Stephanie Springgay

A/r/tography as Living Inquiry Through Art and Text

There is a substantial body of literature on arts-based forms of research demonstrating scholars’ endeavors to theorize the production of the arts as a mode of scholarly inquiry and as a method of representation. However, if arts-based research is to be taken seriously as an emerging field of educational research, then perhaps it needs to be understood as a methodology in its own right. This entails moving beyond the use of existing criteria that exists for qualitative research and toward an understanding of interdisciplinarity not as a patchwork of different disciplines and methodologies but as a loss, a shift, or a rupture where in absence, new courses of action un/fold. This article proposes an understanding of arts-based research as enacted, living inquiry through six renderings of a/r/tography: contiguity, living inquiry, openings, metaphor/metonymy, reverberations, and excess.

The Rhizomatic Relations of A/r/tography

A/r/tography is a form of practice-based research steeped in the arts and education. Alongside other arts-based, arts-informed and aesthetically defined methodologies, a/r/tography is one of many emerging forms of inquiry that refer to the arts as a way of re-searching the world to enhance understanding. Yet, it goes even further by recognizing the educative potential of teaching and learning as acts of inquiry. Together, the arts and education complement, resist, and echo one another through rhizomatic relations of living inquiry. In this article, we demonstrate rhizomatic relations in an ongoing project entitled “The City of Richgate” where meanings are constructed within ongoing a/r/tographic inquiries described as collective artistic and educational praxis. Rhizomatic relations do not seek conclusions and therefore, neither will this account. Instead, we explore a/r/tographical situations as methodological spaces for furthering living inquiry. In doing so, we invite the art education community to consider rhizomatic relations performed through a/r/tography as a politically informed methodology of situations.

A/r/tography as an Ethics of Embodiment Visual Journals in Preservice Education

A/r/tography is an arts-based research methodology that inquires into educational phenomenon through artistic and aesthetic means. A/r/tographical research engages in pedagogical inquiry where the distinctions between researcher and researched become complicated, responsive, and undone. A/r/tography, the authors argue, develops the relationship between embodiment and ethics as a being-with. In this manner, ethics does not refer to the rationalist acquisition of knowledge or moral codes that advocate particular bodily behaviors but instead suggests that participating in a network of relations lends itself to gestures of non-violence. This article extends previous writings on a/r/tographical inquiry through a particular examination of the use of visual journals in a preservice teacher education course. Through the intertextuality of image and word, visual journals enable teachers and students to make meaning and inquire creatively into educational issues in a space that respects self and other.

“The Chinatown Foray” as Sensational Pedagogy

Abstract Thinking through affective theories by Alfred North Whitehead, Giles Deleuze, and Brian Massumi, this paper proposes an understanding of pedagogy that is sensational. To consider affective theories and their implications for educational research, I engage with a relational artwork, “The Chinatown Foray,” by Toronto‐based artist Diane Borsato. In “The Chinatown Foray,” the artist and the audience, which consisted of amateur mycologists, foodies, and a few art students, foraged through Chinatown in Manhattan, New York, to collect various mushroom species in the shops and markets, followed by a group lunch of dim sum at a local restaurant. In the paper I describe relational art and situate Borsato’s practice within this paradigm. From there I contextualize the use of walking as a form of research‐creation and attend to the politics of smell in the construction of alterity. The paper concludes by way of Deleuze and Guattari’s (1986) theories of the “minor,” which recognizes that bodily encounters—the act of one body interacting with another body—are affective. I argue that close, critical, and deeply contextual analyses of relational art practices as sensational pedagogy advances, develops, and enhances understandings, theories, and practices of body knowledge. Moving beyond a simple binary of mind and body, a sensational pedagogy endeavors to free the base senses, like smell, from their limiting associations.

