Day 2016-03-01

Welcome!

Thank you for joining me in my first post as a CAPI Crossing Borders Scholar with the University of Victoria. Using an assemblage of literary vignettes, poems, images, and video clippings as my medium, I intend to use this blog space to share my process as an arts-based researcher working within the context of a shanti-school in a small village in Goa, India. Fractitious, sporadic and tangled, these posts form a body which avoids the dilution of factual representation and instead sits in discomfortable spaces where language hesitates and absolutes falter. Uncertain and often unspoken, this is not a memoir of interpretation, rather a movement of sensual invention. A living, aesthetic inquiry into my practice. As I think with some of the tensions, highlights, curiosities and inspirations that emerge through this research experience, I hope that these posts may provoke you to critique, question and explore alongside with me.         

So, what sort of arts-based research am I doing?

Drawing loosely on feminist and post structural notions of learning as an “untamed” and “more-than-multiple” experience, my a/r/tographical research explores my affectual experiences as a British Columbian, school-based Child and Youth Counsellor as I work as a visitor in the context of a shanti-school in Goa, India (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 154; Irwin, Beer, Springgay, Grauer, Xiong, Bickel, 2006). Well practiced in traditionally Western paradigms of education, my intention is to move beyond my familiar understandings of what it means to be educated in North America, engaging with a rendering of a/r/t/ography to heighten awareness of intuitive forms of learning that arise in an encounter between intra-acting bodies, materials, and the agentic spaces between (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). Understanding learning experiences as relational and enigmatic events, composed of rather than in the world, I am engaging with an inductive, intuitive and becoming-with process, exploring the emerging themes and entanglements of my presence in this Goan classroom as they grow out a child-driven, emergent art project (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987; Mazzei, 2010). As I take on the implications of methodology and “data analysis” in post-qualitative research, I think with Deleuze and Guatarri’s (1987) constructions of maps, expressing my interpretation of these events with my own poetic and visual assemblages and navigating curiosities through artistic memoir. Through this method, my intention is to look into the “events of activities and encounters” with affective, arts-based education, “evoking transformation and change” in my experience with “data” and understanding of learning (Hultman & Taguchi, 2010, p. 535). Ultimately, this research seeks to provoke movement beyond my habitually North American understandings of education, and towards post structural epistemologies as a means to nourish intuitive forms of learning, being and knowing.

Stay tuned for pieces of my artistic memoir coming soon!

I will also be posting blog entries and photos of my process on my website alexmberry.com if you’d like to follow along.

References

Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). Ch.6: How do you make yourself a body without organs?. In A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Hultman, K., & Taguchi, H. (2010). Challenging anthropocentric analysis of visual data: A relational materialist methodological approach to educational research. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 23(5), 525-542.

Irwin, R. L., Beer, R., Springgay, S., Grauer, K., Xiong, G., & Bickel, B. (2006). The rhizomatic relations of A/r/tography. Studies in Art Education, 48(1), 70-88.

Mazzei, L. (2010). Thinking data with Deleuze. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 23(5), 511-523. Retrieved March 19, 2015, from file:///C:/Users/Alex/Downloads/Mazzei_Thinking data with Deleuze -2 (1).pdf