Art/Research International (Journal)
Not a member yet
272 research outputs found
Sort by
LEARNING THE “LANGUAGE” OF MOTHERHOOD AS INTERNATIONAL GRADUATE STUDENTS: A POETIC ETHNOGRAPHY
No full textAs international students seek degrees in U.S. institutions of higher education, their role as students is forefronted and recognizable by faculty and peers. However, what often remains invisible are international students\u27 social and personal experiences during academic study abroad. Although there is a great deal of feminist research on academic identity and motherhood, almost nothing has been written regarding the experiences of international women who become mothers while pursuing graduate studies in the U.S. This poetic ethnographic study focuses on the lived experiences of eleven international graduate student first-time mothers from Chinese mainland and Taiwan who became new mothers during their programs of study in the U.S., especially how they kept learning their ongoing, dynamic, multifaceted, and embodied “language” of motherhood through various kinds of social interactions, and among divergent practices, beliefs, and cultures. This article explores how poetic inquiry can contribute to the understanding of international graduate student mothers’ experiences as a social, cultural, and educational phenomenon. This article also discusses the issues of ethics and self-reflexivity of conducting poetic inquiry research
TRAUMA-SENSITIVE PEDAGOGY & PRACTICE NEWSLETTER 1 (OF 2)
No full textThis publication includes the first of two newsletters published in this issue of Art/Research International. This second newsletter is followed by a commentary and references for both newsletters.
Attentive to local and global mental health realities and the emergent need to provide intercultural mental health perspectives, resources, and methods that work across cultures in school contexts, I (the first author) conducted a participatory poetic inquiry, “Image, Body, and Voice: Supporting Girls’ Sense of Wellbeing,” with grade-6 girls in an inner-city school in Alberta. It sought to: (i) meet new Teacher Quality Standards (TQS) “to build positive and productive relationships with students [and] peers” (AB Education, 2018, p. 4); and (ii) be “aware of and facilitate responses to the emotional and mental health needs of students” (p. 6). I was guided by the following research question: In what ways might girls’ experiences with art-integrated activities and body-centred methods inform educators about pedagogical practice and mental health interventions?
Findings indicated the transdisciplinary praxis that emerged—arts-based, contemplative and somatic methods—enhanced the girls’ sense of self and wellbeing. The youth reported that these activities had explicit value: sharing circles used for check-ins and - outs, ceremony—which welcomed witnessing—relational and body-centred practices, and one-on-one time with the PI. The life-size body maps as research creation illustrated that the participants learned to externalize sensations and emotions in a safe way, aiding them in the development of skills needed for emotional self-regulation. Body maps broadly defined are life-size body images, while body mapping is the process of creating body maps using collage, photography, painting, or other arts-integrated methods to visually symbolize aspects of people’s lives, their bodies, and their worlds.
Funding from Research Impact Canada, VP Research & Innovation University of Alberta and the Kule Institute for Advanced Study aided to mobilize evidence-informed knowledge from this research through professional community engagement with pre- service teachers at a full-day workshop. Presenters at the workshop were members of a Community of Professional Practice (COPP) where the activities of educational research and trauma-sensitive practices were shared, including culturally aware methods for diverse populations. This newsletter reflects one of two events and two research creation artifacts provided as follow up to the attendees
Editorial: Encountering Artistic Research Practices: Analyzing their Critical Social Potentialities
No full textNone, editorial
Becoming Backpack: Towards a Counter-Inscription of Young Adult Collegian Identity Work
No full textThis article invites readers to encounter the author’s early attempts at engaging creatively with data produced during a research project called Life Lines: The Art of Being Alive to Young Adulthood. Launched in January 2019, the Life Lines project was conceived as a critical participatory arts-engaged research endeavor aimed at opening up conventional theoretical wisdom about the nature of young adult college student identity formation. In addition to providing details of the inquiry project’s design and aims, a series of visual and poetic prose narratives open and become threaded throughout the article. These multimodal expressive forms function as a type of creative counter-inscription device, working both to complicate identity development models that limit subjectivity to human consciousness and agency, and to illustrate a more expansive, somatically attuned, and materially-entangled set of practices and productions of young adult identity work’s work and its study
SELF-REPRESENTATION IN PARTICIPATORY VIDEO RESEARCH: ETHICS AND LESSONS LEARNT
No full textParticipatory video involves co-researchers using digital or video cameras to create their own videos and present issues according to their sense of what is important. In 2018, the authors—including three co-researchers from refugee backgrounds—collaborated through participatory video research to document views on better access and participation in higher education. Here, we reflect on key ethical issues encountered and share lessons learnt from our project. Our aim is not to discredit this methodology but to contribute new discussions on how participatory video can be used effectively as a form of self-representation to target wide audiences and effect social and policy change. This way, debates on the social and political potentialities of arts-based methods such as participatory video can be expanded. Since deploying participatory video in forced migration research is a relatively novel approach, there is much scope to expand the contours of knowledge on its potential to reach diverse audiences and open up new opportunities for social and political impact
A review of Karel Verhoeven’s “Scenes (cour jardin)”: An Open Invitation to Play
No full textThis is a review of “Scenes (cour jardin),” an ongoing project series by Belgian visual artist and designer Karel Verhoeven. The series consists of different architectural sculptures that are placed in (semi)public spaces. This review evaluates the project in terms of its relevancy for socially engaged artistic practice, and the more fundamental questions it raises: What can be learned from situations created by art in public space? How does an observation guide artistic practice? Is it hypothetically possible to assume that the essence of the work of art is not in its appearance, but in how the work is used? What are interesting opportunities for collaborations between artists and social scholars?
