Can Concrete Poems Fly? Setting Data Free in a Performance of Visual Enactment

2019 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 129-135
Author(s):  
Adrian Schoone

In researching the tutors working in alternative education centers in New Zealand, I sought ways to bring voice to their lived experiences through, initially, creating found poetry from interview transcripts. The poems helped bring their vital voices to the page. Even so, I found the emotion of tutors’ lived experiences buckled under the pressure of their compression into lines of poetry. Thus, I set the found words free to form nonlinear configurations in two and three dimensions. In the tradition of concrete poetry noted by Khlebnikov, I “loosed the shackles of syntax . . . to attach meaning to words according to their graphic and phonic characteristics.” In this article, I present concrete poetry deriving from my poetic inquiry and reflect on the value concrete poetry provides arts-based researchers.

2017 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 262-265 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daisy Pillay ◽  
Kathleen Pithouse-Morgan ◽  
Inbanathan Naicker

We explore how using the literary arts-based methodology of collective poetic inquiry deepened our own self-knowledge as South African academics who choose to resist a neoliberal corporate model of higher education. Increasingly, poetry is recognized as a means of representing the distinctiveness, complexity and plurality of the voices of research participants and researchers. Also, poetry is understood as a mode of research analysis that can intensify creativity and reflexivity. Using found poetry in the pantoum and tanka formats, we provide an example of a poetic inquiry process in which we started off by exploring other university academics’ lived experiences of working with graduate students and came to a turning point of reflexivity and self-realization. The escape highlights our evolving understanding that collaborative creativity and experimentation in research can be acts of self-knowledge creation for nurturing productive resistance as university academics.


Author(s):  
Adrian Schoone

On the face of it, social pedagogy has no recognised presence in New Zealand. The education workforce, and society, are generally unfamiliar with the term ‘pedagogue’ and what that role entails. Despite this, a range of vocations in New Zealand reflect social pedagogical practices. In this article I explore one of those vocations: tutors who work in alternative education centres. Charged with caring for and educating students who become disenfranchised from conventional secondary schools, these tutors draw from their life experiences, cultural knowledges, sporting and arts skills and vocational skills to provide a holistic education. Based on the findings of a poetic inquiry in which I re/presented the experiences of tutors through creating found poetry, I present 21 attributes of tutors’ identity. In describing tutor character, tutor pedagogy and tutor achievement, I imagine these tutors as social pedagogues in New Zealand. I conclude by suggesting that these tutors play a vital role in helping students to navigate through education and life. In addition, tutors in New Zealand contribute to our global understanding of social pedagogical practice.


Author(s):  
Jonna Nyman

Abstract Security shapes everyday life, but despite a growing literature on everyday security there is no consensus on the meaning of the “everyday.” At the same time, the research methods that dominate the field are designed to study elites and high politics. This paper does two things. First, it brings together and synthesizes the existing literature on everyday security to argue that we should think about the everyday life of security as constituted across three dimensions: space, practice, and affect. Thus, the paper adds conceptual clarity, demonstrating that the everyday life of security is multifaceted and exists in mundane spaces, routine practices, and affective/lived experiences. Second, it works through the methodological implications of a three-dimensional understanding of everyday security. In order to capture all three dimensions and the ways in which they interact, we need to explore different methods. The paper offers one such method, exploring the everyday life of security in contemporary China through a participatory photography project with six ordinary citizens in Beijing. The central contribution of the paper is capturing—conceptually and methodologically—all three dimensions, in order to develop our understanding of the everyday life of security.


2013 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 381-393 ◽  
Author(s):  
Debbie Hopkins

Abstract While the term “climate change” is highly recognized by the nonscientific general public, understandings of its manifestations are varied, contrasting, and complex. It is argued that this is because climate change has become simultaneously a physical and a social phenomenon. Thus, climate change is becoming socialized through nonscientific interpretation. Research has considered the roles of independent sources of information used to inform these communities, ranging from media sources to personal experiences. However, little consideration has been made of the interplay between information sources and how these sources are perceived by nonscientific communities in terms of trust. This paper presents a qualitative study of 52 ski industry stakeholders in Queenstown, New Zealand. It explores the sources of information used by these communities to construct understandings about climate change, their perceptions of these sources, the dominant interpretive factors, and the interactions between the information sources. It finds that personal experiences of weather are used to interpret other sources of information and are drawn upon to corroborate and reject the existence of climate change and its relevance for their locality. This paper concludes that locally relevant information on climate change is required to ensure that it is applicable to nonscientific realities and lived experiences.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Amy Lavini

