2023 Publications

List of publications related to a/r/tography from the year 2021: Journal articles, book chapters, dissertations, and theses:

Please note that these works mention or use a/r/tography and not all of them focus on a/r/tography explicitly.  

LU: 22/APR/2024

Bickel, B., Irwin, R. L., & Siegesmund, R. (2023). Carriance: Stitching an artist-scholar through cyclical time. In B. Bickel, R. L. Irwin, & R. Siegesmund (Eds.), Arts-based educational research trajectories (Vol. 6, pp. 107–129). Springer Nature Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-8547-8_8

This chapter offers an introduction to the history of the Arts-Based Educational Research Special Interest Group (ABER SIG) of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) before summarizing the stories and essays written by award winners of the Outstanding Dissertation Award of the ABER SIG (2005–2021). The essays and stories cover a range of topics from successful academic careers to extreme challenges. They also include a collection of ideas on what ABER is and how it is practiced, taught and mentored while also attending to challenging institutional ideas around race, identity and gender.

Camacho, C. (2023). Yes, I do: An artists’ community of practice. Studies in Art Education, 64(3), 297–323. https://doi.org/10.1080/00393541.2023.2220165

After living in Cali, Colombia, and getting to know the culture and social life that takes shape around artistic practice, I started to wonder about the kinds of educational experiences that were developing outside of the formal curricula in visual arts educational institutions. I decided to address the artistic practice of a community of artists who share an educational space, an art scene and, ultimately, the same challenges regarding the learning spaces that emerged from the emotional bonds of collectivity. As I delved into their teaching spaces, I wanted to understand how the creation of knowledge, as a by-product of their interactions around the learning experience, provided transformative spaces that enrich meaning within this artistic milieu. In this way, we can understand the value of artistic practice and its close connection to the artistic piece and the resulting aesthetic experience, paying particular attention to research and production processes.

Guler, A. (2023). Thinking with atonal music in visual arts education: A/r/tographic collaboration to bring out cognitive skills and sensory awareness via Schönberg’in String Quartet No.4 Op. 37. Journal of Qualitative Research in Education, 23(33). https://doi.org/10.14689/enad.33.1660

We engaged in the living inquiry of a/r/tography to explore self-care in academia. Through digital chat about our week, we shared black-and-white photographs that captured moments of self-care and reflection upon our day, the selection of self-care and its impact on wellbeing; supporting one another to self-care, to expand our repertoire of self-care strategies and explore our role in shaping our environment of academia for wellbeing. Crisis descended early in our conversations as COVID-19 spread and forced us all into lockdown. Self-care took on new importance, meaning and activity as we found our way through our ‘new normal’ that drew our ‘normal’ into sharp relief. Our intention here is to give insight to a shared journey of self-care for wellbeing, drawing others into reflection on their own context, how they self-care and how they may engage in self-care that is contiguous to their workplace, their colleagues and their students. This study has been based on the researcher’s requestioning the results of the a/r/tographic autobiography study with students on Arnold Schönberg and his works, which was carried out between 2017-2021. In the research the aim was to observe the effects of thinking through atonal music and its reflections on visual arts  education as well as the cognitive skills and sensual awareness of the participants. The requestioning of the autobiographic outputs of the researcher with her students within an a/r/tographic perspective  was considered important in terms of creating new meanings and actions in visual arts education. The study was carried out with the researcher and 16 undergraduate and 1 graduate student from Kırıkkale University Faculty of Fine Arts in the academic year 2021-2022 Spring semester over a work from Schönberg. There were 6 applications in total, each application lasted 4 hours. The data of the study consist of video and voice recordings, photographs, art works, poems, student opinions, observation notes, student diaries, performance activities, personal communications, Schönberg’s String Quartet No. 4 Op. 37 composition and the 39 paintings that the researcher made for this composition. The data was interpreted through a/r/tographic inquiry. At the end of the study it was observed that the application of musical thinking with atonality acts to visual arts applications brought forth skills such as making deep interpretations, developing theories, solving problems, thinking critically, self inquiry, and the use of senses in a intuitive perspective within personal experiences.

