Projects and programs operating through the Onstead Institute have yielded a range of publications that advance the study, research, and understanding of ideas, issues, practices, and techniques related to K–12 art and design education. To date, these publications include the following.

Education as Experimentation Project 

Books

Book cover with title on a black background"The Alchemy of Research-Creation: On Pataphysical Experimentation, Dark Infrastructures, and Antifascist Studio Practices"

Authors: Tyson E. Lewis and Peter B. Hyland
Forthcoming from SUNY Press in April 2026
 
Research-creation is an attempt to suspend the operative divisions that define Western modernity: divisions between the head and the hand, knowledge and pleasure, science and art. Yet, this practice, which holds so much promise, has often fallen prey to insipid hybridization between science and art, or facile interdisciplinarity — both of which are fashionable trends in the current knowledge economy.
 
The "Alchemy of Research-Creation" charts a new, imaginative genealogy for research-creation, one that returns to a spatial and temporal configuration that predates the advent of the divided Western world: the alchemical studio. This shift to the alchemical studio means a fundamental reconceptualization of the problematic of research-creation, aligning it more with queer, pataphysical, and neurodiverse forms of non-knowledge produced through occult practices than with more familiar and safe epistemological questions concerning scientific validity and aesthetic judgment.
 
Through engagements with pataphysical artists, critical theorists, and occult practitioners, Lewis and Hyland open up a dark dimension within research-creation that has the potential to set adrift what can be thought and what can be sensed beyond the current coordinates of our divided world.
 

"Studious Drift: Movements and Protocols for a Postdigital Education"Book cover of Studious Drive with white type on a dark yellow background.

Authors: Tyson E. Lewis and Peter B. Hyland.
University of Minnesota Press, 2022
Purchase Studious Drift or read an open-access book through Manifold.
 
The global pandemic has underscored contemporary reliance on digital environments. This is particularly true among schools and universities, which, in response, shifted much of their instruction online. Because the rise of e-learning logics, ed-tech industries, and enterprise learning-management systems all threaten to commodify further and instrumentalize higher education, these technologies and platforms have to be creatively and critically struggled over.
 
"Studious Drift" intervenes in this struggle by reviving the relationship between studying and the generative space of the studio in service of advancing educational experimentation for a world where digital tools have become a permanent part of education. Drawing on Alfred Jarry’s pataphysics, the “science of imaginary solutions,” this book reveals how the studio is a space-time machine capable of traveling beyond the limits of conventional online learning to redefine education as interdisciplinary, experimental, and public study.
 

Book Chapters

“Vestigial Research for Postdigital Pataphysics”

Authors: Tyson E. Lewis and Peter B. Hyland
Postdigital Research: Genealogies, Challenges, and Future Perspectives  
Jandrić, P., MacKenzie, A., & Knox, J. (Eds.)
Springer, 2023
Access the chapter through the Springer Nature website.
 

Articles

“The Anti-Fascist Politics of Studioing”

Revista Portuguesa de Pedagogia (Vol. 56, 2022)
Read the open-access article on the Impactum Journals website.
 

“12 Experiments in E-Study for a Post-Pandemic World”

Philosophy and Theory in Higher Education (Volume 3, Issue 3, Publication Year 2021, pp. 147–158)
Read the open-access article on the Peter Lang website.
 

“Organizing a Studious Conference for Public Experimentation”

Visual Arts Research (Vol. 44, Issue 1, 2018)
Read the open-access article on the Scholarly Publishing Collective website.
 

Other Institute-Sponsored Faculty Collaborations 

Books

"Trouble in Censorville: The Far Right’s Assault on Public Education and the Teachers Who Are Fighting Back

Disobedience Press, 2024
 
From Florida, whose “Don’t Say Gay” law prohibits K–12 instruction on gender identity and sexual orientation, to Texas, which is shuttering libraries in schools, America is in the middle of a far-right war on public education. Now, for the first time, K–12 educators from across the nation give readers a teacher's-eye view of the radical right crusade to take down public education, coordinated by well-funded, well-connected far-right political interests. Christian nationalists hell-bent on erasing the line between church and state, white supremacists opposed to a curriculum that teaches the enduring effects of anti-Black racism, political action committees, such as Moms for Liberty, calling for the banning of novels featuring LGBTQ+ people, and profiteers eager to divert taxpayer dollars into private schools are mounting a relentless attack on teachers, the students they serve, and the commitment to public education that is a cornerstone of democracy. “It’s a phenomenal, unprecedented moment that we’re in,” says a librarian, recently retired from her Texas school. “It’s surprising how many people don’t know what’s going on. I talk to reporters who have no idea. And they’re reporters.”
 
In "Trouble in Censorville," public school teachers from states as far-flung as Florida, Texas, Kentucky, New Jersey, Tennessee, Wisconsin, and Washington describe, in their own words, being threatened, stalked, doxxed, ostracized, smeared as “pedophiles” and “Marxists,” placed on leave, and fired for teaching historical truth and racial justice, supporting LGBTQ+ students and, in one case, for wearing “insufficiently” feminine attire. Their stories bring readers face-to-face with the human cost of these attacks, which range from social isolation to pent-up anger over institutional betrayal to the terrible toll on teachers’ mental and physical health.
 
And yet, teachers are fighting back. They’re mobilizing colleagues, parents, and community members who share their faith in the freedom to read, the freedom to think critically, and the freedom to challenge small-minded provincialism. Their stories of frontline resistance, collected here, provide a battle plan for confronting censorship, rallying support, and mobilizing a grassroots defense of public schools. Their gripping testimonials are enhanced by a timeline that situates today’s far-right war on public education in the context of American history, moving briskly from Reconstruction to the anti-left and anti-gay fearmongering of the McCarthy era to the Black Lives Matter movement to the Trump presidency. Terrifying, infuriating, and inspiring, Trouble in Censorville sounds the alarm for a democracy on fire.