Re-touche

Creativity and affect in families with a family member, who is labelled as disabled, is central in this article. These families are often pinned down to individual, closed categories where everything revolves around the label “disability.” Our research goes beyond binary thinking in terms of abled/disabled and other linear explanations by using artistic processes as ethnography. We start from encounters between two people who both created something about their “non-ordinary” brothers. One (first author) made a shortfilm/documentary about her own family, the other (research participant) wrote a TV series about a man who takes care of his brother after their mother’s death, which was not autobiographical yet inspired by his own experiences. The first author distilled etchings from their encounters, which piece together different layers: the scenarist’s biographical story, the story of creating the series, the series’ script and the first author’s thoughts and readings. The concept of re-touche—of touching and being touched, and in this way returning to family fissures and creating something new from them—runs through this art-based project.

“Institutionalized States of Information Abstinence”

In this study, I provide applied examples of using cut-up poetic inquiry as an arts-based research method for analyzing erasure poetry. The erasure poetry was composed by five poet-participants and me during a sensory ethnography that explored embodied experiences of a sexual educator training program. I first overview erasure poetics in the context of sexuality education. I explain how erasure poetry as method can interrupt authoritative proclamations of truth, while also providing a technique to grapple with complex, corporeal data – central topics in sex education research. I then theorize cut-up poetic inquiry as an additional form of erasure, asking and illustrating how the processes of cut-up can distill information to enable emergent analytic insights in the context of my research. Throughout, I meditate on how erasure poetry as an arts- based research method can contribute to discussions of language, discourse, and embodiment in sex education research.

Affective Epiphanies

This proposition explores the potential of a pedagogy of affect as an arts- based research approach to museum education at the university level. Such an approach is predicated on a continuous movement of situated stories as the heart of the learning encounter, generated relationally between object-body-space, or artwork- learner-museum. As a forum for deliberation, the purpose of this conversation is to consider how emotions, as the basis for teaching with caring and sensory awareness, bring vitality, aliveness, and feelings to the fore. This conversation explores affective epiphanies sourced from personal practical knowledge as an expression of arts- research-in-progress. By drawing on autoethnographic life writing, I explore an alternate approach to three museum collections that demonstrate how and why the aesthetic relation of stories operate as pedagogic pivots in ways that reconfigure conventional museum engagement. Rethinking museum education with an arts research perspective is an effort to advance how context connects affective systems of knowing relationally, and why embracing stories offers new pathways to understand museum education through more expansive learning approaches, inclusive of feeling.

Rhetorical Questions and Ruminations

Transitioning from graduate student to early career faculty can often provoke uncertainty and questioning. This study explores the rhetorical and revealing nature of such questioning (i.e., Am I really this lost? Am I in the right place?). Utilizing methods from arts based research (Barone & Eisner, 2012), specifically poetic inquiry (Prendergast et al., 2009; Richardson, 1992), we created found poetry around rhetorical questions from our existing collaborative autoethnographic journal. We frame our findings with a selection of poems to provide insight into our lived experiences of transition. The question poems illustrate that our first year as assistant professors were preoccupied with managing tasks, balancing work, avoiding burnout, building relationships, and discovering how to belong in the new context. While rhetorical questions do not necessarily produce answers, questioning in a collaborative space allowed us to explore the struggle, complexity, and ambiguity of academic identity construction as early career faculty.

Pull of Words

Poetic inquirers immerse themselves in the flow of life, listening for art in the ordinary world, offering a response through voice and written word. The biennial International Symposium on Poetic Inquiry, which draws poet-scholars from across disciplines and the world, showcases the artful use of poetry in research as a method of inquiry. In this article, the Fifth Symposium on Poetic Inquiry is relived by two attendees who interrogate found poems they each created from presentations and performances. The poems are brought together as a means of researching each author’s respective approaches to creating found poetry. In this article, the authors converse about their methodological frameworks: phenomenology and metaphor/ narrative. Central to this dialogue is how the found poem is listened for, and how artful responses are made to the pull of words. The authors conclude by considering the ethics of rehousing others’ words and the challenge this inquiry presents to our own private sense-making in academic conferences.

Review of Tsing, Swanson, Gan, and Bubandt’s (2017) Edited Volume

This is a review of Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene, an edited volume from Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson, Elaine Gan, and Nils Bubandt. The text showcases historical abuses of the earth and offers a myriad of opportunities to creatively inquire about our current relationship and interactions with other matter, creating a sense of urgency within the precarity of the Anthropocene.

Quilting Resistance to the Sleep Industrial Complex

In this narrative account of sleeplessness, I draw on Ball’s (2002, 2012) poststructural conceptualization of quilts as social texts to explore the practice of quilting as a method of arts-based storytelling. Through the process of quilting, I story my experience of resisting the Sleep Industrial Complex. I explore the biocultural arena of sleep and critique the biomedical construction of sleeplessness as insomnia. I argue that the medicalization of sleeplessness works to support multi-billion-dollar industries that purport to cure insomnia through consumerism (Barbee et al., 2018; Williams, 2008). I describe how radically accepting sleeplessness as a facet of my existence, and not a medicalized disorder, is an expression of self-acceptance and an act of self-care. In this arts-based narrative account of sleeplessness, I mark the transition from viewing sleeplessness as a medical disorder to radically accepting sleeplessness as a natural facet of our complex being-in-the-world.

Review of Artistic Research and Literature

The intersection between artistic research and literature has so far found little attention in the literature of arts research (Caduff & Wälchli, 2019). This is surprising as artistic research regularly encompasses creative forms of language, but also because creative writing has established itself as an academic discipline for quite some time. The anthology I review here, Artistic Research and Literature, edited by Corina Caduff and Tan Wälchli offers a heterogeneous and hybrid collection of contributions engaged with the performative quality of the research, the definition of the subject, institutional affiliations and self-positionings as well as a diverse range of case studies.

Keep Candy in the House

My mother’s love of Tootsie Rolls was the only fact I could grasp after her sudden passing. I wanted to share this and other memories of her through a eulogy that was whimsical, far-ranging, and entertaining, but I struggled to write one. My struggles reminded me of other writing challenges, such as my recent dissertation proposal, although there I was partly guided by my arts-informed research methodology framework. Gradually, I found some of those methodological elements could illuminate parts of eulogy writing: formal concerns, audience, presence and engagement, subjectivity, and meaning-making all resonate with arts-informed research’s commitment to form, audience, creative enquiry, researcher presence, and holistic quality. These connections show arts-informed research affords lifelong learning opportunities apart from academic practice; in this case, arts-informed research is a resource tool for navigating lived experiences of grief and grief writing. Moreover, arts-informed research encourages affective narratives and socially-constructed meanings to produce new understandings, which I realize here by including eulogy excerpts to produce an artistic representation of “research” about my mother (including her undying love of chocolate).