 
Embodied Absence and Evoking the Ancestors: A Collaborative Encounter
No full textThis paper argues that through participation, dialogue, co-action and the occurrence of immersive experiences, as suggested by Kester (2011), key elements of the research process, relationship, and friendship deepen and are enriched by engaging with absence and presence as part of a chosen activity and bodily experience. The following narrative explores how the production of visual artwork and co-created ritual experience in a chosen landscape weaves a gossamer safety net across the chasm of loss and raises questions of absence and presence, personal loss and the collaborative shared experience; the power of ritual, conversation, and object-making give attention to the presence of absence. My argument builds on the notion of presence, manifest absence and Otherness (Law, 2004, pp. 84-85) and extends the ideas that absence can be located in space and have materiality and agency (Meyer & Woodthorpe, 2008).
 
Recuperating Conflict: Between Critical Generosity and Antagonistic Activation
No full textIn this paper, I will argue that small scale conflict and disagreement in civic life are a vernacular part of our social experience and yet, in the hands of artists, they can actively work against larger hegemonic structures and help foster new expressions of agency and democratic action. By examining a number of socially engaged art projects I developed as the research director of the artist collective, Broken City Lab, and by situating this work in relation to a number of core ideas exploring notions of antagonism, I propose a tactical recuperation of the idea of conflict in order to see it as a core part of our democratic social lives
A REVIEW OF "THE ANTHROPOCENE PROJECT": TREACHERY IN IMAGES
No full textHere, we engage The Anthropocene Project: a 2019 art event that features photographic exhibits in art galleries and museums, both across Canada and internationally. The project also includes a feature length film, augmented reality, and a proposed curriculum. The Anthropocene Project thematically addresses one of the most pressing, yet controversial, matters of our age: the deleterious effects of human activity on the earth. As a proposed geopolitical epoch, the Anthropocene marks this specific time in history whereby human activity has more significant environmental impact than all other factors combined. The photography that depicts scenes of ecological cost and environmental devastation are deceptively, seductively appealing. We resist the lulling effect of the Anthropocene Project’s visually stunning images that engender a sense of awe at these demonstrations of human engineering achievements on such a large scale. We are left wondering at our species’ prospects of survival when we can become entranced by images portraying events so counterintuitive to our survival as omnivores, as mammals, as oxygen dependent creatures
From Bubbles to Foam, A Nomadic Interpretation of Collaborative Publishing: A Review of Jorge Lucero and Colleagues’ Article in Art Education
No full textThis review is a bricolage of nomadic encounters with Jorge Lucero and colleagues’ (2016) article on ways to engage with collaborative publishing. Lucero presents a Facebook discussion amongst practitioners denouncing the limited power of practitioners in shaping academic discourse. It shows how social media can serve as a platform for inviting the practitioner’s voice into research. The authors illustrate that by using Facebook, practitioners’ unfamiliarity and discomfort with academic standards can be bypassed. It demonstrates metalogue as a conceptual form of writing that disrupts the structure of conversations and challenges the authorial researchers’ voices. A critical note, however, is whether it is beneficial in the long term to consider the academic and social media parts as separate accounts. We argue that collaborative publishing requires collaborative research and writing in the first place. In response to the article, we started a WhatsApp conversation. This enabled us to reflect on the content of the article and experience the use of social media as a collaborative writing method ourselves