Diagrams and Cuts A Materialist Approach to Research-Creation

In an attempt to disrupt arts-based research methodologies that simply fold “art” into its midst, our article enters into the theoretical conversations around critical and materialist research-creation to explore the concept of diagramming as self-organized enfoldings that do not describe or instruct experience, rather they are expressed as an open process that is emergent, vital, and abstract. The purpose of our article is to unfurl a theoretical discussion about materialist diagramming through the concepts of pure edging and cutting. In laying out this theoretical framework, we simultaneously consider how we engendered the diagrammatic within a research-creation project on artist-residencies in schools to offer ways in which one can enter into such a methodology and engage with it as data-in-the-making.

How do you make a classroom operate like a work of art? Deleuzeguattarian methodologies of research-creation

This paper engages with Guattari’s query about, how to make a classroom operate like a work of art? Guattari’s question is not intended to be prescriptive or dogmatic. Rather, his thinking engenders a way of thinking about art as an affective event that has the capacity to invent new relations and new ways of learning. In the first section, we attend to concepts like “objectile” and “depth perception” in order to think about difference affectively. From there we discuss Deleuze’s movement-image and time-image in order to problematize humanist notions of recognition and generosity and propose a politics of experimentation that is never fully intelligible and known. In the final section, to support our claim that affect and movement are crucial to new materialist research we re-turn to a methodology of research-creation as diagrammatic, in order to further consider the implications of an enfolding, affective, moving ecology for educational research.

“You go to my head”: art, pedagogy and a “politics-to-come”

This article is an engagement with Deleuzeguattarian theories as a way to explore the possibilities of a “politics-to-come” and what that might mean for education. To mobilize our thinking through deleuzeguattarian concepts, we inhabit contemporary artworks by Toronto-based artist Diane Borsato. Our interest in deleuzeguattarian encounters with contemporary art seeks to shift politics from the body-politic of representation towards an understanding of politics as movement. In developing movement, we engage with the theories of touch, affect and the diagram which helps us imagine pedagogies outside of structural models that confine and limit how we understand the world.

A/r/tographic Collaboration as Radical Relatedness

In this paper the authors examine a/r/tographical collaboration in a community-engaged research study investigating immigrant understandings of home and place. The study, The City of Richgate, involves a complex collaboration between community members, community organizations, educational institutions, and a research team comprising artist-educators. The study crosses border zones of cultural, ethnic, geographic, institutional, public, private, and disciplinary boundaries, reflecting the ever-changing character of postmodern reality. In this paper the authors reflect critically and theoretically on the lived experience of radical relatedness found within the complex collaboration, particularly within the a/r/tographic research team. This offers a qualitative methodology of radical collaboration applicable to many fields of inquiry in the academy, art world, and community.

The Primacy of Movement in Research-Creation: New Materialist Approaches to Art Research and Pedagogy

The Pedagogical Impulse (TPI) was a 3-year research-creation project that initiated a series of artist-residencies across a variety of educational sites in Toronto, Canada. In this chapter we examine the primacy of movement as a proposition of research-creation through a ‘case study’ of one of TPI’s artist-residencies in a secondary school and argue that movement is germane to emerging post-humanist explorations within educational research, and a crucial component for re-imagining research-creation methodologies.

On the Need for Methods Beyond Proceduralism: Speculative Middles, (In)Tensions, and Response-Ability in Research:

This article responds to agitations occurring in qualitative research related to the incompatability between methodologies and methods, the preponderance of methodocentrism, the pre-supposition of methods, a reliance on data modeled on knowability and visibility, the ongoing emplacement of settler futurity, and the dilemma of representation. Enmeshments between ontological thought and qualitative research methodologies have rigorously interrogated the logic of anthropocentrism in conventional humanist research methods and have provoked some scholars to suggest that we can do away with method. Rather than a refusal of methods, we propose that particular (in)tensions need to be immanent to whatever method is used. If the intent of inquiry is to create a different world, to ask what kinds of futures are imaginable, then (in)tensions need attend to the immersion, friction, strain, and quivering unease of doing research differently.