Flønes, M. (2023). Expanding and resisting—Choreographing relations through performative stop-moments as an emerging choreographer-researcher-teacher in dance. Research in Dance Education, 0(0), 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1080/14647893.2023.2208521

In this article I inquire into choreographic-pedagogic stop-moments, identified through bodily felt intensities and affects, in the Bird project. The Bird project was a collaborative dance project that took place in an elementary school in Norway in 2020, where, as a choreographer-researcher-teacher, I cooperated with the teachers and pupils in the third grade. I bring out my own doubts and preconceptions from former choreographic projects as a starting point for the inquiry and ask: How do stop-moments from the collaborative Bird project work perform my emerging practice as choreographer-researcher-teacher? I explore this question inspired by the methodology of a/r/tography and performative inquiry, as well as the theoretical landscape of agential realism and the expanded notion of choreography. The diffractive analysis of two affective and bodily felt stop-moments has led to the creating of entanglements between theory and practice in choreography, research, and teaching, which expands my emerging practice as a choreographer-researcher-teacher.

Flønes, M. (2023). Diffracting Through an Ethical Itch: Becoming a Response-Able Dance Education Researcher. Journal for Research in Arts and Sports Education, 7(2), Article 2. https://doi.org/10.23865/jased.v7.5086

In this article, I describe and discuss how an ethical doubt has performed my a/r/tographic research journey and led to ethical, methodological, and choreographic-pedagogic insights. The ethical doubt emerges from working with the video format as research presentation in a dance education research project where children are involved. The focus of this article is how I dealt with these ethical challenges through a diffractive inquiry, and further, how such an inquiry led into a sense-making process entangling ethics, research, choreography, dance, and education. Through exploring how the ethical doubt performed the research process, this article contributes to a rather scarce field of research on the topic of ethical issues in research presentation and ethical-pedagogical- choreographic and research methodological entanglements. In the article, I am thinking with the theoretical frameworks of post- qualitative inquiry and agential realism, both as a theoretically and methodologically. The apparatus of inquiry is constructed from a/r/tography, performative inquiry, and diffractive inquiry though a transcorporeal engagement with these research methods. As I unravel the research journey, I also diffract with the concepts of response-ability and the expanded notion of choreography. In the final discussion, I propose a response-able practice of research through a relational approach and attunement to research, pedagogy, choreography, and ethics.

Hashem, S. (2023). A/r/tographic inquiry: When art meets text. In H. Mreiwed, M. R. Carter, S. Hashem, & C. H. Blake-Amarante (Eds.), Making connections in and through arts-based educational research (Vol. 5, pp. 213–225). Springer Nature Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-8028-2_16

“When Art Meets Text” is an a/r/tographic inquiry that highlights my lived experiences as an artist/researcher/teacher-educator exploring the multimodality of practicing and disseminating academic research through art and text. I specifically approach this inquiry through an a/r/tographic lens because it seeks to broaden the understanding of life’s complexity through acknowledging the spaces in-between, the interconnectedness, and the relational in our existence (Carter and Triggs, Arts education and curriculum studies: the contributions of Rita L. Irwin. Routledge (2018); Springgay et al., Being with a/r/tography. Sense (2008)). A/r/tography is a methodological approach that lives in the liminal in-betweens of the multiple identities we assume as artists/researchers/teachers. It also lingers in the visual and textual as embodied in the interrelatedness of image and word. I am sharing this a/r/tographic inquiry to further contribute to the academic discourse on the potential of arts-based educational research while facilitating a reflective personal conversation about my being in a/r/tography.

Hunt, A. (2023). Tritagonist theatre: Investigating the potential for bystander agency through three interconnected solo performances [Ph.D., University of Derby (United Kingdom)]. https://doi.org/10.48773/9x0z3

Hunt, an artist, researcher and teacher, utilised a/r/tography, a practice-based research methodology (Springgay, Irwin, Leggo and Gouzouasis, 2008), to propel the development of the three productions and the published work. I’m No Hero (INH) interwove the heroic acts of two women: Irena Sendler (who saved 2,500 Jewish children from the Warsaw Ghetto under Nazi occupation) and Rachel Corrie (who was killed by Israeli Defence Forces while protecting Palestinian children). The Kites Are Flying (TKAF) was adapted from Michael Morpurgo’s book for children. Set in Palestine, TKAF explored the pedagogy of hope in oppressed and incarcerated communities. Acting Alone utilised verbatim and autobiographical accounts of field research conducted in Palestine, together with participatory elements, to transform the hierarchical relationship between spectator and performer. These works led to the published article ‘Acting Alone: exploring bystander engagement through performer/audience relationship’ (Hunt, 2019), which is submitted alongside the three performances as a coherent body of four published works.

