Art/Research International (Journal)
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An Artiture of Formerly Incarcerated Tongan Students in Community College
No full textThis article is taken from my dissertation study that explored the lived experiences of three Tongan Americans, each of whom were incarcerated in juvenile hall and are now attending college as a part of a transition program into local community colleges. The study introduced a Tongan version of the school-prison nexus by highlighting the ways in which the education and the justice systems work to ignore the dual culture realities of Tongans living in the United States. Adopting and fusing Fa‘avae’s (2016) talanoa and Lawrence-Lightfoot and Davis’ (1997) portraiture methodologies, I co-created a new approach Artiture—in collaboration with Taniela Petelo, my cousin, a Tongan-based international artist—to explore the following question: What are the challenges Tongan students face when they attend college after being incarcerated in the juvenile justice system? Findings from this Artiture highlighted intersections of family, history, cultural obligations and expectations, and the impact on Tongan Americans who deal with what Vakalahi (2009) calls “dual culture” (pg. 1259)
The Capacity of Artmaking Assemblages to Enable Positive Transformations: A Case of a Finnish Schoolgirl
No full textThis article explores how artmaking assemblages bring changes in children’s potential to express themselves. Assemblages are a system consisting of human, non-human, material, and relational elements in a given situation. Through the concept of artmaking assemblage, I explore the arts-based effects emerging around a Finnish schoolgirl participating in artmaking research workshops. Analysed video data from the workshops illustrate how her expression and participation change in and through the artmaking assemblages, and how different details in the artmaking assemblages combine to promote those changes. The girl’s artworks are used as data, as is an interview with the artist who participated in the workshops. The concept of artmaking assemblage is used as a thinking and writing companion when analysing the events from the artmaking processes. I conclude that artmaking processes, when done in a consistent manner and in a trust-based environment, support children’s possibilities to express themselves around sensitive issues
Tongan Crip Gang: A Tongan American Identity
No full textThis article is an articulation of Tongan angafakafonua (way of the land, culture)as Tongan identity and its (re)makings through religion and gangs in the United States. Based on a section of my doctoral thesis, I examine the influence of the Mormon Church on Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act charges.1 This article acknowledges that legislators, driven by their Mormon religio-racial ideology, interpreted the legislation in an exclusive manner. They took liberties to explicitly exclude first-generation Tongan Americans based on their preference for street gangs rather than the fraternal organizations associated with the Church. During the period between the settlement of Utah and the RICO trial of Siale Angilau, American-born Tongans of the first generation modified angafakafonua to address the needs of a growing Tongan community in the United States. In the later years of this transitional period, second-Generation Tongan Americans utilized angafakafonua to counteract excessive surveillance by gang task forces, racial profiling, and discriminatory practices employed by the state
Walking-Writing-Weaving : An A/r/tographic Reimagination of the Human-Algorithm Relationship
No full textInternet algorithms influence the news we read, the products we buy, the music we listen to, the people we interact with, and even the words we use to communicate. Our preferences, beliefs, perceptions, and behaviours are all shaped by algorithmic processes, threatening our capacities for self-awareness and self-formation. What’s more, algorithms operate smoothly and imperceptibly under the surface of our postdigital existence. How can we begin to make sense of our relationships with algorithms, knowing that they operate beyond the limits of perception? How can we reconsider the human-algorithm relationship as a way of opening new possibilities of being? Using a/r/tographic inquiry, I addressed these questions through a months-long process of walking, writing, and weaving, revealing insights that may help illuminate a path toward living with the complexities and contradictions while hanging on to the parts of ourselves that remain resistant to domination
From Threads to Frames : Animating an Immigrant Senior’s COVID-19 Pandemic Experience
No full textSenior immigrants hold a wealth of experience and knowledge often unrecognized due to language and cultural barriers. This article promotes a collaborative approach within arts-based research (ABR) that flattens conventional hierarchies, creating a space where voices of participants and researchers are valued and heard. By embracing translation as both a method and metaphor in the co-creative research process, this article amplifies a senior immigrant’s unique response to the COVID-19 pandemic through her creative making. In this collaborative model, ABR actively involves a senior as co-researcher, building research on her local knowledge and insights. Our approach invites a reconsideration of social support strategies for immigrant seniors, advancing public discourse about their role and resilience within the arts education community.
Creative Review of Amelia Walker\u27s Alogopoiesis
No full textThis review of Amelia Walker’s Alogopoiesis is an interdisciplinary response, reflecting Walker’s own creative approach of employing both form and content. Creative nonfiction, critical thinking, and a mixed media artwork response to Alogopoiesis reflect the effects that reading it has had on me as a creative, as a researcher, and as a living being. It is a happy coincidence that I chose to open the book in a café on Mount Myoko in Japan, and, as I climbed through the pages, I discovered a multitude of connections to my many worlds. I began walking beside each protagonist, nodding, feeling, staying. The word alogopoiesis, made up from alogia and poiesis, is an apt portmanteau for this body of work. Alogopoiesis renders an unsilencing. A slow-rebuild, remaking, and sensing of gaps where the unspoken reside. This book sharpened my outlook. My in-look. Replacing my rose-coloured glasses with recognition as I sank into stories of mental distress, violence, abuse, heartbreak, and prejudice.
“Our Culture is a Product of Active Word”: A Poetic Inquiry into Immigrants’ Experiences with Writing in a Host Language
No full textWith a focus on the intersection of creative writing and research, this article reports findings from a poetic inquiry project conducted within an undergraduate writing seminar to help pre-service teachers make sense of immigrants’ experiences with writing in a new culture and language. A group of undergraduate students in Ohio were invited to make found poetry based on interview data from conversations with immigrants about writing in English as their learned language. Adopting Bourdieu’s theories, the research reveals the dynamics shaping the writing culture in North America. The students’ found poems reflect a sensitivity to the societal, political, and ideological foundations of writing. Importantly, the poems recognize writing as a tool for immigrants’ identity negotiation and highlight how rhetorical control can be used for cultural assimilation. In response, some of the students’ found poems advocate for rhetorical complexity and co-constructions of new cultural futures by immigrants and their hosts.
Moana (Pacific) Expressions of Design: Setting the Conditions for Intergenerational inquiries through Learning and Creative Practice
No full textThis article is a reflection on an attempt to create a space of flux through the concepts of positionality, vā and talanoa within the design academy. This was presented as an academic course, originally intended to address a gap in established learning, and to make space for intergenerational knowledge systems that were originally being shared outside of the studio (shared at the knee, through office hours, and in passing conversations). This sharing led to key questions regarding how we (re)craft our ways through our practices and what cultural conditions are needed to enable safe design and cultural production. Five students enrolled in the course and are featured as co-authors in this article. They whakapapa as Tangata whenua (Māori, people of the land) or Tagata o le Moana (specifically Sāmoan). They are enrolled in a range of design disciplines such as spatial design, fashion design, and concept design. Classes were held once a week over a 12- week semester period. These in-person classes involved reflecting and re-presenting our positional contexts, a sharing and setting of kai, hikoi to gallery exhibitions featuring Māori and Pacific art practitioners at an institutional level and a community level, alongside the sharing of scholarship developed on the concepts of vā and talanoa, while coming back to ourselves and our familial, generational social settings
Book Review of Art-Care Practices for Restoring the Communal: Education, Co-Inquiry, and Healing
No full textBarbara Bickel and R. Michael Fisher, through their co-creative life-partnership, have composed in their book Art-Care Practices for Restoring the Communal: Education, Co-inquiry, and Healing, a beneficial guide (project) for research, education, academe, and art. They provocatively decentre deep-rooted beliefs in individualism and competition—aspects that dominate today’s academic life, promotion, publishing quotas, and journal rankings. In their thoughtful tarrying, they offer the reader three equally important text sections: “Communidreaming on Theory”; “Spontaneous Creating on Practice”; and “Gestating on Service.” Opening this collective is a detailed glossary, followed by a foreword of poetry, psalm, and photographed process which introduces Bracha Ettinger and her guiding Matrixial theory. Thereafter, Bickel and Fisher’s story of inspiration transports us into their intimate and courageous practice of Spontaneous Creation-Making (SCM) with 35 co-creatives—“an invitational way to make and re-make sense of the troubling times” (p. xxxv) which unfolded during the pandemic and shutdown in North America.
Getting Lost Through the Relational Mail Art of Art/Re-search (T)here : A Decolonizing Methodology
No full textArt/Re-search (T)here is a SSHRC-funded project that creates new understandings of art, research and decolonized processes amongst theories of knowledge. The relational mail art of Art/Re-search (T)here unfolds through post theories of the (post)qualitative posthumanist philosophies and decolonized practices. These disruptive co-compositions happen by getting lost through thing-power, and through the decolonial project of re-turning to the dynamic whole. (T)here, co-conspirators collaborate through art to reimagine re-search. The project’s initial research questions change alongside co-conspirators in transit as binary knowledge is (un)learned and disrupted. As the mail art travels to entangled spaces, processes are risky, glitchy, (un)known, and trans-formed. In letting go of research questions, art/re-search creates trans-formations. The authors put a call to action for re-searchers to work together through art in ways that question the structure of academia and how we come to know/be. Through relational (un)learning and risk-taking, some-thing lost is getting (t)here.