4/14/19 Gene’s comments on Dahlia’s and Lamar’s posts for this week.

Hello all:

Robert Shreefter emailed me a few days ago to tell me that, due to a family emergency, he had to cancel his visit to our class tomorrow. I am, obviously, saddened by the news. There is a chance Robert may be able to join us before the semester ends, but at this point the chances are, at best, 50-50. There is much to talk about, however, in relationship to the articles that Robert suggested we read (as Dahlia’s post makes abundantly clear). Additionally, Noor – who couldn’t be with us last week because she was at AERA – has agreed to talk about her project. I’m also hoping Gregory, who didn’t get much time to talk about his project last week, can talk a bit more about where he’s at with his project – I’m particularly interested in how his subjects want their work to be shown and what they say about it.

I thought Dahlia’s comments and reservations about the articles that Robert suggested we read were sharp and poignant. I think they bring up many theoretical concerns, and that it is time, now that we only have a few sessions left, to think about how theory frames our own work and goals. We may not have talked about this enough in our class. When you write, Dahlia, about how the children’s art was used not to “just document experience” but to “help process and construct the understandings the kids had of themselves and their surroundings” is that a comment about art as a visual methodology with a specific purpose or intention? How does that relate to arts-based research? Thinking about the article by Wang et al that we read a while ago, are the children’s drawings and collages featured by Robert and some of the other authors for this week an example of “art as research” or “art in research?” And what did you all think about the relationship between the artists and the children in Robert’s articles and the others (that weren’t on the syllabus but available on our Common’s site). I also am curious about Dahlia’s comments of collage as a “stance,” and hope to hear more about it tomorrow.

Putting aside for the moment Lamar’s startling and joyful comment about preparing for his “grandchild,” – something I definitely want to hear more about – I am excited about the progress he is making with his project. Are you moving from “documentation” to “a process of “constructing understanding” (using Dahlia’s phrase) and how do the collective collages and interviews fit into that process? Unfortunately, the link Lamar provided hasn’t yet worked for me, but I know we will all hear the interviews before the semester is over. I also wondered, Lamar, if your Black male students decided, after all, to join the collage-making and how the felt about their drawings after speaking with you.

I need to apologize for this late and brief set of comments. I had an odd day today and am just now getting the time to review the posts.

Gene- 3-31-19, comments on posts for this week

First, a shout out to Lamar, who has had a rough week. Your text, Lamar, makes me think of my own engagement with students in Newark – many stories of domestic violence, absent fathers, hunger, lovelessness. One of the conundrums with these stories is trying to navigate the macro-meso-micro conditions that mediate these stories. We can blame 400 years of racism and brutality against people of color in this country (macro) and yet none of that seems a sufficient explanation for the absence of love (meso) that haunts many families and the damage that this absence inflicts on our students (micro). All these levels of damage, of course, are relative and constantly intertwining. How do we confront them as teachers and researchers? How do we begin/join a process of healing that is needed on all these many levels of activity?

I wonder if it would make sense, Lamar, for you to make a quilt of sorts from the drawings, and maybe also a quilt of the selected texts with certain lines and words emphasized. Earlier you wrote about the colliding dreams of your students floating on water, which is an amazing image and idea, and though the ephemeral can be very powerful (see, for example, the work of Andy Goldsworthy), there are also other less emphemeral ways to present collective images/voices of hope and dreams. You could take all the different handwritings of the word “love” or “guns” and join them together in a poster with or without the drawings (and then show them to the students). I’m just quickly spouting out ideas; of course you want to do want makes sense to you. Or you might think about your students doing it. I think both are legitimate.

The line, “Being mean to each other like black and white” stuck out to me because of its non-judgmental voice. My students in Staten Island often say, “why can’t we all just get along?” as if their privilege has no relationship to macro-meso forces. Even young students have absorbed this (hegemonic) way of thinking and it definitely has an appeal to it because it makes it easier to believe that it’s just a matter of faith in individual good will. This optimism and belief in personal-power to create change  is also a necessary ingredient of systemic change, but it diminishes the reality of designed and purposeful oppression. Notice that the use of the word “designed” implies that oppression aligned with a vision- something visual. That’s why Mirzeoeff proposes a “countervisuality,” a new vision that we can see and thus design. I wonder if it helps to think of your stduents’ drawings in terms of the creation of a new vision.

I wonder what role the prompts play in the drawings/text.

The line “To live and stay with my family” also struck me. I’m curious about the “live” and the “stay.”

It’s interesting to look at Dahlia’s project after looking at Lamar’s. Dahlia has embraced the role of the artist who can “cook” the work of her students, something Lamar is hesitant about doing. Cooking may not be the right metaphor here, because Dahlia is not mushing things together but carefully and respectfully highlighting, making choices, curating in a way that many of you seem hesitant to do. The two images she constructed are phenomenal; they are visually captivating, evocative and complex. They visually present the “400-year long event” that Christina Sharpe writes about the past of slavery still present in the space and time of her students, her white students as well. And so there is hope in that. Are you going to show these images to the students you quote?

I am also excited to see the poem that Dahlia has extracted from the transcript, an arts-based approach to research that is being used by other researchers as well (see, for example, an article “The Teacher almost made me cry” by Honkasilta et al. that takes lines from different narratives of children with ADHD and turns them into poems). I love the part, “because I know every nook and cranny of Patrick Henry, not just because of the building  …because of the people there. But still I have a connection towards the actual building” and think it could be presented in a visually striking way if you wanted to think about doing so. Poems, of course, are visual (think again about Pink’s discussion of how every experience is presented simultaneously in multiple modes even though we can’t talk about experience that way) and I think playing with the words in this poem and their organization could be exciting. Have you ever looked at the way ee cummings writes his poems? You can think about spacing between words and letters, capitalizing, and of course adding actual drawings/photos and marks.

