recommendation by the Editorial Board of the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism