Art/Research International (Journal)
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"The Long Shadow of a Juniper Berry": The Poetics of Land-Based Research
No full textThe purpose of this article is to focus on one land-based, poetic experience at the Blackfoot cultural site Aisinai’pi, Writing on Stone Provincial Park in Alberta, Canada. The focus is on an experience with two participants in the research, the Elder and the artist, who are both working with the school involved on this journey and me, the researcher. To situate the article as part of a research study, I also share the context of the broader qualitative study that works within an Indigenous paradigm to explore the development of kinship between children, the land, and each other. My question in this article is this: How do the poetics of land open new possibilities of how to cultivate a kinship ecology with children? I engage poetic inquiry and life writing to illuminate how this experience on the land gave meaning to and shaped the rest of the research study as it unfolded with children, teachers, an artist, and the Elder who guides the work.
Exploring the Textual and Tactile Weave of Academic Subjectivities: : Self-portraits, Intimacy, and Distance
No full textWithin the neoliberal university, academics become positioned around market-driven managerialist ideologies and the techniques enacting those principles. Audit cultures actively and continuously measure and shape academic subjectivities defined by a specific kind of success. The market-driven individualistic model can conflict with ethical ideals and longings for self-expression, while the mismatch between institutional goals and personal values creates an academic self that is pulled in conflicting directions. We become subjects of the discourse but we can limit our subjectivity and develop authentic insight. In this paper, we engage in a process of embodied making. We create textual and tactile self-portraits as a way of pushing back at neoliberal subjectivities, and to make visible our multiple selves. Although we recognize that we are always a part of what we resist, we use making as a way to create micro-resistances for our own renewal. Our self-portrait assemblages and stories are ambiguous and fluid but capture a view of selves hidden beneath the professional self. We are reminded that we are creative beings, and that there is room within neoliberalism to open intentional spaces. We may not always succeed in seeing our contradictory identities, yet we are able to occasionally capture glimpses of our shifting selves.
A Schizo-Poetic Inquiry of a First-Year Doctoral Experience
No full textUndertaking a doctoral program is a significant commitment involving sustained effort as an individual engages in academic work and scholarly identity formation. As a graduate student with a psychiatric disability, I face an added layer of challenge: dealing with symptoms as I navigate an academic system that is not designed for bodyminds like mine. This poetry and visual art collection offers a glimpse into my experience as a first-year doctoral student with schizoaffective disorder1 as I navigated Zoom classrooms, considered academic timelines and campus mental health awareness week, and wrestled with symptoms during the summer session. Through a schizo-poetic and visual inquiry informed by disability poetry and schizo-poetics, I present an embodied, multi-sensory exploration to highlight similarities and differences in the experiences of doctoral students with mental illness and their neurotypical peers, as well as to expand the conversation around disability and academia
Art/Research Cover: Artwork : An abstract painting on raw canvas: "Schizo Considers Academic Timelines"
No full textWhere Does It Hurt? A Poetic Holding of Existential Hurt
No full textThe question of an existential experience of hurt is not only relevant during present times of enduring hurt through realities such as a deadly pandemic, racialized violence, precarious educational realities, and ongoing struggles for justice in its many forms. The work of this poetic inquiry is enduringly relevant insofar as both institutions and people hold, create, sustain, and attempt to respond to hurt of many kinds. At times, we may cause more hurt than we soothe. As I write, I am grounded in the practices of poetic and literary analysis and position this piece a space and a form to hold the seemingly incommensurable questions for us as teachers, as artists, and as humans existing and living through a world of hurt. As a philosopher of education, I am perpetually concerned with the possibilities of a humanizing education that may soothe and eradicate existential hurt. I look toward poetry and art to show us the way
