Art/Research International (Journal)
Not a member yet
272 research outputs found
Sort by
A Tapestried Review of the Fully-virtual, Non-traditional (Un)conference "MAKING shiFt HAPPEN: Female Academics Creating Personal and Professional Alchemy in the Academy," Co-convened by Alison Black and Rachael Dwyer
No full textThese storied and aesthetic offerings are presented as an alchemic tapestry of experiences and responses to the conference MAKING shiFt HAPPEN. This innovative (un)conference was fully virtual, and connected us across disciplines, countries and time zones. In this review we respond to how MAKING shiFt HAPPEN offered flexible, sustainable and inclusive options for us, women in academia, to engage with meaningful ideas and with other women around the world
Conflicting roles of mother and academic? Exploring the use of arts-based self-care activities to encourage wellbeing
No full textMothers in academia (“motherscholars”), whether faculty or doctoral students, are confronted by structures and policies often impeding promotion and movement through the academic pipeline. While research has examined these struggles, such as our own research over the last few years, this study addresses these issues from a new perspective — wellbeing. Using an arts-based participatory study, this article discusses how six motherscholars (including the authors) living in the US, Kazakhstan, and New Zealand sought to alleviate their conflicting roles of mother and academic through sharing online practices and struggles through self-care activities. Findings demonstrated how collaborative encouragement, and even pressure, to focus on self-care appeared to support participants’ daily lives in and out of academia as participants became aware of themselves as individuals, beyond being a mother or an academic. Implications suggest the importance of informal support networks (especially when formal structures do not exist) for motherscholars to reduce role conflict by encouraging wellbeing through self-care
Settling the Soul through Va\u27 (Relational) Ethics: An Ekphrastic Review of Hinekura Smith\u27s "Whatuora: Theorizing \u27New\u27 Indigenous Methodology from \u27Old\u27 Indigenous Weaving Practice
No full textThis piece is layered unapologetically with indigenous ways of being as the norm. From Fetaui’s bio, she aligns herself with Hinekura’s decolonization locale. The positioning of the author’s parents also connects and honours Hinekura’s mother who is instrumental in Whatuora. The migration of Fetaui’s parents from Samoa highlights the importance of our Pacific history and where our ancestors both Māori and Samoa traversed our Moana/Vasa(ocean). This migration and positionality is significant in aligning Samoa as respectful cousins to the land of Māori, Aotearoa, notwithstanding the birth place of her parents and of her ancestors bones in Samoa. Her chosen life partner and children are also named and her position within higher education is last. Our whanau/aiga (family) our whenua/fenua (land) are our collective priorities. Our academic credentials are ranked last
A Canadian Selvage: Weaving Artistic Research into Resource Politics
No full textThis exploratory article addresses our experiences as artist-researchers engaged with “Trading Routes: Grease Trails, Oil Futures,” a research-creation project supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. “Trading Routes” focuses on the intersecting geographies of Indigenous fish grease trails and the proposed Alberta-British Columbia oil pipeline. These converging routes are shedding light on the present entanglement between Indigenous and non-Indigenous cultural heritage, ecological perspectives, and resource extraction. Through artistic scholarship, material production, historical and cultural understanding, we seek to better account for the ways in which an environmental social justice perspective can be crafted into arts-based research. We write from a point of reflection, where we assess, evaluate, disentangle, and unclad some of the learning that has come to us through the research-creation and presentation of contemporary weaving. We suggest that arts-based research can offer a methodology of learning and thinking rooted in a perspective of informing, informality, or thinking about artworks in form, an extension of a/r/tographic praxis that is grounded in an analysis of materiality and aesthetics
Crafting a DIY Campervan and Crafting Embodied, Gendered Identity Performances in a Hyper-masculine Environment
No full textThis paper presents a multi-media textual collage that shows rather than tells the lived experiences of my conversion of a DIY campervan over several months in a diesel mechanic workshop in Sydney, Australia. This is a “small culture,” (Holliday, 1999) to which I gained limited access as I developed craft skills and the confidence to speak back to relative, milieu-specific, gendered power. I use autoethnographic textual fragments written shortly after the moment to depict the struggle to acquire skills, build confidence, and cross “small” cultures in an unusual crafting context. Grounded theoretical insights are suggested as they relate to three things. First, I examine the nature of individual, self-directed learning as engendered by the non-expert, hands-on doing of craft supported by YouTube instructional videos. Second, I consider positive and negative affective identity factors, particularly feelings of competence or incompetence and challenges to my own (female, middle-aged, injured, and non-expert) embodiment. Third, I consider the collaborative, discursive ways in which hegemonic and non-hegemonic masculinities were talked into being as contingent, relational identities against the foil of a constructed “other.