Lee, N. Y. S. (2023). Bringing pieces of myself home to myself. Visual Arts Research, 49(1), 58–72.

This article draws from my dissertation, particularly the final part of the four-movement framework I created to cultivate a relationship with the unknown. I share the textile installation The Grey and Green (Dis)Comfort of Home and two sets of poetic vignettes, articulating how this research-creation directed me to a personally trans-formative inquiry into loss that became my doctoral study. This article presents a methodological framework for advancing concepts through art making and philosophizing in tandem. Each movement encompasses an exploration of a concept, an accompanying art practice, an experience that emerges, and a resultant learning. In this movement, the concept of home is accompanied by the practice of yarn bombing a chair, which inspired considerations of my position and orientation, and led to lessons about the importance of arrivals and threshold-crossing. In making crossings into the unknown and arriving home, I bring pieces of myself home to myself.

Long, N. (2023). In lieu of flowers: An a/r/tographic journey of apology and forgiveness. International Journal of Education Through Art, 19(2), 195–212. https://doi.org/10.1386/eta_00126_1

This research-creation project explored the tension and evolving relationship between the author and the public memorial to the victims of the Montreal massacre, a space she had been avoiding for over twenty years. The victims were fourteen women, who, in 1989, were gunned down at their university in Montreal in a violent act of misogyny. A public green space, the Place du 6-décembre-1989, was inaugurated on the tenth anniversary of the shooting and houses a monument titled, Nef pour quatorze reines. The project stemmed directly from the author’s first-time visit. The creative process enabled a conversation with matter, allowing the author to reconcile her unsettling relationship with the site and its memorial. Discomfort and vulnerability evolved into an emergent pedagogical story, and an apology in the form of tracings, or visual letters, as peace offerings to each of the fourteen women and as an act of self-forgiveness.

MacKenzie, D. J. (2023). Understanding death within eternal poetic time. Journal of Poetry Therapy, 36(1), 19–32. https://doi.org/10.1080/08893675.2022.2161753

This article is an a/r/tographic (artist/researcher/teacher) study through autobiographical close readings of several poems as a means to understand death within what the author calls eternal poetic time. Moving beyond the author’s childhood’s static image of death, the paper suggests that the ephemeral nature of life is not something to fear, but makes living more beautiful and eternal through the making and sharing of poetry and art. This paper is the first part of a three-paper study, which includes original poetry by the author.

Miettinen, S., Mikkonen, E., dos Santos, M. C. L., & Sarantou, M. (2023). Introduction: Artistic cartographies and design explorations towards the pluriverse. In S. Miettinen, E. Mikkonen, M. C. L. dos Santos, & M. Sarantou (Eds.), Artistic cartography and design explorations towards the pluriverse. Routledge. https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/60124

Rallis, N., Leddy, S., & Irwin, R. L. (2023). Relational ethics through the flesh: Considerations for an anti-colonial future in art education. Qualitative Inquiry, 10778004231176091. https://doi.org/10.1177/10778004231176091

In this article, we reflect on our teaching practices that include the development of an artist-in-residency program in one teacher education course and one graduate course in the Fall of 2022 at The University of British Columbia. During these residencies, Carrier Wit’at artist and printmaker Whess Harman and Indigenous scholar and a/r/tographer Jocelyne Robinson of the Algonquin Timiskaming First Nation demonstrate through their art practices how love and land are central tenets to relational ethics. We engage with Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua’s theory in the flesh alongside the artists-in-residencies as we consider an anti-colonial future in art education. We propose the concept of relational ethics through the flesh as a reflexive, embodied, social justice–oriented way of being in the world.

Rojas Farias, M. (2023). Arpilleras of migration: An a/r/tography about female Latin American resilience [University of British Columbia]. https://doi.org/10.14288/1.0434280

This thesis is a metaphor for an Arpillera, since it assembles dialogues, poems and photographs collected during encounters between a pair of women who share similar and dissimilar life circumstances. The thesis addresses issues of gender inequality and how the empowering potential of the collaborative and socially engaged textile art of the arpilleras can be a tool to facilitate dialogic praxis within circles of women who have experienced and continue to experience oppressive situations. Through an a/r/tographic approach the thesis analyzes, discusses, and elaborates on elements derived from feminist theorists, critical pedagogy, and art education for social justice primarily. The concept of living inquiry informed by the methodological approach of a/r/tography is relevant and enlightening in the research since it holds the whole theory, collaborative artmaking, and writing–poetic or theoretical–into a unique and personal experience that generates knowledge about feminine migration, single parenthood, and Latin-American ways of being. The results show the transformative power of the arts. In the same way, sisterhood, collaboration, partnership, and reciprocity as key principles of Indigenous Knowledge are present along the whole text. Arpilleras- dialogue-transformation-socially engaged arts.

