What I love about revisiting well-loved works is how we see and experience the piece differently based on the new moment of passing we are in.  In keeping with the idea of audiencing, I also realized that the context in which we read the piece (most of the time, the class we are in and our classmates) shapes how we read the piece and what we take away from it.  Reading Wendy’s work this week, I was struck with the ideas of agency, caring and temporality.

One of the ideas that kept popping up for me is the balance between seeing kids as agentic social actors while also recognizing their vulnerability and dependence on adults for survival.  This echoed Gene’s words in his art books he brought last week.  How do we hold this balance of agency and vulnerability in our work, both for the kids (and adults) with whom we work, but also…for ourselves?  I appreciated this line from A Camera is a Big Responsibility: “I want to urge that when we conduct photography projects with young people, we do so with a selfconscious effort to incorporate them as producers, interpreters, circulators, exhibitors and social analysts of their own and each other’s images.”  It expands the ways in which we bring kids into our work.  It isn’t just about them taking pictures but about them being involved across a project; it’s about honoring their voices as agentic enough to interpret and analyze their work also.  This is a shift from research that takes a surface level approach to kids’ photography, just asking them to create data but then leaving the “higher-level” analysis to the adult researcher.

Of course, this stance requires not only respect for kids but also care.  This idea was not only entangled throughout the three readings but also in the work of Gene and Victoria, who studied with Wendy.  I kept thinking about the idea of how, as doctoral students, we are drawn to specific scholars, not just for their content area work but also for their stance and way of being in the world. Gene, Victoria and Wendy have written deeply thoughtful analyses of their own place in the research and in thinking through ways to honor their participants and center their voice, not just in the research process but in the world.  I feel that same sense of care in our class as a whole and wonder about ways to bring that flow of care throughout our other classes that may not feel as deeply rooted in love and respect for ourselves, for others and for different ways of being in the world.  What does it mean when, as researchers, we center ways of caring that kids express?  What does it do when we highlight explicitly in our writing care for our participants as a stance?  How does naming this amorphous and affective idea of caring in an often left-brained “intellectual” field change those who are reading the piece?

Temporality was also a theme that threaded through the different readings for me though I am still grappling with how to wrap my head around it.  I am specifically thinking about Gabriel / Juan and the way he was drawn to images of his younger self and the young women (or girls) in Pregnant Bodies, Fertile Minds who expressed themselves across dimensions of time.  I am intrigued by the way that arts-based research gives us more space for being fluid with time and thinking nonlinearly.  For exploring the liminal spaces between and across time.  For creating room for the imaginary as Lamar’s work invites us to do.

so much to think about…looking forward to our discussion!

Hello all! I am looking forward to seeing you all today! It just hit me that I never posted my art pieces to the group…so here they are and here are more that are capturing my attention right now!

Clearly I love the idea of layers, collage, texture and color!

Ed Fairburn

This whole page!

Her Ancient Beauty, Hossam Dirar

Nefertiti, Hossam Dirar

Nefertiti, Hossam Dirar

Deeper, Michelle Robinson

Joseph Cornell

This week’s readings brought up so many emotions that seemed to conflict with each other…I found myself nodding my head in agreement and then sitting in discomfort with a phrase I found unsettling. I think underlying all these readings is a push to be more reflective and introspective and question our own gaze, our own motives, our own desires….which is usually uncomfortable, as Gene reminds us so beautifully in his piece.  What does it mean to be reflective?  How do we examine our own ideas in a way that goes beyond simply stating it in three sentences at the start of a paper?  How do we use that examination to shift our later behavior?

In reading Gene’s piece, I once again thought about what it means to be a scholar of color working with (mostly) kids of color.  While Gene uses his artistic talents and ways of seeing / understanding the world to examine his role as a White man (though complicated by being part of a terrorized group), how am I doing this work as a woman of color?  Especially as a woman of color who occupies this in-between space of being ethnically ambiguous to most people, as not part of the “dominant” communities of color in the U.S., as not being marked as being Arab or African or Muslim at first glance?    I am intrigued by Gene’s collages and the intuitive choosing of images; this reminded me of our conversation when Noor shared her work.  What does it mean to choose quickly and from “our gut” rather than create a list of images that become sanctioned or governed by something that is probably external to us?  How does this help us dig deeper into what we are seeing and what we are producing as researchers?  I am excited to try these techniques for myself…though also a bit nervous, I admit.  But that is the point, right?

