Art/Research International (Journal)
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272 research outputs found
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Constructing a Pedagogy of Apparentness
No full textIn this explorative essay, I discuss the complexity of apparentness as it pertains to being a teacher educator and an artist. Notions from creative and postmodern research approaches help me suggest that it is a quality of perception and not a quality of art or any other kind of text. In this exploration of how apparentness comes in and out of focus for me as an educator and as an artist, I begin with a discussion of the role of art in my becoming a teacher educator; I realize art’s efficacy as a site for exploring the acts of facilitating discussions, drawing the attention of others, and raising an awareness for what we believe matters. As a painter, I reflect on and inquire into what is laudable and limited in these forays of connecting art to teaching and education. The research approach is narrative and reflective, not intent on the discovery of discreet findings, but more interested in discovering questions and in offering some ways of framing my experiences and their possible implications for educators, teacher education, art, and artists. I ponder the parallels between art and education, particularly in how viewing art can be a metaphor for classroom discussions. The essay is concerned with what we believe is apparent and mysterious, and how we engage in dialogue with the resonance and dissonance of the perceptions of others
Making Visible the Invisible: How Combining Autoethnography with Visual Arts Practice Unearthed More Than I Imagined
No full textThis article documents how I came to combine autoethnographic accounting with visual arts practice. I developed this mixed methods approach for my PhD study which explores the interdisciplinary possibilities offered by combining visual arts practice with STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics). Visual arts practices as narrative forms tend toward the non-linear (Anae, 2014), whilst autoethnography offers self-reflection. Writing an autoethnographic account for an artwork has the potential to generate a wealth of data, some of which are visible, some of which are not. The invisible data become available only when the artist speaks to/writes about the artwork. If some content/context of a visual artwork is only visible through background information provided by the art maker, this discovery troubles another issue concerning our notions of what a good visual artwork is. Finally, I test this article’s autoethnographic authenticity against Adam’s four characteristics of autoethnography.
A Thing is Whatever This is That I Can\u27t Say: Exploring Aporias through Poetic Inquiry
No full textThis inquiry exists because of a necklace I made but could not explain. I picked up theory and poetry and set off on a journey to answer why, and what now. How do you articulate the value of something you remain incapable of explaining? In the middle of the journey, I reached the edge of a ravine. This paper is written there, at the lip of the aporia. It is like a letter or a map. It aims to guide you to that uncrossable gap existing between thing and object, thing and us. It invites you to join me—speaking poems about and into that chasm, and hearing strange replies that might be echoes, or new verses—as I make with and despite and because of the mystery. As I inquire into and with the world, gaps and all, to approach things—that which is that I can’t say.
Puppets Know Best: An Arts-Based Exploration of Scholarly Identity, Liminality and Soulful Research
No full textThis article addresses the struggle of crafting a recognized professional scholarly identity, and reflects on the significance of puppets to interrupt this struggle, assert one’s voice, and creatively occupy one’s space. Our interdisciplinary contribution aims to extend conversations on the realities of academic life that are often muted or diluted such as anxiety, self-doubt, weariness and failure, with implications for creative research practices. We engage the aforementioned realities through a mix of creative and whimsical writing styles (e.g., human-puppet dialogues; poetry; reflection), leveraging insights from the Jungian psychological approach to archetypal symbol and the imagination as well as transformative arts-based approaches involving storytelling, voice, and liminal space. After exploring our own experiences carving out space as creative and reflective scholar-practitioners, we discuss two examples where puppets disrupted the status quo of particular academic settings and provided opportunities for different, more spontaneous forms of engagement with the self and with others.
Exiled Poetics: Glück, Darwish, and A Transnational Edenic Imagination
No full textTaking up the writings of Louise Glück and Mahmoud Darwish, this essay (re)searches the place and potential of a transnational, Edenic imagination as a vision of belonging amidst the alienation of modern life. Where a transnational poetics rejects ossified borders and boundaries, seeking porosity and imaginative possibilities that work across, around, through, and in-between, an Edenic imagination embraces a consciousness that simultaneously holds holy memory alongside longing for transcendence; so too do these ways of reading and seeing refract in the art-making I attempt as I seek the invisible web of connective, human tissue present in the poetic renderings of Eden by Glück and Darwish. As forces of modernity, colonization, and globalization maim and sever, a transnational, Edenic imagination gives language and location to our thirst for sacred inhabitance. As a method of inquiry, such a reading invites both researcher and reader to dwell in the liminal space of poetics.