I think you’ve made exciting strides in your work Dahlia!!

The link that Dahlia shared with us under her heading “Incredible art to share” is truly incredible. You should all look at it.

I couldn’t help thinking about the fact that Patrick Henry owned almost 70 slaves despite his oratory against slavery

Since I have made a number of comments about curation, it is interesting to consider how Greg is curating his photos. He is using a contingent-dynamic process; he began by choosing participants but then the participants chose other participants. Greg loses a bit of control here, but in alignment with ideas of participatory research gives curatorial power to others. The photographs themselves are terrific, but to my eye they seem very different from the first set he showed us though like the fist set they are very clean and polished.  I get confused, Greg, by your concern with “sample-size” since that is a term usually used when talking about quantitative data that is meant to be generalizable. As far as I know, you are not making any generalizable claims. Where both Dahlia’s project and Lamar’s combine image with text, these photos, thus far, are without captions or participant reflections and comments. As with Lamar’s work, I wonder how the prompt mediates the response and how the prompt even gets interpreted by the participants.

I’ve been listening to Saadiq for the last ten minutes, one cut leading to another. Love that Girl made me think of Marvin Gaye and the Attica Days when we used to dance the “Bump.” A great deal of joy, and yet while that joy is, as Dahlia pointed out last week, necessary to any revolution we want to be a part of, it is not by itself sufficient to dismantle the macro oppressions our communities confront. Mindfulness has been terribly coopted, and yet on the micro scale mindful activities – if practiced in the spirit that Christina Trowbridge presents – has potential power to change macro systems. I find Noor’s comments on Lamar’s hard week and his students’ drawings resonating with me. Lamar is doing care work with his students, but the gap is wide between his students’ healing and their empowerment to transform their worlds so that the care work for their own children will not be necessary. But we have to start where we are. Still, I wonder, Lamar (and everyone else) how you push the tension between catharsis and transformation, and what is the researcher’s role in this process.

It is exciting to think about drawing as “a form of praxis”.

I am increasingly excited about the prospect of all of you exhibiting your work since it is so rich, though you don’t need to make any decisions yet. We can use Noor’s drawing, which I love, as part of the invitation. I’m not sure what it says that her first marks on the paper depicted wine on table! 🙂 Notice how Noor, drawing with the left hand, created a drawing that has all the vivacity of a child’s drawing – it is funny, has character (great lines) and no worries about absolute rendering.

Luis has been using visual methods as tool of self-care and reflection, but so far they have mostly been cries for help because the students are still struggling mightily with calculus. The drawings are not helping them become better at calculus, and even if the drawings helped student to temporarily disengage from solving math problems and find humor in their angst, their desperation will return with the next assessment. On a much more meso scale, the drawing cannot solve the students’ calculus problems any more than the drawings of Lamar’s students will vanquish the dysfunctionality that surrounds them. Can Luis use drawings in a way that will help his students contemplate calculus (visualize calculus?) in way that will both bring peace and breakthroughs? Can it, in other words, be used as a contemplative and healing method to learn math? Whereas Dahlia, Greg, and I think Noor as well are seeking to evoke conditions, situations and experiences, Lamar, Luis and probably Aderinsola are trying to find the bridge between evocation and transformation within their particular focus.

Gregory

I think the two photos that Gregory posted are spectacular and really made me consider the artistry of the photographer-subjects. The photographs are beautifully framed and posed, they each evoke pride and care though their flavors are very different and I will be curious to know how all of you see and feel them. I am taken by the high bar fence in the photo on the left that implies it is guarding a building of importance and yet the house seems a family house – old and modest, the basement doors (panels) clearly worn. The photographer-subject stands in front of the fence, removed from a building that most hold importance for her and indicating a separation that wasn’t always there. I can’t quite read her expression (does she have a trace of a smile? Is there a bitterness?), but the light pouring in on the right, shadowing the fence and reflecting of her glasses and bounding up the stairs also evokes the passing of time, maybe one of light and dark. It is interesting that her coat is almost all in dark except for opening that is lined in light; her coat is not closed, she is again inside and outside. Very beautiful photo that almost playfully is lined up with the very different photo on the right so that the light from one photo almost seeps into the next.

The photo on the right shows the subject at work, with craft, skill and beauty all central to her task-profession-desire, working with what might be lace- fragility. She is working with hands, paying careful attention. Again she’s framed the photo carefully, its center directly between her and her manikin. The lamp, off-center and tilted is also very beautiful. The light though comes not from that lamp but, briefly, from the window. I can’t quite tell if there are flowers on a distant table and if that is a door on the right. I need to see both these photos more clearly. There is a peace and contentment about this photo; it is not as tense for me as the one on the left. There is a quiet dignity and self-awareness, however, in both images.

Lamar

Picasso said that he spent all his adult life trying to learn how to draw like a child again, and we see in the drawings of Lamar’s students why this might be a goal. These drawings are so full of joy even though so many address tragedy. These students are not afraid of color, and they draw with abandon- people as big as the houses they are next to, pages filled with both scribble and renderings, no obvious needs for rendering perfection but the message is radiantly clear and perfect in its own right. Valerie, who writes that “I have a dream to end world hunger” drew an image that reminds me of Edvard Munch’s Scream; I imagine the text written as if it were a scream. I wonder if Valerie might think about doing that or if she even thinks of her image as screaming.

Some of the texts really stood out for me: Hope is when you never stop believing in someone; Hope is something you fight for; Hope is when you can achieve other things; Hope feasts like an eagle; Hope means drawing; Hope means happiness. These statements make me think of the work of Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer, and you might want to look at their work.