In reading Cole, I kept thinking about what my own consumption of painful images does…why do I do it?  In fact, I really try to avoid it as much as possible – watching videos of people being hurt or killed or abused – because it feels not only painful but so utterly disrespectful.  Who am I to get to watch someone’s pain over and over again?  I also wonder what those images accomplish?  Do we, as individuals and as a society, feel more compelled to take action when we see those images?  Are we bearing witness (and then what do we do with that) or just consuming someone’s experience?  Is it a way to feel better about our own lives?  I have so many questions here…I would feel “better” if I knew those painful images caused people to make some sort of change…

In reading the essays by hooks, I was first moved by the idea of “…not just critiquing the status quo.  It is also about transforming the image, creating alternatives…” This always feels (at least to me) to be a missing part of the “hammer of critique” that lives so intensely in academia.  We focus so much on critiquing and deconstructing that we can forget that the same hammer can be used to build something different. I won’t say brand new because our tools, our ideas of what is possible, our dreams and schemes are still informed and shaped by who we are now and the contexts in which we live.  I am often disheartened when I watch academics critique the oppressive structures of the academy and then a few years later not only embody it but use it to measure the worth of others….it makes me fearful of my own future.

I was interested in her quotations by Stuart Hall on cultural identity as a process of becoming.  This has always fascinated me, the way we are never still…that our identity is less a noun and more a verb that is constantly shaped and reshaped.  Within this, of course, live the past and present, but there is always room for shifting, for redefining (for ourselves), for more discovery.  This feels a lot more hopeful to me…even when larger structures feel insurmountable, there lives this glimmer of seeing ourselves for ourselves as hooks points out…the gaze in the mirror (though shaped by everything outside us also) vs. the male gaze, the White gaze, the gaze of power in general…

My discomfort grew when I kept thinking of the role of Black women amongst both Black men and White women.  Though none of this is new, it still settles horribly in my body.  The idea of something to be consumed – as a sexual being, as labor, as the sidekick who gives great advice (the modern chick flick version)…I know this idea lives with other women of color as well but it does not feel as intense. In thinking about how Arab women are portrayed in Western media, it is always as a subject – to be abused by Arab men, to be rescued by White women.  Rarely do they have the agency to define their own image.  However, as Arabs we have a very large media in our “home countries” – movies and endless television shows that show the complexity of Arab women…Arab women frustrated with Western depictions can take comfort in the access to other options, even when they are still problematic.

My other sense of discomfort came with what I felt was a subtle piece in the essays by hooks.  There felt to me a sense of the enlightened academic talking about how others need to “be awakened” and learn to look differently.  I am thinking specifically in how she felt such horror watching Boyz in the Hood and seeing the pleasure other Black viewers got from the movie.  I felt torn reading this part because my feelings align with hers – I feel sorrow when I see girls of color not question their depictions as sexual beings to be consumed in different music videos, album covers, party fliers and so on and so on.  But I also wonder whether I am engaged in some sort of class colonization that says, “I know more than you do.  You are not as enlightened and I will help you learn what you need to know so you can believe as I do.”  That may sound dramatic but do we not engage in some kind of “savior” like behavior when we think thoughts like I have or write as hooks does, ” Unless we transform images of blackness, of black people,
our ways of looking and our ways of being seen, we cannot make radical interventions that will fundamentally alter our situation.”  I am really struggling with these thoughts so please push back!

A couple of ideas that have been meandering through my mind in relationship to next week’s class (and life, in general, really) are those of “with-ness” and messiness.

The pieces by Pink and Jordan discuss in one way or another, the idea of being with – ethnography being with multimodality, our senses being with each other, a researcher being with those we research, an artist being with those who experience our art, and art being with its environment.  And really, to do any of these things we have to be with ourselves also and not remove ourselves (our biases, our quirks, our intuition) from our researcher persona.

With-ness is an idea that comes up a lot in my research and in my constant self-inquiry.  “Being with and doing things with” as Pink describes is at the heart of my research as we walk and walk and walk through the community, taking pictures and talking, recording videos and sitting together in quiet.  I’m also struck with the idea of producing new knowledge together, rather than just documenting what is there.  But a question that keeps popping up for me relates to the fact that different people can be together differently.  For some, the being with is helpful and for others, being with in certain moments can take away from our experience of a place.  How much can we really be with others, even if we are a few inches away?  How much could Matta-Clark really be with the surrounding community, especially younger people, homeless people and new immigrants?  Being with is relational.  It cannot be just one-sided.  I think of this with my kids – I think of being with them.  But I am still an adult, still the “official” researcher, still their former teacher.  Like the youth and homeless people who worked with Matta-Clark…how do they view our with-ness?

