Re-performing Art/Re-search (T)here

Abstract

Art/Re-search (T)here is a SSHRC-funded project that creates new transdisciplinary understandings of art, research and pedagogy. A review of the literature finds that researchers from a wide range of academic fields employ transformational arts-based methods with their participants, but that they are far less likely to weave art-making in all stages of the research process themselves. While researchers “outside” of the arts experiment with art-making in their un/familiar re-search (Absolon, 2011; Rowe, 2020) contexts, I re-perform how new networks and assemblages emerge. Art/Re-search (T)here includes 6 other re-searchers/co-conspirators from different academic fields who identify a need for, and absence of, arts-based research in their respective spaces, including English, Cultural Studies, Social Work, Indigenous Studies, Game Design, Unions, and Education. The individual and collective work that is created throughout this project performs (post)qualitative (Lather, 2007; St. Pierre, 2011) practices and feminist new materialist posthumanism (Barad, 2007) through the data/dada (Morawski & Palulis, 2009) that arises. In the first article, the individual art/re-search that my co-conspirators (Taylor, 2019) and I create provokes me to think about telling stories differently (King, 2005) through the (in)tensions of art, the limitations of language and the embodied (be)longing that occurs through the virtual-material-discursive (Springgay & Truman, 2017). I work through belonging with each of my co-conspirators in the process. In my second article, I work through the initial research questions with my co-conspirators through a collaborative mail art project. Research questions change and shift. I think about how this relational inquiry unfolds as a new materialist (Barad, 2007) methodological space of getting lost (Lather, 2007) with ethico-onto-epistem-ologies (Barad, 2007) of trans-formation in trans-it -- whereby some-thing lost is getting (t)here. In my third article, I re-perform and re-imagine the data bodies and events (Rousell, 2018) of Art/Re-search (T)here after the project ends through a dadaist (Kuenzli, 2015; Richter, 2010) art installation titled Transpedagogical data/dada assemblages. This leads me to put a call of action for more transdisciplinary transpedagogical (Helguera, 2011) art/re-search within higher education (Loveless, 2019) and beyond as it creates space for data/dada, diffraction and difference (Barad, 2007; Haraway, 1988; Lather, 2007) to emerge in world that, I contend, should embrace emergence.