Walking-sensing as a decolonial art and pedagogical practice

2021 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 115-133 ◽  
Author(s):  
Injeong Yoon-Ramirez
Keyword(s):  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
Pedagogical Practice ◽  
Art Making ◽  
Physical Movement ◽  
The World ◽  
Contextual Relation ◽  
Critical Intervention

How can walking, as a sensate experience and a recollective engagement with our memories, lead us to imagine new ways of knowing, being and sensing otherwise? This article conceptualizes walking-sensing as a decolonial art and pedagogical practice, which offers anti-colonial critiques and activates decolonial imaginations. By combining walking and sensing together, I first highlight how our experience of walking is intrinsically intertwined with our act of sensing that is already oriented and attuned in the contextual relation to things in the world. The notion of walking-sensing is used to describe not only our physical movement and the sensibilities of our bodies, but also as recollective and communal engagements, such as connecting memories with others, (re)collecting personal and local stories, and imagining the ways of living and being otherwise. I further elucidate how walking-sensing can be a form of anti-colonial critiques and decolonial imaginations that valorize multiple knowledges and sensibilities as well as to pave a path towards a new liberatory way of being in solidarity. With pedagogical scenarios, I demonstrate in what ways walking-sensing can be utilized as a critical intervention towards decoloniality. Lastly, introduce two artists’ art-making practice and how they are linked to the concept of walking-sensing. In this way, I elucidate the inextricable relationship between art and pedagogical practice and how walking-sensing can lead to decolonial resistance.

Allowing ourselves to follow our bodies: Cultivating student curiosity via sensorily-oriented modes of teaching

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 233-247 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Bruff
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Teaching Practice ◽  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
The Other ◽  
Pedagogical Practice ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Metal Music ◽  
The World ◽  
Extreme Metal

This article addresses the themes animating the Special Issue from the other side of the coin, namely the notion of aestheticizing political pedagogies. This reflects the direction of travel in some sections of politics and international relations scholarship, where there has been an upsurge of interest in aesthetics and especially popular culture. While there have been valuable contributions on teaching within such work, there has been a lack of sustained reflection on how, for example, a more aesthetically informed pedagogical practice can help us encourage students to think critically in creative ways. There has also been a rather bloodless account of aesthetics, diverting attention away from its visceral essence. Taking inspiration from the writings of Matt Davies on aesthetics, Jennifer Mason on the sensory and Cynthia Enloe on curiosity and surprise, the article explores the potential for aestheticizing political pedagogies to be mobilized in purposeful, strategic ways for enhancing the capacity of students to think critically and creatively. More specifically, I discuss how sensorily-oriented modes of teaching can disrupt entanglements between students’ ways of knowing and experiencing the world and their ‘objective’ understandings of politics, society, culture and so on. Three examples from my own teaching practice are discussed, all rooted in my utilization of extreme metal music with the aim of cultivating curiosity among students about their topics.

Arts-Based Research

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janinka Greenwood
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
The Political ◽  
Ethical Awareness ◽  
Art Making ◽  
Arts Based Research ◽  
Aesthetic Responses ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The World

Arts-based research encompasses a range of research approaches and strategies that utilize one or more of the arts in investigation. Such approaches have evolved from understandings that life and experiences of the world are multifaceted, and that art offers ways of knowing the world that involve sensory perceptions and emotion as well as intellectual responses. Researchers have used arts for various stages of research. It may be to collect or create data, to interpret or analyze it, to present their findings, or some combination of these. Sometimes arts-based research is used to investigate art making or teaching in or through the arts. Sometimes it is used to explore issues in the wider social sciences. The field is a constantly evolving one, and researchers have evolved diverse ways of using the communicative and interpretative tools that processes with the arts allow. These include ways to initially bypass the need for verbal expression, to explore problems in physically embodied as well as discursive ways, to capture and express ambiguities, liminalities, and complexities, to collaborate in the refining of ideas, to transform audience perceptions, and to create surprise and engage audiences emotionally as well as critically. A common feature within the wide range of approaches is that they involve aesthetic responses. The richness of the opportunities created by the use of arts in conducting and/or reporting research brings accompanying challenges. Among these are the political as well as the epistemological expectations placed on research, the need for audiences of research, and perhaps participants in research, to evolve ways of critically assessing the affect of as well as the information in presentations, the need to develop relevant and useful strategies for peer review of the research as well as the art, and the need to evolve ethical awareness that is consistent with the intentions and power of the arts.

