Rakini Devi: Diasporic Subject and Agent Provocateur

Burmese-Australian choreographer/performer Rakini Devi is informed by her diverse skills in the areas of classical Indian dance, visual arts and contemporary performance practice. She uses these skills as well as her satirical wit and storytelling abilities to create an intricate portrait of the lived experiences of a contemporary diasporic subject. This is a portrait that is not only aesthetically stimulating but also politically inflected and provocative at the same time. Through her work Devi encourages us to remember that diaspora is more than a theoretical trope, that it is a complex and often contradictory experience which results in joy as well as pain as it is played out on live bodies.

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Lower Case Truth: Bridging Affect Theory and Arts-Based Education Research to Explore Color as Affect

International Journal of Qualitative Methods ◽

10.1177/1609406921998917 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 20 ◽

pp. 160940692199891

Author(s):

Ellie Haberl

Keyword(s):

Education Research ◽

Visual Arts ◽

Lived Experiences ◽

Affect Theory ◽

Western United States ◽

Visual Method ◽

School Practice ◽

Lower Case ◽

Project Participants ◽

Grade Classroom

As education researchers increase our focus on affect as a crucial dimension of school practice and pedagogy, we also have the responsibility of taking up the paradoxical nature of seeking to represent and analyze moments of feeling that, by their very nature, evade our understanding. This article explores the question of attending to affect in education research by drawing on research conducted in a seventh grade classroom in a mid-sized city in the western United States, where students were explicitly invited to ground argumentative writing in lived experiences that were significant to them, including those experiences often deemed difficult and thus saturated with affective intensities. Invited to use visual arts-based methods of representing the felt dimension of the project, participants used both color and abstract design as a method for representing the complexity of these affective intensities. The author makes an argument for this visual method of representation that invites students to illustrate their affective experience in ways that maintain its complex, contrasting and often non-linguistic nature.

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