When one of the students includes within her incredible painting the call to “stop selling cigarettes” I couldn’t but help think of Eric Garner.

I love the way, Lamar, you are pursuing this project. I think your questions for your students are good questions, and recording their answers would be great too. I wonder if it might be a good idea to set aside a time for a “reading circle” in which the students would read (and show) what they wrote (and drew) and talk about it. This would be less formal than asking them specific questions but might give you something a bit different. You could also have a performance circle. What would happen if you created collages based on everyone’s images and text, or posters with the images demanding action that were put around the school (or community)? You could invite parents to the reading circles. Your questions and any of these activities would keep pushing on self-reflection while also evoking, for others, what these very young students are grappling with.

I don’t want you to forget about floating copies of these drawings as an exhibition possibility. How would you do that?

It’s been a long time since I’ve used imovie, but it probably is the best program to use since it is very accessible. It will take some work to get used to it, but I am very excited by the possibilities it offers.

Dahlia:

I love this quote from Toni Cade Bambara that Dahlia offers. It reminds me of Emma Goldman, one of our greatest activists and anarchist extraordinaire who wrote that a revolution without dancing isn’t a revolution that’s worth having. As artists and revolutionaries, this might be one of the most important considerations to keep in mind.

Aderinsola

Part of the reason why I wished I had recorded our last class was because the questions that Aderinsola was posing to Wendy, and the prosody of her voice as she posed them, were not only richly critical and direct but also could have been used as voice-overs in her own work. Also they could have been used, in manipulated forms, as separate voice files that challenge the role of the researcher, and in particular the white researcher (though the questions Aderinsola poses have pertinence for all researchers). Why is it that so many progressive white researchers choose to spotlight young people of color? Is this a progressive act, an act of solidarity? Is it undertaken from a sense of guilt or responsibility? Is it exploitative? Who benefits from the research and how do the benefits and costs balance out? Does a balancing in favor of benefit negate the cost? Who decides? Is there a savior-sense to the undertaking? A sense of self-satisfaction? Is it the best that a white researcher can do? Do these same questions plague researchers of color albeit with variation? Is there something else that we think researchers and white researchers should do if the social justice that Anderinsola writes about and that Lamar’s students draw and write about is our primary goal. Where does joy fit in? Is the job of a researcher to make sure that the research participants speak for themselves (as Lamar wants his students to do) and does Wendy’s whiteness, per se, preclude that possibility? Is curation a bad idea? What does Aderinsola mean by a “collective voice?”

From the first time I met Aderinsola a number of years ago I was struck by her refusal to just ride the waves of graduate school. I was also impressed by her persistent challenge of whiteness within the Academy. Her questions posted here are a continued problematizing of positionality and the right (legitimacy) of white researchers to study others. These questions do not have easy or simple answers, but we all need to continue to think about them.

I was attending a panel discussion on whiteness in the Academy. Asilia Franklin-Phipps, who will be visiting us toward the end of the semester, was one of the panelists. One of her co-panelists stated that if you are white and want to be in solidarity with communities of color you need to do so as an “accomplice.” I do not think that unpacking that concept is easy. What does it mean to be a researcher-accomplice? Do researchers of color not struggle with this issue as well though clearly from a different position?

Aderinsola- I am looking forward to the next iteration of your project and curious if any of these issues will infiltrate it.

Noor

 Noor’s post and that of Aderinsola grapple with some of the same issues though move in different directions. Images (Wendy’s photos, my drawings and collages) can be viewed as exploitative and voyeuristic like historic photos of black women and girls but Noor emphasizes the reflexivity of the girls and Wendy’s self-reflexivity as a qualitative difference from those older photographs that has potential for generating (evoking?) insight that is non-reductive though issues of curating and complicity still remain troublesome. Mirzoeff’s The right to look addresses Noor’s efforts to challenge white hegemony, but hegemony – obviously – is a formidable force and combating it demands constant awareness and self-scrutiny. I think Noor’s emphasis on the process, on creating spaces where reflexivity and curiosity bloom, is central to the countervisual and to counter narratives.. Creating what Noor is calling a “real question” helps facilitate that ambiance, and it is something for all of us to consider (I am thinking specifically right now about Lamar’s project though Dahlia’s is prominent in my mind at the moment).

I listend to the Sanctuary sound track that Noor provided the link to and they reminded me of Lamar’s freedom dreams. I’ve always thought of sanctuaries as being, by definition, counter-spaces, escapes from unfreedom and yet many of those who discussed sanctuary envisoned it as the dominant space, without borders, a space infused with love and in which displacement contradicts its very essence. Did Wendy help create sanctuary spaces for those she worked with, are we doing that in our projects? Can arts-based research, infused with the awareness that both Noor and Aderinsola discuss, help create a revolutionary space that is irresistible as Toni Cade Bambara demands?

Noor is running the marathon today. I look forward to hearing, Noor, how it all went. I’m rooting for you.

Gene

My comments on posts 3-17-19 

Visual methodologies, evocation, analysis and audiencing

I sometimes feel we don’t talk enough about our images themselves – what they evoke, how we analyze them, and how we disseminate them.

Noor made an insightful comment about the four women standing in front of the statue of Marion Sims in Aderinsola’s image. She highlighted the pride, power and attitude conveyed by their stance, one evoking not only a defiance and a countervisualiy but also a historical narrative about injustice, rebellion, refusal and the 400-year long oppression of people of color in the US. I thought we didn’t give enough time and analysis to that image, but it’s something I hope, Aderinsola, that you think about as you continue with your collage. Did you consciously put that image in the center of your collage?