scholarly journals Reply to Doing Indigenous Epistemology: Internal Debates About Inside Knowledge in Māori Society’, by Toon Van Meilj

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Sissons
Keyword(s):  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
Social Practices ◽  
Indigenous Epistemology ◽  
The World ◽  
Ontological Turn ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Ways Of Being

Van Meijl is right to insist that epistemology must be about active, socially contested ‘ways of knowing’ and that understanding the relationship between such ways and their products is as much an ethnographic problem as it is a philosophical one. Ways of knowing, as social practices, are also, more generally, ways of being or becoming and so are not, in my view, radically distinct from the ontologies they produce and reproduce. Phillipe Descola argues strongly that his four ‘ontologies’ are also schemas of practice, fundamental ways that people know, experience and inhabit the world. I think Van Meijl is mistaken, therefore, when he characterises the ontological turn in anthropology as being about different relations between mind and matter. For me, it is most significantly about the different ways that personhood or subjectivity can be understood and embodied.<br>

scholarly journals When Researchers Embrace an Artistic Lens: A Review of Patricia Leavy’s Method Meets Art

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matilda Mettälä
Keyword(s):  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
Comprehensive Overview ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The World ◽  
Everyday Realities

Method Meets Art offers an enhanced view on how the artistic lens can provide new ways of knowing and become a source of deep enrichment in science; a means to understand everyday realities and the world. It serves as a methods book to all arts-based researchers coming from different disciplines as it includes a comprehensive overview with practical variations and research examples. It may also be of interest to researchers and artists outside the qualitative community from various fields as well as to anyone who wishes to explore the merging of science and the arts.

scholarly journals Collateral beauty in the wind of truth: reclaiming a new sense of reality

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Rita Casadei
Keyword(s):  
Deep Understanding ◽  
Pedagogical Practice ◽  
Life Care ◽  
The World ◽  
Sense Of Reality ◽  
New Form ◽  
New Education ◽  
Sense Of Wonder

It is beautiful to be able to have the opportunity to allow oneself a doubt on the unquestionability of one's mental habits; it is beautiful to be able to renew one's energy to relate to the world in a way not bent by the banality of convenience and calculation. It is beautiful to realise that one feels the need for beauty as an inspirational motive for one's thinking, feeling and acting, and as a resource towards a new education. The serious pandemic crisis has probably accelerated a necessary but demanding process that takes time to accomplish: that of becoming aware of a reality based on the principle of interconnection and interdependence – of the person with all his/her dimensions, with each other, with the Cosmos. I believe that this new perception of reality – as the result of an experience – can mark a new step for the discourse and pedagogical practice so as to devote itself to a new form of beauty in the search for a ἀλήθεια (aletheia) truth to be configured as a desire for unveiling and deep understanding of the sense of reality, to be nourished in a revitalised interdisciplinarity, with a sense of wonder and amazement for every aspect of life. Care, responsibility and commitment, if animated by joy and love, can only aspire to excellence, giving the person the opportunity to fully realise his or her dignity and humanity.

