Shaya Golparian defended her PhD dissertation at the University of British Columbia in December 2012. Her study is an a/r/tographic living inquiry that investigates the theme of displacement through visual and textual performances of her experiences of being un/homed. It is an aesthetic (and not anesthetic) self-exploration of her struggles of in-betweenness and unbelonging through and with/in multiple layers of her identity as a Persian-Canadian, and emigrant/immigrant artist, researcher, learner, and teacher. Additionally, her work draws on post-colonial literature to analyze the journey of an artist, researcher and teacher sharing her personal experiences as an emigrant/immigrant struggling with absence and loss, trying to make a place to belong. In the pedagogical process/product of this living performance, she re- visits, and re-members her lived and living struggles with the concepts of home, language, Othering, invisibility, exoticism, pain and ethics, and critically analyzes those struggles through a post-colonial lens. What is re-presented throughout her dissertation is a critical self-exploration through art creation (photographs and video installations) and writing.
Shaya suggests that through the process of visually/textually writing about home one can create a home for oneself in the spaces of one’s creation. She highlights the significance of the pedagogical moments of being together, with pain and she calls for a sensitive pedagogy of representation in art education.
