Volume 9, numéro 1, 2024

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In this article, I explore insights gained in the investigation of a personal artist-curator relationship using Katve-Kaisa Kontturi’s methodology of material-relational following. In my role as a curator, I track my relationship with Danish artist Regitze Karlsen as it unfolded from 2017 until 2023; from my first meeting with the artist and her work, through collaborative work on an exhibition, and a studio visit afterwards. I show how the method of following provides in-movement knowledge of the artist-curator relation, which makes it possible to conceive of the art-work as an expanded process of ideas, sites, materials, and affects between artworkers. Moving between sections of lived experiences and theoretical reflections, I conclude that the curatorial modes of being hooked, curiosity, and concern, were essential for my following of Regitze’s and my artist-curator relation.

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We write about the poetics of kinship with birds, trees, stones, and places as an act of resistance to neo-literal, neo-liberal destruction of refuge for non-human beings. Through research in which we situate ourselves in relation to the more-than-human, we take up kin as a verb. We offer experiences of kinning—that is, being present with that which is alive, has agency, and gives voice—as an invitation to readers to open themselves to listen in life and in research. We write in dialogue, through letters to each other, and we write poetically. With poetry’s attention to metaphor, embodiment, and vision, it is the natural language for describing the experience of kinning. Inquiring poetically helps us regain a communicative being-in-relation with wild, more-than-human others at a time of ecological distress, and to seek to better appreciate mystery and understandings that exceed human forms of knowing. Through this paper, we theorise from within our understandings and experiences about poetically kinning with the more-than-human.

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In this article, we explore the potential of artmaking as a reflexive practice, grounded in the work of feminist new materialist philosophers Karen Barad and Donna Haraway. Barad and Haraway’s philosophies emphasize our entanglement with more-than-human materialities and forces and consider our ethical responsibility to the world. We explore our own artful practices such as collaging, drawing, mapping, and creative writing as reflexive practices that help us consider who we are in relation to our research. These examples provide a grounded description for novice and veteran researchers alike who might be interested in using artful reflexive practices in their own work.

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This paper explores the nature and experience of artistic mastery, that is, the experience of being long-practiced in an art such as writing, oil painting and teaching. Following the hermeneutic tradition and drawing on H.-G. Gadamer’s Truth and Method and other hermeneutic sources, the authors engage in a dialogue about their respective experiences of what it means to become experienced in an art form. The origin of their dialogue springs from one author reading and commenting on the other’s doctoral thesis, and discerning a hermeneutic sensibility in noticing the significance of emergent moments in life experience and in artistic practice.

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After 14 complex years, I message him: “I keep saving you and losing me.” M hangs himself. Numbly I sit holding M’s cold dead hand in my warm shaking one. I’m 33. A widow. Twenty years on, and now a creative arts therapist/educator/researcher, I launched an arts-based autoethnographic (abr+a) quest to exhume and frankly face my role within my husband’s suicide. Naively, I imagined cultivating an ecotone where self-care and care-for-other intra-act. Lured by this poietic methodological experiment, Scarcity-Gargoyle, however, sloped in— an inner-alter symbolising a trauma-response that had outlived its usefulness. Leading a motley crew of author, animangels, Darwin, and new material/posthumanists, it incited a gyroscopically-circling contemplation of trauma and scarcity, now folded into this Exquisite Corpse game. As this game unfurls, the question lingers within creases and crevices: What might these critters speak/sing/growl/howl/whisper/rasp to the lofty aspiration of crafting capacity for simultaneous compassionate becoming-with self and other?

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Senior immigrants hold a wealth of experience and knowledge often unrecognized due to language and cultural barriers. This article promotes a collaborative approach within arts-based research (ABR) that flattens conventional hierarchies, creating a space where voices of participants and researchers are valued and heard. By embracing translation as both a method and metaphor in the co-creative research process, this article amplifies a senior immigrant’s unique response to the COVID-19 pandemic through her creative making. In this collaborative model, ABR actively involves a senior as co-researcher, building research on her local knowledge and insights. Our approach invites a reconsideration of social support strategies for immigrant seniors, advancing public discourse about their role and resilience within the arts education community.