Transplanting Ties

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
John R. Bowen
Keyword(s):  
South Asia ◽  
Economic Cooperation ◽  
Religious Community ◽  
British India ◽  
Physical Movement ◽  
Muslim Population ◽  
Chain Migration ◽  
The World ◽  
New Residents ◽  
Historical Accident

This chapter traces the physical movement of Muslims to Britain. Muslims came to Britain mainly—though not only—from South Asia, and they settled in certain cities and neighborhoods. Although Muslims living in Britain today trace their origins to many parts of the world, the majority have roots in former British India, and mainly in today's Pakistan and Bangladesh. Furthermore, within those two countries, a small number of districts have contributed in strikingly disproportionate numbers to the Muslim population of Britain. The concentrations began with historical accident but, once in place, reproduced themselves through practices of “chain migration,” whereby one generation of immigrants pulled another after it. The results are concentrations of closely related people in certain British neighborhoods. Many of these new residents of Britain have sought to maintain their ties to the homeland through marriage and through forms of economic cooperation. These practices reinforce ties of shared ethnic and religious community within certain British neighborhoods.

Branded Beautiful

2019 ◽  
pp. 151-165
Author(s):  
Lia T. Bascomb
Keyword(s):  
Coming Out ◽  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
White Men ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Down Low ◽  
Queer People ◽  
The World ◽  
Cultural Amnesia ◽  
Ways Of Being ◽  
The U.S

This chapter investigates how white homonormative narratives perform tyrannous acts that distort understandings of queerness for people of color. As white queerness romanticizes and celebrates “coming out”—becoming the universal marker of liberation—these fascinations forge a space where other, discrete ways of being in the world appear anachronistic, backwards, or rare. McCune re-opens the case of “white men on the Down Low (DL),” if you will—to elucidate how the larger discourse of the queer triumphant, or queer progress, activates an erasure of all queers (white included) who do not fit the mold of the “out and proud” gay subject. This elision constructs a cultural amnesia around other ways of knowing sexuality outside of coming out—which enables a mis-remembering of a white queer past and present, devoid of discretion. Secondly, these constructions of a white queer past sanitize white queerness and enable a discourse that not only impacts how white queers perpetually privilege progress narratives, but potentially demonizes or distorts queers of color who perform often more illegible enactments of queerness. Bringing back the film Brokeback Mountain as a shape-shifting cultural text—globalizing an understanding of the foregone closet—the chapter forces an interracial non-romance between discretion in whiteface and blackface. Brokeback Mountain and other resonant texts perform a popular queer historiography, which misreads or under-reads the broader histories and social realities of queer people within and outside of the U.S.

Spiritual Health Identity

2016 ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Y. Joy Harris-Smith
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Black Church ◽  
Lived Experiences ◽  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
Spiritual Health ◽  
Spiritual Life ◽  
The World ◽  
Mainstream Society ◽  
Epistemological Framework

This chapter aims to identify the ways in which spirituality, religion and the Black Church help to shape a spiritual health identity in a group of Black women by placing their lived experiences at the center of analysis using methods that are epistemologically consistent with how they understand the world. A spiritual health identity refers to the recognition and consciousness that a healthy spiritual life is essential to one's existence. It effects how they see themselves and their relationships to other people. Black women's ways of knowing are often pushed to the margins and lacking validation in mainstream society. Utilizing a womanist epistemological framework allows Black women to define themselves and lifts up the ways, spaces and places that help them make meaning.

Educating for Intelligent Belief or Unbelief

2021 ◽  
pp. 89-104
Author(s):  
Cathy Benedict
Keyword(s):  
Religious Beliefs ◽  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
The World ◽  
General Lesson

We live in a time in which spiritual and religious beliefs, ways of knowing and being in the world, are positioned as conflicting and radically incompatible. The purpose of this chapter is to lay out an in-depth rationale for what happens when we engage in religion-blind practices, as well as present general lesson ideas and examples of dialogue that help all of us consider how we come to know our world through belief and unbelief systems. Using musical chant as one way to introduce talking about religion in the classroom, this chapter introduces the reader to one way of opening spaces for discussion about how we come to know our world through belief and unbelief systems.

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