Lace Marie Brogden

Identities (Academic + Private) = Subjectivities (desire) : Re:collecting Art∙I/f/acts

Expanding upon previous theorizing of Art·I/f/act·ology published in Qualitative Inquiry in 2008, this article offers autoethnographic re:collections of a performance/paper presented at the international Academic Identities in Crisis? conference at the University of Central Lancashire, held in September 2008. The conference version used textual and photographic bricolage as a method for re:viewing public and private subjectivities in the continually becoming of an academic. The artifacts highlighted during the performance/paper combined the (mostly) public—including but not limited to drafts, publications, ah-ha moments, and setbacks of a PhD journey—with the (mostly) private—photographs and poetries of mothering and daily life. As with the performance/paper that preceded it, the contribution of this work se veut (wants to be) an approach to working with shadows of embodied knowing/becoming as/in academia.

art·I/f/act·ology : Curricular Artifacts in Autoethnographic Research

Contemporary curriculum theorists conceptualize curriculum, schooling, and the teacher as sites of discursive production and as dwelling places for theory. Drawing on memory work around childhood report cards, this article uses commonplace artifacts to reassemble autoethnographic memory. In sifting through memories and artifacts, the author combines notions of archaeology and bricolage with writing as inquiry, proposing art·I/f/act·ology as research method. This approach to autoethnographic research is conceptualized as a way to blend art and reflective practice, generating alternate ways of understanding curriculum as lived.

Living Spaces for Talk with/in the Academy

Exploring to find the question is always already exploring to find the method. Whats (really) happening when we talk in academic spaces? What talk(s) belong in the Academy? Where does the ‘talk’ happen and how is it (in)visible? Based on ‘talk’ of reflective practice shared between two colleagues, this article examines issues of ethics, methodology and usefulness as they pertain to the terra (in)cognito of idea talk with/in the Academy. Through a dialogue about methods and method in which we emphasize permission to dwell, we hope to further inquiry into the role of talk with/in the Academy.

Two hours or more away from most things: Re:writing identities from no fixed address

How do we construe and re:construe the (archi)textures of (written) life? What is belonging when identities are temporal and where naming remains elusive or unknown? This article plays writing collaborative writing, deconstructing textual hierarchies between the “main” text body and footnoted text as a means of interrogating ways identities are written/performed. It is inspired by correspondences between the authors, generated in relation to three previous works published in Qualitative Inquiry, James Haywood Rolling, Jr.’s “Messing Around with Identity Constructs: Pursuing a Poststructuralist and Poetic Aesthetic,” “Searching Self-image: Identities to be Self-evident,” and Lace Marie Brogden’s “Not Quite Acceptable: Re:Reading my Father in Qualitative Inquiry.” We share correspondences between academics, using spaces created in writing “between friends” while constantly becoming through the re:writing of our identities from no fixed address.

Not Quite Acceptable Re:Reading My Father in Qualitative Inquiry

Re:membering can be used as a research tool for messing with notions of “self.” As a tool of autobiographical narrative, textual fragments may be useful in peacing/piecing together some ways in which memories efface and, alternatively, reinscribe themselves on postcetera (including, but not limited to, postmodern, poststructural, and postcolonial) identities. This article is inspired by two previous works by James Haywood Rolling, Jr., published in Qualitative Inquiry: “Messing Around With Identity Constructs: Pursuing a Poststructuralist and Poetic Aesthetic” and “Searching Self-Image: Identities to Be Self-Evident.” Through the use of bricolage as method, it is written as a response to “death” and as a re:generation of possibilities for disrupting identity constructs with/in autobiographical research writing.

Talk/Reading/Voice: Re:search

In this article, the authors embrace talk as space for emergence and possibilities. They flirt with the part reading plays (or might play) in conversations within the academy, recognizing such readings take multiple forms: individual, shared, in response, and in reaction (to name a few). To confront oneself with the not yet known is to witness what is forming or being called forth as its shaping emerges. Using co-constructed reading responses, the authors present examples from Kings (2003) The Truth about Stories as illustrations of their work together, where work, like talk, is about pushing the edges of what can be known and, more particularly, about what can(not) be said. The authors maintain finding voice through reading, research, and self-study helps shape collaborative work within the academy. This reveal encourages the mapping of unmapped but taken for granted parts of academic life, an already querying of method.

“Finding” Payepot’s Moccasins Disrupting Colonial Narratives of Place

Using altered readings of normative, “common sense” histories, this article illustrates diverse entry points into interpreting narratives, museums, and place. It queries ways in which colonial subjectivities can be (re)produced through museum objects, collections, and displays, as well as the social engagements collectors, benefactors, curators, visitors, and others might have with them. The article revolves around a late 19th-century pair of moccasins of First Nations provenance attributed to renowned Cree Leader, Chief Payepot, housed in a rural, community museum, the Jasper Cultural and Historical Centre. By examining both the physical and metaphorical positionalities of “Chief Payepot’s Moccasins” as they come to be represented through various texts and subtexts, we argue for a disruption of hegemonic settler narratives in the not-yet-post-colonial territory commonly known in contemporary nation state terms as southern Saskatchewan. This approach privileges thinking with objects in an effort to dislodge colonial assumptions about place and belonging, encouraging dialogic meaning-making about historical and contemporary life with Treaty in Western Canada.