I’m hoping we get a chance to look together at the images that Gregory, Luis and Lamar uploaded to the Commons site. Notice, in Gregory’s images, the differences in body gestures, settings, and clothes. What do these images evoke for you? How is agency and care (themes central to all your posts today) manifested in those images. What role did Gregory play in their content and the decisions made by the participants? Are these artworks of self-reflection, of pride, of defiance, of advocacy (all of the above?)? How should Gregory and his participants think about curating and audiencing these photos? Do the participants expect a curated exhibition of some sort? Why did they agree to participate?

I was so pleased to see the many drawings that Luis linked to our Commons site. Most of them are, maybe unsurprisingly, pretty literal (and despairing), but there were some energetic scribble-dense images and a few surprising cartoons. Many of these also included text, and we should talk about the role of text in the images themselves. I am curious to hear, Luis, if you think these drawings were successful self-reflective tools or/and if you think they were messages to you – calls for help and understanding (and caring). What are your next steps?

The one image Lamar uploaded was striking for its starkness and clarity. Notice how the diagonal line goes behind the gun not in front of it. The text, too, is blunt. So Lamar, are you going to discuss the drawing with JJ and/or with others? Will you float it in water? As with Luis’s drawings, we need to think about if the drawing helps JJ know his own thoughts and work through them? Is it a cry for help? For action? For advocacy? And how do our answers (and the student’s thoughts) on these questions mediate how we think about audiencing? What are your goals for the drawings?

Comments on your posts re: Wendy’s projects

The central themes of this week’s posts that seemed to revolve around research ethics. These ethics embraced the ethos of care and the demand that research participants be able to exercise the greatest possible degree of agency in all aspects of the research process. We have discussed these ideas in class in relationship to our own work and that of others, and they are explicitly central to Wendy’s projects and I think she would be pleased that her articles sparked discussions about them.

Luis wonders whether researchers “have the right to probe,” but if they do then he finds Wendy’s approach, “respectful of the lives of children,” an admirable way to proceed. Like Luis, Dahlia admires the agency that Wendy facilitates for her participants and the importance Wendy places on the researchers responsibility to make, as she states, “a self-conscious effort to incorporate them [the participants] as producers, interpreters, circulators, exhibitors and social analysts of their own and each other’s images.” Dahlia implicitly sees this effort as central to the very idea of caring for one’s participants, for seeing them as full individuals with their own thoughts and interpretations. If I interpret Dahlia’s post correctly, she also recognizes that the care-demand of recognizing the full humanity of research participants is not always easy to fulfill. This is especially the case when one’s participants are children, who are “vulnerable” and “dependent on adults for survival.” What caring can mean with vulnerable populations is very complicated, and how it is enacted is also not as straightforward as one might hope. Greg is also concerned with facilitating participant-agency as an ethical demand. The participants in his study, in contrast to the youth Wendy works with, are mature women, and so the care and vulnerability embedded in the research process are necessarily different in some ways. Greg, in his pursuit of having his participants be in control of how they are seen by others, writes that “simply placing the camera in the hands of the subject offers a complete liberation of control and possibility.” He also poignantly addressed the deficit of care that marks our educational system and that visual methodolgies might address by noting that one of his participants took her self-portrait at her alma mater saying that the school provided her an education but “did not value her presence and place at the time.” Was her setting then chosen to convey her success despite the school’s expectations of her? Lamar, feeling a kinship with Wendy’s ethical-methodological stance and process during her research thinks of “flipping, ‘photovoice’ to “drawing-voice’ where my students are given the opportunity to use drawings to represent their point of view and experiences to adults both in and outside of school who make decisions.”

Dahlia’s comments made me think again about the role of advocacy in research. Many of us, for reasons related to social justice, work with vulnerable populations and populations that are oppressed and marginalized. We want to make the world better and more just, a place that prioritizes caring for the mental, spiritual and physical health of all. In some ways we are advocating with and for our research participants. What is the relationship between care work and advocacy? Between participant agency and advocacy? Is advocacy by definition something one does for others and is it thus necessarily disrespectful and destructive? How do we think about Wendy’s goals for the projects she conducted with her participants and her goals for the publication of that research (the audiencing of the research)? We can ask the same question of my article and Victoria’s dissertation, and of course about all the work we are doing in this class. I sense a strong advocacy thread in Lamar’s project and Gregory’s project, so these issues may confront them more severely than others, but the micro-meso-macro dimensions of everyone’s work, and your positionality within your own work, needs to be discussed. Good educators are necessarily, I think, advocates for their students.

Issues of empowerment, advocacy and research authenticy are often complicated by contingent events. Remember how, in our last class, Noor profoundly stated that Alysha’s decision to withdraw her name and image from the article I was writing about her may have been empowering even though it emerged from despair rather than from a conscious decision to refuse the right of others to see her (even in ways she had previously affirmed). It was certainly powerful in that I then withdrew my article for consideration.

I think we should all be careful about the claims we make for agency. Agency, even under the most optimal conditions, is always socially and historically mediated and subject to contingency. We might look to Karl Marx, Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Foucault, William Sewell, Dionne Brand and Sadiya Hartman for thinking about how agency is enacted, freed, and transformed.

Luis made some important points about Wendy’s methodology- the meticulous and “rigorous” way that she designed and analyzed her research. These are worth noting and thinking about as we do our own projects. Do you, for example, want to consider a system of coding for the artifacts and conversations your research produces?

Hello all:

It’s just after noon, and I am looking at the comments posted so far on our Commons site. I am so pleased that you all found Victoria’s project as provocative and evocative as I did and I look forward to you all discussing her work and your work tomorrow.

