Intersections in the Research Territory
Research is not static and like music, I need to feel, listen, dance, and perform while walking it as it unfolds in multiple directions. That said, I applied the idea of an “iterative cyclic web” (cited in Smith & Dean, 2009: 19) to visualize the itinerary of the inquiry and its elements, including myself as an ethnographer. While working in the fieldwork, I intend to borrow other ways of knowing from ‘Eight Aboriginal Ways of Learning’ (Yunkaporta, 2009: 3) because some ideas can help to know the research terrain better in order to connect it to the community needs. For example, the idea of story sharing, connecting personal experiences to environmental issues, thinking, and narrating from non-verbal language.
- Scribbling While Walking Through Hybrid Arts-Based Research Methodologies
- My researcher position(s)
- Being a Teacher
- Being a Mother
- Being an Artist
- Being a Researcher
- Togetherness: Ethnography, theory, subjects, objects, pedagogy, and ethical considerations
- Ethics
- Ice Cracks as Ruptures for Scribbling a Dynamic Research Map
- Intersections in the Research Territory
- Encounter Resistance
- Wandering on/in/around Cracks with Ethnography, A/R/Tography, and Art-Based Research Methodologies.
My research map has many perspectives and ways of knowing. Similar to the ones found in nature, cracks can be provoked, but it is uncertain of their direction, length, and depth. I believe it is important to explore what’s inside the cracks. Overall, research can look like ice archeology, you have to pay attention to when the ice melts to find interesting things. Because of this, as shown in image 8, I came up with this map where there are three spheres, and an unfolding set of inquiry paths intersect with them and are also superposed. The spheres are theory, fieldwork, and current world issues. I illustrated the performative researcher position from an ethnographic perspective as a teaching-mother-artist-researcher experiencing and creating experiences co-creating a situation between students and myself as a teacher. In the research, I employed the methods of:
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Theory: analysis of literature, analysis of artists’ works that inspired references to design curricular activities;
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Field Work: interviews with teachers of art and students, teaching, observing, documenting, and collecting information;
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Responding to the Current World and its Issues: Designing a frame for a democratic arts curriculum map in collaboration with students and teachers of art at middle-school.
Production of Knowledge
Following Irwin (2013) and Østern et al. (2021), anything that allows me to produce research material through artistic practices including my own body when performing art as research is also useful to approach teaching from a performative practice. The cracks represent inquiry paths, ethical considerations, theories, and fields intersecting with the arts to produce knowledge. For example, when exploring gender and the environment, I need to employ contemporary art tools to discuss humanities. In the context of a lesson plan, the theory is taken into an experimental phase by applying arts-based methodologies but also qualitative and quantitative. Pitfalls can change the course of the inquiry and this is what happens when life experiences that my students bring into the classroom affect but also informs my teachings. The research is itself a space for change where relationships are built but also destroyed. So going back to Eraclito’s quote about never walking on the same river twice, I walk research as it unfolds changing the scenarios I use to teach and collect data. I mapped this with the wandering directions of the researcher's position. Irwin (2013: 211) describes this as “coordination points for worlds in progress”, “terrain of the movement… becoming-intensity, becoming-event, and becoming-movement” (pp. 198–215). I also thought of including the layers that can be documented through objects and placed alternatively in the organizational structure of the rhizome (Smith & Dean, 2009, Irwin, 2019, Jenssen & Martin, 2021).
The map has a sort of bird’s-eye-view perspective to give a possible general frame and gain perspective as a metaphor for the terrain/space/environment of the research. I also added some keywords to start making theoretical connections. I supported this considering Irwin’s criteria of a “non-representational” (2013: 211) rhizomatic map since when isolated from my process map description, it can not be identified with the ice cracks. This representation also aligns with Haseman (2006: 98-106) who presents “the paradigms of research” (p. 98) because, in my dynamic-cracking system of ideas, one can situate the self from a non-individualistic and depersonalized perspective by integrating the question of “How can presentational forms be understood as research?” (p. 102). Poetically speaking…as I walk, I draw and as I draw, I discover and write and vice-versa.