Pink writes about the constant tension between neat discrete categories and the messiness of how we actually experience things in a connected way, senses intertwined with each other and with memory and space.  Yes, the five senses are a neat way to categorize as are different modes.  But they do not reflect how we actually take in a moment even if they help us distill specific aspects of it.  This idea had already been in my thoughts based on a reading for another class – The Wonder of Data in which the author, Maggie MacClure, talks about the constant tension in research between organizing our data into neat themes and codes and the thrill and wonder of the pieces that resist this categorization and force us to really lean in and wonder.  I think of my niece who is almost two and who walks around the world using every sense to experience new (and familiar) things.  She does not put markers into the category of things we touch but don’t taste – for her, every sense is available for experiencing and if you can color with a marker as you bang it on the table and chew on the cap, then life is really grand!

Matta-Clark blurred and blurred and blurred the lines – between artist and activist, art viewer and artist, reality and imagination, art and the world around it.  I feel like many of us are trying to craft identities as researchers that embrace this blurriness and that bring in our whole selves.  I am eager to discuss our work next week in the context of these pieces!

A question that keeps popping up for me is how the “form” of inquiry shapes / enhances / constrains what we “see” and experience.

The piece by Wang and her colleagues was a helpful introduction to arts based research and what different forms and genres can help us see/imagine/complicate.  I appreciated the practical aspects of the piece and seeing specifically what knowledge and ideas can be crafted using different genres such as photography vs. photo-comics, for example.  I did have to laugh to myself that as much as I can critique pieces that seem overly “neat” and “organized”, I really do benefit from pieces such as this that help to “create some order in the messy field” and give us practical ideas for how to engage with different methods.

I realize, of course, that there is so much more than the genre in how we experience something – there is the intent of the creator of the piece, who we are as an audience at the moment we experience it, the context and company in which we experience it and more…But once an artist creates a piece, do they have any control on how it is experienced by others?  I don’t know…Rose (2016) discusses that how we think a piece will be audienced shapes how we compose it in the first place.  Just thinking of these posts we are writing now definitely proves that.  How would we write them if we thought nobody would read them, or if only Gene read them, or if Gene were a professor who only valued “traditional” academic writing?  Clearly the audience shapes how we compose even if we cannot control how an audience experiences our work.

The Barone and Eisner piece reminded me of this in describing the limitations of traditional “academic” writing – the way in which the story it can tell is constrained by its form.  It isn’t that it can’t tell a story but that it can tell a very specific story within certain confines.  They compare this to arts based research  that instead “provides an image of those interactions in ways that make them noticeable.” This idea has really stayed with me this week, that “arts based research is a heuristic through which we deepen and make more complex our understanding of some aspect of the world.” This differs significantly from trying to make something clear, to break it into discrete parts and to simplify it, which feels (at least to me) like the purpose of many academic journal articles.  I kept thinking of Ursula LeGuin’s idea that, “If you can see a thing whole… it seems that it’s always beautiful.”  How does arts based research allow us to see more layers and complexity in what we study…and how does this allow us to see the beauty of kids and communities that are often described by traditional research in deficit-framed language?

This tension between research “clarifying things” and arts based research making messy and complex is a theme that I think will travel with me throughout this semester and hopefully for a very long time.  In thinking about Rose’s call to reflexivity and considering our own interpretations of a piece, I am thinking of many of my questions in researching, especially with kids.  If the adult researcher is choosing the arts-based methods – drawings, photography, video, etc…we are already adding in our aesthetic and research preferences, already deciding which form shows the complexity of our question, already limiting what types of stories can be told.  In grappling with this, I am experimenting with having kids choose their own modalities and combining forms as they wish.  But I have still chosen the subject of the research and the combination of kids and those two things will deeply shape the site of production and thus the images and audiencing…so much to consider!

The Eisner piece gives me hope that even as I grapple with the above ideas, the infusion of arts based research will allow the kids and me to be released from “the stupor of the familiar” aspects of our community and start to create new understandings of what is around us…even if they are limited by the forms of research.  I suppose I have to acknowledge that each way of inquiry into an idea will have its limitations but will also have so many affordances that will help us launch into other lines of inquiry.  I am thinking of John Muir’s idea that, “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.”  I hope, then, that each inquiry, rather than feeling limited, connects and links with other ideas for exploration.