This article describes the interdisciplinary arts and education research project, Culture Shack, which particularly addresses the use of arts to engage young people across cultural and geographical borders. Drawing heavily on Weis, Fine and Dimitriadis’ suggestion for a “new research imaginary” (2009: 437), this paper is a call to arts educators, particularly those working in the global South, to seize a moment of emergent criticality in which the business-as-usual of education research can be productively disrupted. Culture Shack is one such ongoing
innovation-in-progress, informed by the peered and tiered learning model that collaborative arts pedagogies make possible. As Rizvi’s global relationality (2009) is understood as both long-distance geographical interfaces,
and also local intercultural ones, Culture Shack links these intersectionalities in both pedagogical and creative
terms.