Encounter Resistance
There are some paradoxes in research: On the one hand, conducting research through the arts breaks the research paradigm (Hasseman, 2006, Østern et al., 2021:2-18). In the map, the cracks can also be interpreted as flows nurturing research holistically. On the other hand, the research methods, the Ph.D. are embedded in colonial structures. I can’t make sense of decoloniality in the research methods I present so I chose not to include that keyword. Instead, I am using a colonial structure to open a dialogue about decolonization in research in arts. I encounter resistance from myself because, to be honest, most of the literature I used has been produced in the Northern Hemisphere mainly in English. I think about the idea of embracing Foucault to understand the circulation of power but this doesn’t mean that I can’t fully acknowledge and deal with it while performing as a researcher from multiple positions. Therefore, the perspective I want to gain as a researcher becomes blurry. With the feeling of mapping an iceberg and trying to crack it, I recognize that lesson plans fail. An example of this is that a day at school may be altered due to personal students' reasons creating situations affecting the field word in the research.
I agree with Smith and Dean (2009:14-22) because my teaching practice, contemporary art, and artistic research as ‘fields of inquiry’ in my doctoral research are nurtured mutually (2009: 23-22). This is described as an ‘ecological-philosophical approach to art-making. When thinking of my own footsteps on the ice this is the intensity I may use to produce cracks, emphasizing a stop on the move as a ‘reflexive process’. That said, I illustrated in the map how my researcher position can go repeatedly around points such as the arts curriculum and its praxis.
But, I believe that the collection of this data can also produce valuable knowledge out of the mainstream of the map informing what teachers call ‘hidden curriculum’. From the artist-researcher perspective, it is also a way to interact with the material, and de-contextualize the research shifting the perspective into a different space. On the map, this is represented as pitfalls producing a major crack from the world to the fieldwork and affecting the arts curriculum.
The performative part of me working as a teacher encounters a researcher and artist telling me to acknowledge the situationally and relationality of co-creating a disruptive situation between students and teacher to destabilize essentialism regarding research. Holistically, knowledge and learning, ethical considerations regarding binaries relate to producing knowledge. The binary ontological and epistemological meet in the pitfalls crack to critically counter act normativity and hierarchies of me acting under one role. I reflect and act from a researcher-artist position, and make a shift from being reflexive to diffractive as a teacher (Barad, 2011: 445).
To complement the analysis of this dynamic-cracking system in art education, Hannula & Suoranta (2014) explain that research is an “open-ended, practice-based and self-critical historical context-aware research” (p. 4) and a “democracy of experiences” (p.21). For example, in Part I. Fail Again, Fail Better (pp. 3-19) the authors suggest performing research through and inside the art practice. In my case, teaching art to middle-school students means to me that I include a frame –which is a lesson plan– to trigger students’ art responses regarding intersectionality. To address the challenges, also mapped as a crack with intersections with the world, theory and fieldwork include mediating conversations with students and bringing their, mine, local and global context into the class discussions. More, I understood that there are also ‘other’ factors influencing research. Not just, being a mother, but under the researcher's wandering directions presented on the map. When looking into the crack of gender and life experiences, I see how being a white woman and privileged immigrant with a foot in academia creates disruptions.
Regarding other pitfalls and contributing to the slippery research surface, being a white woman means to me that I don’t really know how to approach other ways of knowing when being aware of my own colonialism. In my opinion, ethically speaking, I can’t escape it but I use it to better train myself, provide a democratic-arts-oriented curriculum to my students and have discussions with other teachers. Last, teachers don’t have time to conduct research because we are overwhelmed with our daily tasks but I need to use this Ph.D. to pose a question about the academy and its patriarchal ethnocentric structure. I am looking forward to looking into the humanities, multiculturality, and critical pedagogy crack and finding an equal amount of research resources as there are in the North European Literature. I don’t want to use ethnocentric literature as the sole pain killer for my white guilt. The headaches produced by the tiredness of being a mother and mainly communicating myself in English –which is not my mother tongue– need alternatives to keep performing research in arts. When I look at my research map, I would like to avoid mapping a structure with a center. In other words, I don’t want to navigate research as the world map we currently use because it was designed during the XVI merchants to exchange commodities between Europe and the Americas. If research is a commodity, how do I know that I am not neoliberalism it? Stop moments and fall into colonial cracks.