Introduction: Aesthetics, Care, and Action: The Band Plays On

As we write in June 2025, violence continues to engulf many regions of the world, yet the disasters of war too often rapidly fade from the consciousness of those not directly affected as attention turns to local affairs and more immediate concerns. For the many navigating profound anxiety and despair, the theoretical uncertainty that Jacques Derrida identified in language has become a lived reality as the world faces crises of unprecedented scale and character: climate change, environmental collapse, and mass extinctions. What was once John Milton's imagined pandemonium now seems to define our present moment.This only reinforces the fact that we need more care for the planet and for each other to lessen suffering and prevent catastrophe. But in the face of such overwhelming challenges, compounded by the relentless denial of our fundamental interconnectedness, the possibility of moral understanding and affirmative action appear constrained, if not impossible. In these circumstances, the question arises: What has aesthetics got to do with it?When Planet Earth is like the Titanic sailing at cruising speed through an iceberg field, who cares about the band or what it's playing? This special issue argues emphatically that far from being a consoling distraction, aesthetic education represents a crucial pathway toward the care and transformative action our world so desperately needs.In support of this thesis, the articles collected here build on discussions that began at a symposium entitled “Aesthetics, Care, and Action,” jointly held at the University of Central Asia in Naryn, Kyrgyzstan, and UNSW Sydney's School of Art & Design in September 2024. The issue brings together symposium participants alongside other scholars committed to demonstrating how aesthetic engagement can catalyze meaningful responses to wicked problems.The relationship between aesthetic experience and social transformation has deep philosophical roots, dating back to classical antiquity,1 and connections in the modern period from Friedrich Schiller's Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man2 to Walter Benjamin's “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.”3 Contemporary scholarship has renewed interest in aesthetics as a catalyst for social change. Jacques Rancière's influential work on the “distribution of the sensible” demonstrates how aesthetic practices reshape what can be seen, heard, and thought, thereby opening new possibilities for political action.4 Similarly, Chantal Mouffe's Agonistics explores how artistic practices can foster democratic participation.5Recent scholarship has expanded this framework to address contemporary global challenges. Shannon Jackson's Social Works6 examines how socially engaged art operates at the intersection of aesthetic and social practice, while Grant Kester's The One and the Many7 analyzes collaborative art practices that generate community dialogue and action. Claire Bishop's Artificial Hells8 provides critical analysis of participatory art, raising questions about the relationship between aesthetic quality and social efficacy.The ethics of care, pioneered by Carol Gilligan and Nel Noddings, has significantly influenced contemporary aesthetic theory.9,10 Joan Tronto's Moral Boundaries and Caring Democracy11,12 expanded care ethics beyond interpersonal relationships to encompass political and social institutions. This scholarship emphasizes care as being relational and contextual and requiring ongoing attention to power dynamics.Feminist philosophers have also been influential in connecting care ethics to aesthetic theory. Maria Lugones's work on “world-traveling” and loving perception explores how aesthetic attention can foster care across difference.13 More recently, Shannon Vallor's Technology and the Virtues14 examines how technological mediation affects our capacity for care, while Maria Puig de la Bellacasa's Matters of Care15 develops a more-than-human approach to care that encompasses environmental and technological relationships.As the articles in this issue attest, John Dewey's Art as Experience remains foundational for understanding how aesthetic experience can be educational and transformative.16 Contemporary scholars such as Yuriko Saito in this volume and Richard Shusterman17 have built upon Dewey's insights while addressing new contexts and challenges, which have included applications to critical pedagogy and social justice. bell hooks, for example, explores how aesthetic practices can create transformative learning environments,18 while Tara Yosso's work on cultural wealth examines how aesthetic practices function as forms of community knowledge and resistance.19Building on these foundations, this special issue brings together scholars examining how aesthetic experience, care, and action interconnect across diverse contexts—from intimate educational spaces to urban environments, from traditional art forms to emerging digital practices, and everyday life in both urban and rural settings. The issue opens with our editorial contribution, which proposes that aesthetic experience generates both care and action through what we call “relational perception”—moments when encountering the Other aesthetically allows us to perceive ourselves anew, a potentially transformative process that invites compassionate engagement with contemporary environmental and social challenges.Yuriko Saito, the distinguished scholar in everyday aesthetics and aesthetics of care, argues that our aesthetic life encompasses far more than art and spectacular nature. Saito explores how aesthetic considerations play an indispensable role in cultivating and sustaining care relationships with other people, nature, and artifacts. Her call for “engaging in everyday aesthetic education by cultivating aesthetic sensibility, developing awareness and attunement with our whole body, practicing everyday aesthetics, and working with the world” provides practical guidance for implementing a relational aesthetic perception.In educational contexts, Guillermo Marini and colleagues advance the concept of an “aesthetics of school care” as a heuristic approach to educational challenges. By examining the interdependence of ethical and aesthetic dimensions in pedagogical practices, architectural design, and health orientations, their research reveals how the everyday sensory experience of schools creates connections between care practices. The case study from a Chilean high school illustrates how educational environments can transform care from “a static fact” into “an empathic, adequate, and reciprocal action learned through the interaction of bodies, spaces, and objects.”Theatre becomes a site of regeneration in Carmen Pellegrinelli and Laura Lucia Parolin's posthumanist exploration of how applied theatre functions as “a mode of social regeneration that, through beauty and aesthetic experience, reactivates the desire for care and collective change.” Through the case study of ATIR, an Italian theatre company, Pellegrinelli and Parolin demonstrate how nonrepresentational theatre practices create the relational perception central to our theoretical framework. The company's innovative “educator-actor” role exemplifies how aesthetic engagement generates new forms of knowledge that integrate ethical and aesthetic considerations, producing “cartographies, new knowledge, and collective imagination” that can lead to concrete social change.Architect and urban planner Surekha Ghogale grounds the discussion in urban aesthetics, proposing a care-based approach to city planning that acknowledges critical sustainability challenges. Drawing from her experience implementing an urban resilience program in Naryn, Kyrgyzstan, Ghogale identifies how conventional aesthetic models fail to address inadequate infrastructure, conflictual politics, complex human-environment relationships, institutional barriers, and colonial legacies. Her work exemplifies how the double helix of truth and experience operates in urban contexts, where aesthetic perception can reveal both the harsh realities of postcolonial, postsocialist environments and open spaces for transformative care-based interventions.Media artist and art theorist Paul Thomas brings a quantum perspective to aesthetics and care through experimental scholarship that challenges conventional academic writing. His contribution explores how quantum uncertainty might be fundamental to both aesthetic engagement and caring action, suggesting new approaches to relational perception that push the boundaries of how we understand aesthetic experience.Andrea Baldini challenges conventional assumptions by positioning graffiti as “dirty aesthetic education”—a raw, rebellious practice that cultivates critical awareness and transformative action. Drawing on Rancière's concept of the distribution of the sensible, Baldini shows how graffiti subverts dominant hierarchies of visibility, creating space for marginalized voices in public expression and political participation. This contribution powerfully demonstrates how aesthetic disruption can function as a form of care for excluded communities while generating action toward more inclusive urban environments. Due to space constraints, this article will appear in the journal's fall 2026 issue.Together, these contributions demonstrate that aesthetic engagement is not irrelevant in times of crisis. The band on the sinking Titanic provided more than comfort—their music created space for shared humanity in the face of catastrophe. But we still have time to change course. Aesthetic education, enquiry, and practice offer the perceptual tools to recognize the icebergs ahead, to touch hearts, and chart new routes away from danger.