Sasso, L. (2023). A POÉTICA INTROMETIDA NA EDUCAÇÃO: A/R/TOGRAFIA. Revista Da FUNDARTE, 56. https://doi.org/10.19179/rdf.v56i56.1251

Em um mundo hiper interativo e em rápida transformação, a Academia também se transforma. Ainda que de forma relutante, cientistas começam a entender que a subjetividade, a intuição e a criatividade são importantes para a pesquisa científica. Assim sendo, há que se considerar novas formas de pesquisas, novas abordagens, métodos e processos, além de outras formas de comunicação e expressão. Uma dessas formas é a arte, que desafia o paradigma cartesiano e objetivo das universidades. A a/r/tografia, a escrita com arte, a escrita do artista, pesquisador e professor é um exemplo dessa inovação acadêmica. Muitos pesquisadores usam essa escrita para dialogar com seus colegas e com a sociedade, e seguem seu método de Pesquisa Baseada em Arte para atingir seus objetivos de pesquisa. Observada a partir de uma perspectiva educacional, percebe-se que a a/r/tografia também contribui, facilita e induz a compreensão dos fatos e a ampliação do conhecimento em todas as áreas, o que a torna valiosa como pedagogia e, em um sentido mais amplo, como filosofia da educação.

Schmidt, A., Schultz, C., Schultz, J., Hinnant-Crawford, B., & Baron Palomar, M. (2023). Art as counternarratives: A/r/tographic understandings of black youth’s conceptualizations of nature. Leisure/Loisir, 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1080/14927713.2023.2252820

Like race, ‘nature’ is a social construct with meanings and conceptualizations that shift with time, context, and power. Dominant ideas of nature in the U.S. are often centred around whiteness and white preferences are normalized. To make these ‘invisible’ white preferences opaque, I (Alayna) use nature (with strikethrough) to indicate placing the concept of ‘nature’ under erasure and create openings for alternative meanings. Using a/r/tography, Black Feminist Theory, and Critical Race Theory, I asked Black

Sola, B. (2023). La vídeo carta como método de creación en el ámbito de la salud mental: La rara troupe y Locamente como casos de estudio en dos museos de arte. Arteterapia. Papeles de Arteterapia y Educación Artística Para La Inclusión Social, 18, 3–14. https://doi.org/10.5209/arte.83206

En este artículo se expone la vídeo carta como herramienta de creación en el ámbito de la salud mental a partir de un proyecto que se pone en marcha en el Departamento educativo del MUSAC en el año 2012 y que desemboca en un grupo de creación audiovisual autónomo que se denomina La rara troupe. El artículo, basándose en la experiencia de creación del grupo entre 2012 y 2021 y a través de metodologías de investigación de base artística, pretende dar cuenta, desde la utilización del audiovisual en primera persona, de cómo la vídeo carta se revela no solo como formato sino también como un método de trabajo que consigue la articulación de los grupos a partir de la negociación de las diferentes subjetividades que participan en los procesos. Por último, propone la vídeo carta como metodología que pueda ser trasladada y escalada en otros procesos de creación audiovisual en proyectos que trabajen la salud mental desde el concepto de diversidad, entendida ésta como categoría necesaria para huir de estereotipos y etiquetas y situarnos en el territorio político de creación de modos de relación para el entendimiento y la transformación social de nuestros contextos.

Spector, K., & Murray, E. A. (2023). ‘Why is Anne Frank always so durn happy?’ Happy objects and bad encounters in teacher education. Teaching Education, 34(1), 50–77. https://doi.org/10.1080/10476210.2021.2002840

This three-year, living inquiry into how preservice English Education students composed and analyzed visual-verbal journals (VVJs) in relation to Anne Frank’s Diary is grounded in Ahmed’s concepts of happy objects, bad encounters, and good encounters. After theorizing and complicating Ahmed’s concepts, we explore the way that the Diary has been positioned in the social fields of U.S. popular culture and schools. Across the three years, we found that participants overwhelmingly produced Anne Frank as a happy object, in ways that valorized her and emphasized the saving power of individual moral conduct rather than the brutal sides of her life and death. Through communal analysis of the VVJs and pedagogical changes across the years, participants became less likely to produce solely optimistic compositions of Frank. We argue for teacher education courses that do not focus upon single responses to complex issues and histories; instead, we explain how the conjunction ‘and’ can multiply the complexity of our engagements with texts and unravel binaries that have long had a hold on teacher education.