<p>Collaboration is an increasingly popular approach to addressing the multi-faceted needs of youth-at-risk both within academic literature and government policy in New Zealand. Due to being a relevantly new concept, there is limited evidence in the literature regarding how it is being implemented and whether implementations are successful. There is aparticular gap within the literature regarding the experiences of frontline workers and youth themselves. As youth are the key benefactors of youth services it seems important to understand whether and how they perceive the collaborative approach to be working to assist them in their development. To determine this, the following study explores the experiences of nine youth in New Zealand regarding collaborative processes used by services they have been privy to over recent years. Youth participants came from across New Zealand and altogether have experienced a range of youth interventions, from alternative education to Family Group Conferences, aimed at addressing anti-social and criminal behaviours. Taking a phenomenological approach, the study is carried out using concepts from the framework of Appreciative Inquiry (AI). The use of AI ensured the study was strengths focussed and allowed youth to become active agents rather than subjects of enquiry. Furthermore, it has allowed a positive paradigm for discussing ways to ensure that youth services are better focussed on youth's needs, feelings and understandings. Along with the findings regarding collaboration a common theme arose when youth were invited to share their stories which highlighted further areas for discussion when addressing successful service outcomes. That is, the importance of relationship building.</p>


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Tayla Hancock

<p>This thesis is an anthropological enquiry of the fat body. It explores the narratives of eleven individuals in New Zealand and Australia who are fat, or who have experienced life as a fat person. In the midst of an ‘obesity epidemic’, biomedical narratives dominate public understandings of ‘obesity’ and present fat individuals as a picture of poor-health, as lazy and morally irresponsible. This discourse dominates current discussions of ‘obesity’ to the extent that narratives engaging with lived experiences of the fat body are frequently excluded from public discussion and popular thought. Using Annemarie Mol’s (2002) claim that reality is multiple, this thesis challenges this dominant discourse through a combination of personal narrative and photography. Participants were asked to take photographs and provide images that represent their experience of fat. Using their stories, I argue that understanding fat bodies is best explored through participants’ narratives of the multiple bodies they occupy and experience. My findings are used to challenge current representations of fat bodies in western society as I explore the multiple ways in which fat bodies are experienced, felt and negotiated. This thesis reveals that there are diverse types of bodies that emerge in different ethnographic moments, settings and relationships and these are political, social and embodied.</p>


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Aotearoa Muaiava

<p>Research has shown that depression is prevalent in adolescence. This descriptive phenomenological study explored the lived experiences of young Pacific Island (PI) women (17-25 years of age) living in New Zealand. Phenomenological interviewing was used to capture the lived experiences of depression with the aim of developing a deeper understanding of what it is like to be a young depressed PI woman. The essence of being depressed was imprisonment. Young PI women described how family and cultural pressures, experiences of failure and abuse led to their depression. They experienced rejection, being labelled, misunderstood and silenced by others and their circumstances and depression trapped them. The women managed their depression by finding their voice in writing journals, listening to music, reading bible scriptures, prayer and connecting to others with similar lived experience. The implications of the study are discussed in relation to improving parent education and culturally relevant support for young PI women. Recommendations for future research include developing approaches to research that include a more specific cultural and gender focus.</p>


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Aotearoa Muaiava

<p>Research has shown that depression is prevalent in adolescence. This descriptive phenomenological study explored the lived experiences of young Pacific Island (PI) women (17-25 years of age) living in New Zealand. Phenomenological interviewing was used to capture the lived experiences of depression with the aim of developing a deeper understanding of what it is like to be a young depressed PI woman. The essence of being depressed was imprisonment. Young PI women described how family and cultural pressures, experiences of failure and abuse led to their depression. They experienced rejection, being labelled, misunderstood and silenced by others and their circumstances and depression trapped them. The women managed their depression by finding their voice in writing journals, listening to music, reading bible scriptures, prayer and connecting to others with similar lived experience. The implications of the study are discussed in relation to improving parent education and culturally relevant support for young PI women. Recommendations for future research include developing approaches to research that include a more specific cultural and gender focus.</p>


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