Marino, Dian

‘Be passionately aware that you could be completely wrong’—a favourite saying of the educator, scholar and artist dian marino (b. 1941), if an odd sentiment for a scholar. But marino was a unique scholar who combined her teaching, research, theorizing and art practice in a seamless, if often messy, praxis. Her playful approach to this praxis (hinted at by her choice of using lower-case letters for the initial letters of her name and surname—inspired by a love of e. e. cummings' poetry) was one deeply informed by her understanding of the ways in which power and hegemony structured and regulated the regimes of knowledge making in which she found herself participating. Her practical and theoretical contributions to fields of environmental and popular education, participatory research and community art have inspired generations of students and activists—first, over the 30-plus years of her own teaching (the last 10 years of which were based at York University's Faculty of Environmental Studies in Toronto, Ontario, Canada) and then in the 20 years since her untimely death in 1993 (after living with cancer for many years). Her influence was also spread around the world through her participation in the international adult education community from Finland (teaching factory workers) to Indonesia (working with people who lived in slums and scavenged for a living), to inner-city Toronto (working in literacy with immigrant women) and more.

Born and raised as dian coblentz in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, she reflected on her formation as artist and educator, acknowledging that having a mother who was university educated and a father who was not left her feeling not wholly of the working class and with her sense of herself as not like everyone else, and ill at ease as a result.

This feeling of being ‘ill at ease’ reveals a critical and self-reflexive consciousness that marino applied equally to herself as educator and artist and to the world at large in which she participated—often as a disruptive force both at the level of both playful resistance to and dissident theorizing of dominant/hegemonic power. marino's capacity to critique the ways in which dominant notions were trained into people, while informed strongly by her understanding of the concept of hegemony as developed by the Italian Marxist and journalist Antonio Gramsci, is one that she developed by first applying these theories to her understanding of herself. For example, one of the questions she urged her students to ask was ‘Where did I learn that (attitude, behaviour, idea), and whose interests are served by this?’, marino applied this thinking to her understanding of her own formation as an artist. She remembered that as a young girl, she gave her brother a birthday present of a large sheet of white drawing paper—something that was of great value for her and that she naturally thought would be deeply appreciated as a gift. But when her brother used the gift by drawing nothing but a small spider hanging in the upper-left corner of the paper, marino was incensed. Her initial impulse of indignation that a page that could be a canvas to abundant drawing (which is what she would have done) was used so sparingly was re:framed [Page 523](a visual metaphor, of course, and one that is troubled by the insertion of the colon, which is a punctuational politics) in later life with her lenses of artist and counter-hegemonic theorist as an act of brilliance—her brother, regardless of deliberateness, reframing the ‘unused’ white space of the page to lend tremendous power to the austere and singular image of a small spider.

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