A few reflections. Lamar has spent a considerable amount of time collecting visual freedom dreams from his students in order to value, acknowledge, document and celebrate them. But now, Lamar, I sense that, partially inspired by Victoria, you are really beginning to embodying the artist’s place in your project. You are welcoming the messiness and unboundedness of all you are receiving from your students and finding away, through all sorts of artistic leaps, to reveal it, play with it, accept it and push it without knowing where it’s going. The questions you are asking – about silence and voice (which need each other to exist), the permeable and possibly non-existent frontiers between school and not school, between the multiple bodies, voices feelings or your students – takes you to a place beyond establishing findings and into an adventure based on interrogating experience and understanding in non-prescriptive and traditional ways. What happens when voices and experiences meet and how can you facilitate that experiment? What role can artistic play and exploration (placing the dreams in a tub of water) have in transforming our ideas about freedom? What happens when dreams of freedom collide and merge or not? How ill you involve your students in these adventures? I am very excited by these developments.

Luis’s comments about how the artist-role can give the researcher a gaze that is not experienced as judgmental is of great importance. Of course Victoria also spent a great deal of time being with the teachers whose care work she evoked, and so , trust was generated by the sense of community and common mission that they built together. Still, Victoria’s goal from the beginning was not to evaluate but to share in solidarity the daily care experience of teachers. Like Lamar, Luis emphasizes the vastness of experience and its “messiness,” and thus the impossibility to capture even any “infinitesimal moment” in its fullness. Your comment, Luis, reminded me of Cezanne who, tried as he did, could not capture the fullness of reality but tried, at least, to capture its nature, the constant motion and the infinite points from which it could be experienced. According to his wife, Cezanne tried “to forget everything he had ever learned from science and second, through these sciences, to recapture the structure of the landscape as an emerging organism [my italics]. To do this, all the partial views one catches sight of must be welded together” (Merleau‐Ponty Aesthetic Reader, 1993, p. 67).

What does it mean to have an epistemology of care? And what does it mean to “honor” the experience of those we research with in terms of how we go about conducting the research and then presenting and re-presenting it? I think Luis does us a great service by highlighting these questions.

Dahlia’s comments reminded me of the essay we read by Pink and the indivisibility of experience even though, as she points, out, we necessarily analyze experience through modes and categories when we speak though doing so distorts and is insufficient. This is the problem with applying words to experience. Collage, as Victoria, Dahlia and Lamar write theoretically honors the messiness (and rejects the “seamlessness) of life and research, it breaks with rigid borders and conclusive “results.” Other researchers have also made this point (Garoian comes to mind) but sometimes I feel this true more in theory than in the artifact itself. Some of this may have to do with the polish of many finished collages, or the fact that it is exhibited as art and as a commodity. I wonder about the relationship that presentation has to power of collage to disrupt seamlessness and evoke complexity and contradiction. For the maker of the collages, who may make for the purposes of self-care and as a way to rethink and make sense of one’s own experience, the power of collage is probably quite different. Also, I am thinking a great deal lately about the differences of making digital collages (as I have done) and the tactile hands-on materiality of non-digital collage making.

I do not know if I will be able to get back on to our Commons site before class tomorrow, but I hope those who have not yet posted will do so. I am very much looking forward to Victoria getting to know you and visa-versa.

Until tomorrow.

Gene

Hi all:

I thought Luis presented a very thoughtful critique of hooks’ text. He criticizes hooks’ oppositional gaze as necessarily being defined by the dominant gaze, and thus necessarily dependant on it in a way he finds oppressive. Luis acknowledges that hooks also promotes the idea of “alternative texts that are not solely reactions,” and that these creation have the power to transform because “of its independently conceived creation,” but doesn’t the very term alternative also imply an opposition to an already established vision? Dahlia wrote, “our dreams and schemes are still informed and shaped by who we are now and the contexts in which we live.” We can’t escape the dominant lens entirely, but I think Luis’s point, and Dahlia’s as well, is that the act of creating itself can lead to transformation and new possibilities – new ways of thinking about ourselves – even if they are colored by visions that circulate hegemonically.

Luis and Dahlia both talk about how to create transformative artwork that creates new visions of possibility and identity, and Lamar adds to this discussion by asking, “How can I enhance my freedom dreams project to join this process in which people will see our Black and Brown children with new eyes, eyes of love, care, beauty, and humanity?” Luis answers quoting hooks, “We create alternative texts that are not solely reactions“ (128). Is it possible to erase from oneself all the deficit images of black and brown people that are constantly bombarding us in order to create alternative liberatory visions totally free of dominant ones? What questions should Lamar ask his students to facilitate the creation of such images? Lamar asks, “Do/Can freedom dreams convey parts of our cultural identities? Our history of struggles? Are elementary school children too young to have identities that are names to give to the different ways they are positioned by, and positioned themselves within?” His very question implies the burden and possibilities that history and domination necessarily play in the forging of identity and the pervasiveness of stigma and self-stigma, though it also opens up the door to Dahlia’s idea of becoming and the fluidity of identity. Lamar focuses on how “people will see our Black and Brown children” but he also has to contend with how black and brown children see themselves, which is a subject he raised in previous posts. Under what conditions can children making art re-paint their self-image and possibilities? This would be “art as research” and might align with Luis’s idea of art created with the subjects though the nature of that “with” is complex.

I wonder how all these ideas intersect with Greg’s project, “I hope to guide and help produce a diverse and representative study through contemporary portraiture, where agency is in the hands of the subject and the narrative is their own.” How is this going to work? Will you ask individuals to take selfies and then also to frame the context in which the selifes are seen (though obviously the audience context cannot be predetermined). In the images you uploaded, is agency in the hands of the subjects? What do we know about the women who are pictured? What then is the role of the researcher and, in particular, what is your role? When is the race of the researcher important (some great black literature has been uncovered and framed by white researchers but maybe, necessarily, the narratives of some one like Jill Lepore, Eric Foner and Howard Zinn are different than those of Saidiya Hartman).