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This study employs an arts-based duoethnographic approach to contemplate the nuances of and understand the struggles that two researchers confronted in their new professional roles as art educators. The investigation focuses on how conversations, art practices, and reflective/diffractive analysis can help with understanding or processing professional identity development. The data include art practices, field notes, monthly meetings, and emails sent between February and May 2019. The main content of this article presents the two researchers’ exchange of emails and art pieces as part of the preliminary data analysis. Two pivotal elements stand out in the exploration: diffracting relationships and deconstructing perspectives that support growth and development during the process. Additionally, the investigation affirms that positive differences can be produced even though two researchers hold distinct perspectives. The methodology supports professional identity development as an ongoing and deconstructing process of searching for differences and being different.

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This article explores how artmaking assemblages bring changes in children’s potential to express themselves. Assemblages are a system consisting of human, non-human, material, and relational elements in a given situation. Through the concept of artmaking assemblage, I explore the arts-based effects emerging around a Finnish schoolgirl participating in artmaking research workshops. Analysed video data from the workshops illustrate how her expression and participation change in and through the artmaking assemblages, and how different details in the artmaking assemblages combine to promote those changes. The girl’s artworks are used as data, as is an interview with the artist who participated in the workshops. The concept of artmaking assemblage is used as a thinking and writing companion when analysing the events from the artmaking processes. I conclude that artmaking processes, when done in a consistent manner and in a trust-based environment, support children’s possibilities to express themselves around sensitive issues.

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With a focus on the intersection of creative writing and research, this article reports findings from a poetic inquiry project conducted within an undergraduate writing seminar to help pre-service teachers make sense of immigrants’ experiences with writing in a new culture and language. A group of undergraduate students in Ohio were invited to make found poetry based on interview data from conversations with immigrants about writing in English as their learned language. Adopting Bourdieu’s theories, the research reveals the dynamics shaping the writing culture in North America. The students’ found poems reflect a sensitivity to the societal, political, and ideological foundations of writing. Importantly, the poems recognize writing as a tool for immigrants’ identity negotiation and highlight how rhetorical control can be used for cultural assimilation. In response, some of the students’ found poems advocate for rhetorical complexity and co-constructions of new cultural futures by immigrants and their hosts.

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Art/Re-search (T)here is a SSHRC-funded project that creates new understandings of art, research and decolonized processes amongst theories of knowledge. The relational mail art of Art/Re-search (T)here unfolds through post theories of the (post)qualitative posthumanist philosophies and decolonized practices. These disruptive co-compositions happen by getting lost through thing-power, and through the decolonial project of re-turning to the dynamic whole. (T)here, co-conspirators collaborate through art to reimagine re-search. The project’s initial research questions change alongside co-conspirators in transit as binary knowledge is (un)learned and disrupted. As the mail art travels to entangled spaces, processes are risky, glitchy, (un)known, and trans-formed. In letting go of research questions, art/re-search creates trans-formations. The authors put a call to action for re-searchers to work together through art in ways that question the structure of academia and how we come to know/be. Through relational (un)learning and risk-taking, some-thing lost is getting (t)here.

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In this study, we explore how three Asian high school girls from poor/working-class families construct their identity in relation to their experiences with school punishment and anti-Asian sexism rooted in model minority and perpetual foreigner stereotypes. Using found poetry as a method, along with intersectionality and Asian feminist frameworks, we analyze sister circle and kitchen table focus group interviews and diagramming data. We find that, despite their different ethnicities and geographic locations, participants shared significant experiences and perspectives that centered their resistance to anti-Asian sexism, agency and personhood, and familial responsibilities as a source of motivation to excel academically.