The Importance of Tacit Knowledge in Geoscience Brought to the Surface through Artistic Methods
No full textThis study of scientists’ reactions to the experience of an art exhibition, researches Polyani’s (2009) tacit knowing, a knowledge that we cannot easily express into words, and Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) striated and smooth spaces, with striated being a channelled and restricted way of thinking compared to smooth as free flowing and creative. To research these concepts, a psycho-social method—the Visual Matrix (VM)—is used as a research method. Two groups of geoscientists were brought together to first view Waterways, an art exhibition, and then participate in a VM. The research concludes that the scientists were able to express tacit knowledge elicited through the experience of Waterways, enabling them to think differently about their work and form new understandings about the natural environment in relationship to themselves and society. For artists, the VM can be an effective tool when working with scientists and the public. The study argues the importance of bringing tacit knowledge to the surface, allowing greater possibility of combining scientific and artistic approaches
Grief-Writing: Navigating Ecological Suffering Through a Relational Pedagogy
No full textIt’s been a tough couple of years. Each one among us could list off the news headlines as a lengthy and overwhelming reminder. And each one among us could certainly curate a personalized list that amplifies and extends our collective sufferings. The past couple of years have left me wondering, “what could possibly be next?” I heed David Geoffrey Smith’s (2014) call to “reimagine new, wiser human possibilities” for our overlapping worlds of suffering. As an educator, mother, world-lover deeply concerned with all forms of justice, I share grief-writing: poetic stories of small-town sufferings through floods, stories of family hurts, heartaches and loss, stories of love enduring through hopelessness. I engage life writing and poetic inquiry to undertake a dialogue with my own heart-memories, my loved ones, my scholarly ancestors— towards hopeful pedagogical possibilities for healing
Snow in Summer: Poetic Teachings from Cottonwood and Ponderosa
No full textIn this article art is used as inquiry to ask powerful questions, untangle paradoxes, and help us navigate loss and grief in the Anthropocene. Several central questions are considered and animated through narrative and poetry. How do we live poetically (Leggo, 2005) in a world that we need to exploit in order to survive? How do we engage in a more-than-human world full of ambiguity and paradox? How might nature become a teacher or mentor (Jickling et al., 2018), and what anthropocentric barriers do we face? How can stories and poems facilitate holistic expression and place-based connection? As we elucidate the wonder and loss of cottonwood, and the mentorship of ponderosa, Carl Leggo (2004, 2005, 2012, 2016, 2019a, 2019b) serves as a guide for artful attending and hopeful imagination for living poetically. Joanna Macy’s (Macy & Johnstone, 2012; Macy & Brown, 2014) work that reconnects and Leggo’s curriculum of joy offer parallel paths of grief and hope so that we might find our way through the Anthropocene
(In)Habitings: A Poiesis of Presence/Absence in Love and Longing
No full textConceiving poetic inquiry as a space for exploring, perceiving, and imagining, I present poetic (art-making through lyric and figural languages) and simultaneously inquiry (a research-method) through a series of autoethnographic (in)habitings. Weaving poems, lyrical narratives, metaphoric, and speculative reveries, I cast a loose net of inquiry (a method theorized and practiced as orb-weaving) into multi-dimensional spaces to examine the affective intensities of longing. Through temporal, imagistic, and spatial slippages (the openings in the net of entanglements), spaces are left open to experience the sensations of being in the world.
A demonstration and discussion of an architectonics of structure and language-in-use theorizes metaphors to support poetic inquiry-in-the-making—web, hinge, and circumambulations—and poetry’s resources—a poiesis of unspoken and kinetic gesturings. Endnotes provide explanations of the conceptual metaphors employed and notes on research processes and influences. Freed from the bonds of explanation and findings, this poetic inquiry is crafted to engage readers in multi-dimensional spaces of sensory, shape-shifting, and (re)cognition of the open beauty of (re)searching—exploring the poetic, ephemeral, and shimmering data of live/fe worlds. The ultimate goal is to create (in)habitings that are multi-verses of feeling, longing, and love. Longing—a kind of ache in both method and subject—resides in the spaces of in-between-ness