Indeed problematizing the role of the researcher is a common theme throughout the posts as it should be given our goals this semester. Luis takes a strong and an uncompromising stance, “I think there is something wrong with it [standing back and thinking”] and he is clear, “there is a moral conundrum… in nearly all qualitative research with human subjects.” He proposes “art created with [my italics] subjects” but recognizes how careful a researcher must be to do it well. Do we think then that being a researcher who works with human beings is a necessarily compromised and untenable profession? Are we more righteous if we refuse to take the photo than if we take it, if we refuse to write the article rather than write it. If taking a photo of suffering, or writing an article about it, is necessarily complicit with the suffering itself and exploitative, what are our roles as scholars and thinkers? Can we give others voice without our voice being present at all and, if we could, would that be a good thing? How do the photos that Lamar took in DR and posted qualify as research and how does his commentary change how we see the photos? Incidentally, I was recently in DR as well in a place filled with American Blacks, Africans, and Europeans of all sorts and felt the staff of the resort were treated terribly by everyone; what does that say about hegemony and class and racial politics?

Liberation, as many writers, scholars and artists have said (see Baldwin for example) cannot be given. Dahlia’s caution about thinking of ourselves as saviors, or even the possibility of being a savior, strikes a chord in this regard as does Luis’ skepticism of what researchers can do. It is interesting that Dahlia’s paragraph about savior-ness ends with a sentence in which she, collectively, is the subject, “Unless WE transform images of blackness… WE cannot make radical interventions that will alter OUR situation” even as Dahlia’s identity in the US is often read ambiguously. In the language she uses, she implicitly rejects that others can liberate her and her people or provide alternate images, which is probably what Luis is saying as well. But being a researcher is already a privileged position, and the moral quandaries that attach to that position are multiple even when you identify as part of the people you are serving.

Finally, having a vision of justice and liberation implies that you think you are enlightened. Reading Freire’s Pedagogy of the oppressed, it seems clear to me that much as he writes about listening to the people and helping them to problematize their situation in their own words and based on their own experiences, there is the belief that if the people follow Freire’s pedagogy they will come to the same beliefs about liberation and justice as Freire has himself. Don’t we all believe this on some level? How can we be humble, good listeners, and good guides without being dogmatic and ideological? How do our own visions of the world and hopes for that world find nourishment and growth in the visions of those we work with so that we also continue to become and become enlightened?

Last Monday Noor and Dahlia gave two fantastic presentations about their art-research projects and the themes they’ve been pondering for a while. I left that class both very excited about what they were doing and full of questions. Particularly, I was thinking about the many ways they could approach or continue their research. I don’t want to call those approaches “methods,” because methods sound formulaic, pre-determined and dull when their projects are full of the unexpected, the contingent, and the uncertainty of not knowing even fully where they want to go.

Noor’s project on inter-generational knowledge involves doing collages and collages on collages with others while talking within spaces made for talking (like kitchens). When we think of Pink, this brings to mind what other sensory stimuli are present in those environments (coffee, cooking, maybe pollution and noise from the outside, light from the windows etc.) and if these are important to the research and need to be evoked or described. If the answer is affirmative, how do we do that? I also was curious about not only the transcript of the conversations taking place but the sounds of those conversations, because speech will reveal nuances and meanings that text cannot because of qualities like prosody (rhythm, pitch, volume). There are also facial expressions (remember the expression of La Toya Ruby Frazier’s grandmother in the video we saw?) that are hard to verbally translate though a poet might be able to do so visually with words. I think Victoria Restler’s work (she will be with us in a few weeks) could be very helpful to help us think about how to evoke the conditions that accompany fruitful inter-generational collage making. It could easily involve visuals that include but are not limited to the actual collages made together, and it could include video and sound experiments.

The question of what inter-generational knowledge is and why it’s important is also a present question in Noor’s work. Anything spoken between an elder and a younger is of course inter-generational communication. And maybe knowledge is conveyed even when the words themselves seem banal or inconsequential. Certainly relationship is cemented when you are in with someone else in a way that is nurturing. But what do mean by knowledge and how do we create it and pass it on?

In any case, all of you should be taking field notes all the time (these can be textual, audio, visual) so that you remember what you are saying and thinking and what those you work with are saying and thinking and doing. Do not count on your memory to remember. With every second that passes, you replace what you’ve seen or heard with imaginings (also interesting of course). So take good field notes!!!!!

Dahlia’s maps and the images she showed us struck me on a number of levels. First, there is what maps represent – geography, identity, routes to get from one place to another. In this sense the map that a person might choose to represent them has deep significance whether it is the map of a country, a city, a street, a house or a room that has deep significance for that person. So maps can represent various breadth of vision though even when the map is of something much more meso-level, a room of a house for example, it is infinite in the intimacies it has for the creator. Its visual qualities for the viewer, however, may be very different. Maps are famous for not giving us a feel or telling us what is really going on. We see a map of the US but don’t see from it the poverty that pervades it, the racism, the homelessness, the wealth, the people-power that actually live in the spaces represented by the map, pollution etc (though there are now some people making maps that focus on these very qualities). At best, even when they focus on a particular aspect of the geographic space they tend to be more informative – flat and illustrative- than evocative. There are ways around this, but they need to be contemplated. Furthermore, show me a map of your kitchen and I might likely think of my kitchen rather than yours, and associate with your image the smells, sounds, and conversations that my kitchen has for me. Show me a map of the lower-East Side and I will remember my experiences there – including muggings, mural painting, revolutionary incitement, and the homelessness that pervaded that area when I was in my 20s. So there is connection of some sort, but also certainly difference.