Patterns Repeat: Transformation Through Creativity in Research about Land and Colonialism
No full textWithin arts-based research, creativity becomes methodology. The art-work created may or may not participate in disrupting and renewing our world, may or may not bear its own heart beat. In this reflective and lyrical paper, I explore, in form and content, sacredness in the creative process and its potential for creating transformative works capable of disrupting deep patterns of colonial violence and loss. Sitting with a research question of what it means to “listen” to the land, I story experiences within and outside doctoral studies in which I grow and learn through Western, Indigenous and my ancestral Irish-Celtic teachings
Woven Narratives: A Craft Encounter with Tapestry Weaving in a Residential Aged Care Facility
No full textFor six months, a tapestry artist/researcher moved her studio into an aged care home to conduct a participatory art project. Drawing on ethnographic-based qualitative approaches, narrative inquiry and researcher-generated photographs, this arts-based research textually and visually documents the impact of introducing the studio-based craft activity of participatory tapestry weaving into an aged care environment. As well as highlighting the joy of creative collaboration and of learning a new skill, this project explores how tapestry weaving facilitated the understanding of the participants’ worlds through stories and reminiscence. This paper also disseminates that craft, as a practice and method, connects materials, ideas and people through engagement, and facilitates wellbeing. Given rapid population ageing, and the fear and stigma surrounding aged care homes, this paper argues that craft practice might help demystify and connect aged care with the broader community, as well as enhancing residents’ quality of life
Pathology: A Diffractive Encounter of Machine/Body
No full textI’ve been thinking about poems and about college as rhizomes (Deleuze and Guattari 1987), and as diffractive techniques (Barad 2007; Gullion 2018) for thinking about the social world. This project emerged as a way for me to understand my embodied experience of abdominal surgery. I began with the creation of an art journal, and then wrote a poem to accompany the images. I created the images and the text while thinking about my experience of undergoing surgery and diffracting that through Haraway’s (2016) ideas about cybernetics and machine bodies
The Demon of Hope: An Arts-based Infused Meditation on Race, Disability, and the Researcher’s Complicity with Injustice
No full textMy ethical stance demands that my research mutually benefit all research participants and that it should serve to reverse systemic policies of anti-blackness that permeate the educational system in the United States. Through publications and similar academic activities, however, my research advances my own career, but it is doubtful that it significantly advances the trajectories of the students with whom I work. Indeed, it could be argued that this imbalance in benefits advances the very system of white dominance that I claim to contest. In this arts-based, auto-ethnographic study, I document how, through the creation of pastel drawings and digital collage making, I seek to make sense of my compromised role as a white researcher in communities of color. I focus on my recent research with an 18-year-old African-American woman who was diagnosed with ADHD in the 5th grade
An Ekphrastic Poem for Phiona Stanley: Crafting a DIY Campervan and Crafting Embodied, Gendered Identity Performances in a Hyper-masculine Environment
No full textThe following is an ekphrastic review of Phiona Stanley’s article in this issue: Crafting a DIY Campervan and Crafting Embodied, Gendered Identity Performances in a Hyper-masculine Environment