Guided by the poetic explorations of Eden and exile by Glück and Darwish, I work to consider how poetry itself becomes a hybrid site of belonging. The hope is that, through a deep (re)reading of the verses in which Glück and Darwish employ Eden as a metaphor, poetic inquiry might provide a way for us to more fully traverse categories of life, death, time, longing, space, and culture, exploring the complex matrices of our human experience and pursuit of home.
Joy in the Dirt: Discovering Indenture\u27s Wild Places
No full textI was born in South Africa, as were my parents and grandparents. We have descended from people who had been brought to South Africa through indenture, a colonial labour system that introduced alien agricultural methods and an alien workforce from India, to optimise monocultures like sugarcane. My very presence here is, therefore, entangled with colonialism’s domestication and mastery over land, plant, and people (Indigenous and indentured). I have never felt alien here. Why was that? What about the indenture stories of people, land and plant, beyond empire’s mastery and control—my ancestral wild places? And was there room within these wild places to heal colonial wounds across our ethnic and racial barriers? What was lost? Could my PhD2 research transcripts address some of those losses? This paper contains poems that emerged from PhD research interviews, my fieldnotes, my father\u27s memoirs, and letters from my ancestral archives. A poetic lens gave me a decolonial language to inspect the archives and transcripts with some of these questions in mind
Red Lake Breccia: Arts-Integration to Map a Fractured Relationship with Geoscientific Knowledge Production Networks
No full textThrough this work I engaged the geological process of brecciation as a metaphor in an arts-integrated critical analysis of an event that changed the trajectory of my career and initiated the transformation of my relationship with geoscientific knowledge and professional practice. I integrated personal stories from my time as an exploration geologist in Red Lake, ON, and reflections on my current role as a post-secondary geoscience educator, to specifically situate myself within this inquiry. I used mixed-media acrylic painting to analyze information and experiences across sometimes dissonant paradigms. Though common in educational research, arts-integrated practices are still extremely rare for research focused on post-secondary technoscientific training. This work provides an opportunity to think differently. It is a first step toward making visible, and challenging, some of the hidden lessons and omissions in geoscience education that have insulated geoscientists from the effects of their knowledge production
Nomadic Ethics: Attending to the Ghosts we Cite
No full textIn response to Maureen Flint’s (2020) performance and essay, Fingerprints and Pulp, on the ethics of truncating and flattening research participants in qualitative research, I extend this ethical concern to the voices of scholars flattened in qualitative research and writing processes. Scholars cite for many reasons, but what is there that holds us to account for our treatments of academics that come before; how can we avoid flattening and abusing those we cite? Through endeavouring to recognise and protect ghosts and nomadic identities of those other than the author in the research and writing process, I propose a new way of re-animating and re-embodying the haunting, nomadic voices in cited texts, in order to minimise further, future truncations and limitations of the other in academic writing. Attending to the ghosts allows for more ethical and just behaviour towards those cited. Seeing the multitude of ghosts haunting scholarly work obliges more ethical behaviour toward those voices flattened in writing.
Staging the Feminine Ethic of Care: A Review of Reimagining the Academy
No full textThe neoliberal university can be a restrictive, repressive, and/or oppressive space. However, the contributions in this edited publication “Reimagining the Academy: ShiFting towards Kindness, Connection, and an Ethics of Care” by Alison L Black and Rachael Dwyer and published by Palgrave Macmillan represent hope, kindness, love, and compassion. The words and works contained in this book gift to any reader many enriching, impactful storied accounts of academic works from differentiated perspectives. These important works support the re-imagining of academic spaces, scholarship, research, teaching and learning and care for self, others, and the work that matters. My reading of these works engaged my individuated ethic of care and inspired a creative response – artistic and poetic storying as an act of performative synthesis of the experience that awaits the reader
A Review of "The Marrow of Longing" by Celeste Nazeli Snowber
No full textThis is a review of The Marrow of Longing by dancer/poet/writer/educator, Celeste Nazeli Snowber. This book, presented in fragments, is a heartrending and thought-provoking poetic and visual inquiry into Celeste’s motherline, Armenian cultural heritage, and identity. It will awaken, like it has for me, your longings and need to become aware of what has formed and informed your own life. The Marrow of Longing is both an offering/gift and an invitation