Then there is the visualness of the maps that may contrast to its symbolic representation, the rivers and roads looking like veins that crisscross the body that may transmit a sense contrary to the intimacy intended. How does the visualness of the map, what it looks like and evokes, align or not align with what the map is thought to represent by the maker of those maps? Is that contrast helpful or not helpful to convey what the artist wants to convey? Should she double down on the dissonance to create that rupture that collage is supposed to create (rupture of easy meaning), or alter the map to create a different type of visual power? Does it make sense to have discussions with the makers of the maps to understand their motivations and inspirations (which would make the study more “traditional” in some ways), and if so do we need sound files (or text files) to accompany the visuals? Of course these sound files could be played with as well, layered and jumbled, to jar rather than to explain. How does exhibiting the art by itself represent a stance about research that differs from a stance demanding that text and audio be exhibited together? Does the visual seen by itself just become art? Or because research (certainly of self and other) was central to the production of the maps, should we let the visuals “speak” for themselves and allow them to be vehicles through which the viewer will also examine/research herself? Is our objective disruption leading to examination? Is it understanding? Is it empathy?

As Lamar point out when talking about his work, the creation of the art is self-exploratory for the maker – though often that self-exploration is accompanied by discussion. Does research, to be research on the professional level, need to be exhibited? Does research need to have evocative, persuasive, or informative attributes for a public beyond the writer or maker? Is there a question of assessment that we need to consider, or is assessment old-school, old methods, old approaches for different types of research?

I’m forgetting some of the images that both Dahlia and Noor showed us, so please post them to the Commons site so we can all look at them again and think about them. I remember thinking how proud the figures in Dahlia’s images were, but I can’t remember the iages themselves.

Gene

Both Luis and Lamar discuss modes through which experiences are conveyed and the limits of language to express the fullness of those experiences, what Luis calls the “mix of lived experience.” I think one of Pink’s main contributions to the discussion is her insight that no mode by itself (including the visual mode) is itself sufficient to the task of carrying experience, and yet each mode evokes a sensory response that invokes the other modes because on the level of the body experience is not allocated to only one sense but engages them all. When we talk about experience, because of the “crisis of representation,” we don’t have the language to do it justice. If we did, then we wouldn’t be talking about modes at all.

Of course the sensing of an image is mediated by how the viewer (hearer, reader) has learned to engage with her world, and Lamar points out (as Pink does) that these ways of engaging are culturally mediated. For Lamar to think with his students about the different ways to sense Freedom is a brilliant idea. in addition to the 5 senses, we might probe motion, balance, ethics, and intuition as sensory ways of enriching how we think of our own experiences. And there are certainly other “senses” as well.

I wonder if what Luis is calling “distortion” is what happens when artifacts/art are interpreted by the viewer, because the viewer (hearer, etc) immediately senses through experiential ways of feeling and interpreting that are not identical to those of the “creator.” By “distorting,” the audience to the art/artifact is becoming a creator as well, though when the artist’s goal is very specific that may not be to her liking (but it’s also not within her control). When we are using art to express what “others understand and feel” the discussion obviously becomes more complicated given the impossibility of conveying what we ourselves feel.

When we think about poetry, we think about words, music, rhythm and imagery. This is text as art and multisensory. Has it been used for revolutionary purposes? We could argue that it has been used to at least inspire, something we might say about visual art as well.

Luis asks if Matta-Clark is more of an artist or an activist, and both Luis and Lamar applaud his engagement of the community during his art-based endeavors. Just as we expand the definition of research to include any means through which we explore, we could expand the concept of art to include anything that incites new expereinces, that breaks established boundaries, that breaches established ways of thinking. Maybe we could describe anything that anyone makes as art. Noor, in her previous post, writes about visual arts-based research as a “form of humanization.” Could we think of any research process that puts us in touch with our full human potential as art? Does this blurring of boundaries serve us (as individuals and as societies) or does it muddy the waters in ways that are not helpful to our goals? Do you think Theaster Gates was more successful than Matta-Clark in involving the community in the process of creation, in help the everyday person realize their artistic self?

Luis writes about ethics and ownership in relationship to the Matta-Clark article and how important it was. These are good questions to ask. I was wondering how to read the photo of the homeless person on page 42. The photo was attributed to Matta Clark and exhibited in an important Manhattan gallery. Do you think it was exploitative? And how does it make us think about photographic ethics

2/3/19

Hello all:

I thought I would take this time to reflect on the comments that have been posted on our website. I’ve really enjoyed reading them and thinking about them, and I look forward to us continuing the discussion tomorrow.

It seems to be that all who posted responded strongly and mostly favorably to the Barone and Eisner piece, with Luis being a bit skeptical, an attribute of his that will help us all to make sense of what we’re doing. It is interesting to me that when Lamar cited from Wang, he cited Wang’s excerpts from Eisner. This makes total sense, because Eisner, who is really seen as the central founder of arts-based research as an academic “discipline,” looks at arts-based research through a very broad and exhilarating lens. Creativity, disruption, imagination, ambivalence, understanding evocation and exploration are all celebrated by Eisner and Barone; their writing is best in my opinion when they don’t try to define precisely what arts-based research is but concentrate on what it can do. I laughed when Dalia wrote that despite her impulses that seem difficult to constrain, she found Wang’s organized and logical categorizations useful (as did Gregory), and of course Rose is even more analytical and “scholarly”. I, too, find Wang et al., useful for thinking about arts-based approaches to research, but I remain unsatisfied with Wang et al’s definitions (I think the categories are very permeable and their borders unsustainable). Meanwhile Rose presents the many different aspects of any artwork/artifact that mediate how it works and is seen and felt, but as Lamar points out it is unclear to what degree the researcher should try to predetermine the evocative success of any work to others given the impossibility of prediction and the possible negative affect that over-thinking might have on the creative process. Luis goes even further, questioning if art should be theorized at all. After all these exhilarating ideas that Barone and Eisner propose as strengths of arts-based research are all a bit fuzzy, hard to pin down and very subjective. And yet Luis, citing Heidegger, talks about the experience “of unhidden-nees.” In doing so he addresses Lamar’s question, paraphrased here, “Can art help my students discover what they are unaware of. Can drawing help them contemplate their own sense of what freedom means? If so, isn’t that enough?