Vist, T., & Holdhus, K. (2023). ‘We cannot afford outsiderness’: Inclusion, sustainable development and arts education. Nordic Journal of Art & Research, 12(2), Article 2. https://doi.org/10.7577/ar.5083

This article addresses social inclusion/exclusion – specifically the kind of exclusion we describe as outsiderness – in relation to sustainable development and arts education. Our idea is to address and discuss this on an individual/micro level and as a topic of social sustainability. Inspired by Irwin and Springgay’s a/r/tography, Frank’s dialogical narrative analysis, and different walk-along methods, we also explore alternative formats of the scientific article. In this text, we will thus present what became five threads of inquiry into arts education’s potential contribution to social sustainability. These threads describe our path through this field and relate to 1) the position of the arts in the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal (SDGs), 2) social inclusion in the SDGs, 3) research on the arts and health, 4) social inclusion in the arts, and 5) research on outsiderness. Throughout the article, we also exemplify our walk-along discussions through narratives, revealing more of the motivations behind this text. We end the article with a discussion proposing relational arts education to help avoid outsiderness and to promote inclusion, care, social sustainability, and diverging voices or what we describe as counter-voices, in arts education.

Yoo, J. (2023). Interweaving artist-researcher-teacher identities: Facilitating visitor-artwork interactions. Visual Studies, 0(0), 1–7. https://doi.org/10.1080/1472586X.2023.2248073

This visual essay portrays how an artist-researcher-teacher investigates the idea of a/r/tography and constructivist teaching pedagogy while using her own artwork, Fantasy Museum, as a platform for teaching. Fantasy Museum features a series of digitally altered photographs of museum visitors viewing emptied artworks, and visitors are invited to draw their own collections inside the empty spaces, which will later be displayed together in exhibitions. An inquiry-based approach is adopted to facilitate viewers’ participation. Fantasy Museum was shown in several solo and group exhibitions and classroom settings in Seoul, Korea and New York from 2014 to 2019. The project invited various participants (ages roughly between six and 40) to collaborate. This article illustrates the author’s attempt to interweave her identities and practices into the project and possibly offers pedagogical implications for the readers.

曦彤廖. (2023). A/r/tography による美術のワークショップ実践者の省察と探求の促進 マンガ表現を用いた研究対象者の事例分析を通して. 芸術学論集, 4, 31–40. https://doi.org/10.34524/jsartdesign.4.0_31

This study clarifies the effect that “A/r/tography”, a method of self-reflection and exploration by artists/researchers/educators, has on the reflection and exploration process of art workshop practitioners. It is intended to. In particular, in order to examine the effects of “simultaneously using artistic expression and written expression”, which is one of the characteristics of A/r/tography, we analyzed cases where manga expression was used. Based on the characteristics of manga expression, we analyzed how the practitioners’ (inquirers’) reflections and explorations were expressed in the target cases. As a result, we extracted important scenes from the practitioners’ reflections and used them as manga frames. It was found that the practitioner’s actions and thoughts are expressed in words such as dialogue, depending on the specific situation. In the target cases, it became clear that the process of reflection and inquiry was expressed visually and descriptively. Based on the case analysis, we comprehensively considered the promotion effect that the simultaneous use of artistic expression and written expression has on practitioners’ reflection and exploration, and as a result, we came to the following conclusions. By using descriptive expression and artistic expression at the same time, it becomes possible to grasp various aspects of the subject of reflection and inquiry from multiple angles and comprehensively, and to visualize them as traces of artistic expression and written expression. Each trace further enriches the materials for reflection and exploration, and the process of reflection and exploration involves a cycle of drawing/writing acts and perception, and an “inner discovery” that includes reflection on the drawing/writing acts. It was inferred that this would enable a deeper process of reflection and exploration.

  • List of publications and images are composed by Marzieh Mosavarzadeh