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The resilience and retention of nurses is a complex and urgently compelling phenomenon in the global context, made even more critical given the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic. This study explored the stories of nursing resilience told from the perspective of four public health nurses who worked during the COVID-19 pandemic, utilizing narrative inquiry and arts-based research underpinned by the feminist theoretical framework. The stories of nursing resilience were shared in group discussions, one-on-one conversations, and artistic collages with artist statements; these articulated the nurses’ thoughts and feelings about resilience while working during the pandemic. Elucidated are the impacts of the institutional power structure in nursing, thoughts on using artistic expression, and images of a black cloud to express nursing resilience. Further research is implicated on the use of art in nursing education, the power structure in health care, and nurses feeling valued by the healthcare institution.

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Internet algorithms influence the news we read, the products we buy, the music we listen to, the people we interact with, and even the words we use to communicate. Our preferences, beliefs, perceptions, and behaviours are all shaped by algorithmic processes, threatening our capacities for self-awareness and self-formation. What’s more, algorithms operate smoothly and imperceptibly under the surface of our postdigital existence. How can we begin to make sense of our relationships with algorithms, knowing that they operate beyond the limits of perception? How can we reconsider the human-algorithm relationship as a way of opening new possibilities of being? Using a/r/tographic inquiry, I addressed these questions through a months-long process of walking, writing, and weaving, revealing insights that may help illuminate a path toward living with the complexities and contradictions while hanging on to the parts of ourselves that remain resistant to domination.

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This review explores entanglements of the theoretical and affective impacts of an art exhibition called Caring Futures which was part of an interdisciplinary research project. The review is a qualitative analysis of the exhibition, and is interspersed with our experiential, affective, and creative reflections and responses to the exhibition. Creative and imaginative approaches inspire us as researchers and supported our interactions with this exhibition in ways that opened new spaces for knowledge production. Our experiences highlight the value of arts-based methodologies for exploring questions of vulnerability and care. Foregrounding subjective and affective responses is risky in scientific work and confronts conventional boundaries for academic knowledge production. Honoring meetings between art and research(ers) can productively challenge taken-for-granted norms involved in undertaking academic research.

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Barbara Bickel and R. Michael Fisher, through their co-creative life-partnership, have composed in their book Art-Care Practices for Restoring the Communal: Education, Co-inquiry, and Healing, a beneficial guide (project) for research, education, academe, and art. They provocatively decentre deep-rooted beliefs in individualism and competition—aspects that dominate today’s academic life, promotion, publishing quotas, and journal rankings. In their thoughtful tarrying, they offer the reader three equally important text sections: “Communidreaming on Theory”; “Spontaneous Creating on Practice”; and “Gestating on Service.” Opening this collective is a detailed glossary, followed by a foreword of poetry, psalm, and photographed process which introduces Bracha Ettinger and her guiding Matrixial theory. Thereafter, Bickel and Fisher’s story of inspiration transports us into their intimate and courageous practice of Spontaneous Creation-Making (SCM) with 35 co-creatives—“an invitational way to make and re-make sense of the troubling times” (p. xxxv) which unfolded during the pandemic and shutdown in North America.

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This review of Amelia Walker’s Alogopoiesis is an interdisciplinary response, reflecting Walker’s own creative approach of employing both form and content. Creative nonfiction, critical thinking, and a mixed media artwork response to Alogopoiesis reflect the effects that reading it has had on me as a creative, as a researcher, and as a living being. It is a happy coincidence that I chose to open the book in a café on Mount Myoko in Japan, and, as I climbed through the pages, I discovered a multitude of connections to my many worlds. I began walking beside each protagonist, nodding, feeling, staying. The word alogopoiesis, made up from alogia and poiesis, is an apt portmanteau for this body of work. Alogopoiesis renders an unsilencing. A slow-rebuild, remaking, and sensing of gaps where the unspoken reside. This book sharpened my outlook. My in-look. Replacing my rose-coloured glasses with recognition as I sank into stories of mental distress, violence, abuse, heartbreak, and prejudice.