I think it’s interesting that for Gregory, the categorizations by Wang et al helped him see the artifacts/art produced by Victoria as legitimate self-standing research not merely appendages (or illustrations) to written text. The constraints of categories made it possible to abandon the constraints. If the work on its own gives you insight that written text does not provide, insight that is “beyond” words, then does it count as research? What do we value qualitative research anyhow?

Dahlia ponders how the form we choose contributes to the constraining and shaping of meaning (and of course the affordance and illumination of meanings as well). We want to acknowledge the importance of that insight and consider it when embarking on our own research; I believe Luis makes this point as well. At the same time we want to be humble about our goals, understanding that our purpose is explore not necessarily to find. It is what makes arts-based research so exciting or, as Dahlia emphasizes, we use arts-based methods heuristically to gain a deeper and more complex “understanding of the world.” Luis, if I understand his text correctly, is more interested in art as a practical teaching method. And indeed there are studies of schools that correlate arts infusion with academic achievement, in part I think because of the emotional effervescence that circulates through a school in which creativity and imagination are valued. I’m still thinking about what Luis means by precision in expression, something we will no doubt discuss further. In arts-based “products,” precision might be equated with emotional resonance, but Luis is being more down-to-earth than that.

Lamar, clearly an advocate for his students, deliberates whether the drawings his students make are viable and significant because of what they do for their makers regardless of what others might think. I wonder if the students who make those drawings are using the drawing process heuristically (Dahlia liked that idea), trying to figure out how they feel about freedom through the drawings they make. Are the drawings helping them think about freedom. If so, we could call this “art as research”- using Wang et al.’s term: they are using art to be reflexive, to makes sense of their world. If this is taking place, no other justification for the process is needed. And yet, how do we know that the students are using the drawings that way rather than as maybe doing something simpler (though also legitimate)– quickly deciding what freedom looks like and then documenting that image. If my memory serves me well, the images you showed us Lamar (certainly one of them) were of a nature scenes (I remember flowers and pretty colors). We often, idyllically, associate nature with peace and freedom, and that might be a very surface metaphor for freedom. There is a body of literature (I’m thinking specifically of Lefebvre’s The production of space) that argues that we maintain pockets of nature (parks, national forests) as a symbol of freedom, which allows us to destroy nature writ large. So I am curious if the drawings are followed up with discussion and probing (or does that maybe occur during or before the drawing process)? Are you using the drawings as part of an ethnographic study (i.e. documentation) or/and as a way for students to transform themselves and their world. Purpose needs to be considered here as well when we discuss audiencing. You can be your own audience, your family and friends and classmates can be your audience, and, especially if you are using digital media (going back to Dahlia’s comment about form), then the world can be your audience. As Rose points out, evocation is mediated by a million conditions and you can’t predict what a drawing will evoke to others (especially others not like you). In a brilliant book by Susan Sontag (Regarding the pain of others), she points out that images of dead Vietnamese evoked very different feelings from the Vietnamese and from American soldiers.

Dahlia raises an important question about the effects of an adult researcher choosing an arts-based research method to use with children. Luis also raises the question of ethics in research. If we work with children, we want to be always aware of how we manipulate the research process even when we claim to be fully participatory. In my own work, I worry about exploitation a great deal. We will be definitely discussing research ethics throughout the semester; though it will be front and center in some of my work, it will certainly be present in the work of others as well So it’s something I hope we continue to discuss.

Dahlia also cites LeGuinn’s idea that whole always seems beautiful and Muir’s idea that everything is connected. Hegel famously said, “the truth is the whole.” It all depends though from where you look and who is doing the looking. Sometimes the part is a whole in itself, the parts more complicated than the sum of them. And so scale is really important even while embracing the idea that we all, together (along with all other living and non-living things) comprise the universe.

I look forward to continuing the discussion tomorrow as we look at some videos together.

Thanks so much to all of you. I’m sure there is much you wrote that I did not properly address. If I’ve misrepresented any of you, please make that clear in class.

Gene

Hi all:

It was terrific to meet you and break bread with you yesterday. Because the subject of collage came up a number of times, I wanted to suggest two articles on the suggested reading list: Garoian- Art Education in the silent gaps and White, Garoian & Gerber Speaking in tongues. 

I’ve also included a link to an article about the paint Charles White and his work which was intended to rewrite and correct the official American History story.  I thought it especially relevant in light of the interests of Luis and Aderinsola. The link is https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdfplus/10.1086/686548 and I have also included the article in the suggested reading page and called it Robertson: Pan-Americanism, Patriotism, and Race Pride in Charles White’s Hampton Mural. Thinking about the categories of arts-based research articulated by Wang et al., do you think White is engaged in Research about art, art as research, or art in research? Do you think he is involved in arts-based research (ABR) practices at all? Does he satisfy the ABR qualities that Eisner and Barone attach to arts-based research? You don’t have to read the article by Robertson to answer consider these questions, you could only look at the art. Of course reading the article could add to the discussion.

I look forward to reading your thoughts about the assigned articles and about your own projects.

Gene