Erevelles (2011), Gorman (2005; 2010; 2013), Haritaworn (2012), Cacho (2012), Ahmed (2004; 2013), Dossa (2009), Chen (2012), Mollow (2006), Lorde (1997) and Million (2013).
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha & Leroy Moore & Carolyn Lazard & Kay Ulanday Barrett & Essex Hemphill & Lydia Brown & Park McArthur & Alice Sheppard & Fannie Lou Hamer & Marlon Riggs & Constantina Zavitsanos & Kate Bornstein & Les Feinberg & Audre Lorde & June Jordan & Lorraine Hansberry & Fred Moten & Imani Perry & Eli Clare & Sins Invalid & Neve Be & Octavia Butler & Mattilda Bernstein-Sycamore & Harriet Tubman.
Situating sensory ethnography: from academia to intervention
Doing Sensory Ethnography investigates the possibilities afforded by attending to the senses in ethnographic research and representation. An acknowledgement that sensoriality is fundamental to how we learn about, understand and represent other people’s lives is increasingly central to academic and applied practice in the social sciences and humanities […] [Debates…] inform how researchers represent their findings in conventional written and audiovisual texts and in innovative forms designed to communicate about sensory experience. […] [In this chapter…] First, I outline its continuities and departures from existing ethnographic methodologies. Second, I locate [p. 8 ↓ ] it in relation to the intellectual trajectories of discipline-specific scholarship and applied research.
Pink, Sarah. “Situating Sensory Ethnography: From Academia to Intervention.” Doing Sensory Ethnography. SAGE Publications Ltd. 2009.
READING NOTES
What is sensory ethnography?
Ethnographic practice tends to include participant observation, ethnographic interviewing, and a range of other participatory research techniques that are often developed and adapted in context
shift from the ‘classic’ emphasis on ‘holism, context and similar ideas’ to the increasing fragmentation of ethnographic research.
critical methodology, visual ethnography
ethnography is a reflexive and experiential process though which understanding, knowing and (academic) knowledge are produced
ethnography is a process of creating and representing knowledge (about society, culture and individuals) that is based on ethnographers’ own experiences. It does not claim to produce an objective or truthful account of reality, but should aim to offer versions of ethnographers’ experiences of reality that are as loyal as possible to the context, negotiations and intersubjectivities through which the knowledge was produced. (Pink 2007a: 22)
[What do ethnographers do?…] iterative-inductive research (that evolves in design through the study), drawing on a family of methods, involving direct and sustained contact with human agents, within the context of their daily lives (and cultures), watching what happens, listening to what is said, asking questions, and producing a richly written account that respects the irreducibility of human experience, that acknowledges the role of theory as well as the researcher’s own role and that views humans as part object/part subject. (2005: 3) (Karen O’Reilly)
seeking to understand and engage with other people’s worlds through sharing activities, practices and inviting new forms of expression
necessary to rethink ethnography to explicitly account for the senses. […] reflexive, gendered, embodied, visual.
Anthropology of the senses and its critics
Howes described as ‘primarily concerned with how the patterning of sense experience varies from one culture to the next in accordance with the meaning and emphasis attached to each [p. 12 ] of the modalities of perception’ (1991b: 3). .
how different cultures map out the senses. Based on the assumption that in all cultures the senses are organised hierarchically, one of the tasks of the sensory researcher would be to determine the ‘sensory profile’ (Howes and Classen 1991: 257) or sensory ‘order’ of the culture being studied
taking cultural difference as the unit of comparison can be problematic when it shifts attention away from the immediacy of sensory experience as lived, and as such from the moment of perception.
Ingold writes, ‘reduces the body to a locus of objectified and enumerable sense whose one and only role is to carry the semantic load projected onto them by a collective, supersensory subject – namely society – and whose balance or ratio may be calculated according to the load borne by each’ (2000: 284).
senses, away from ‘the collective sensory consciousness of society’ and towards the ‘creative interweaving of experience in discourse and to the ways in which the resulting discursive constructions in turn affect people’s perceptions of the world around them’ (2000:285).
[Anthropology…]commonly assumed dominance of vision, or occularcentrism (Howes, Stoller)
need to separate out the idea of there being a hierarchically dominant sense
understanding vision in terms of its interrelationship with other senses
[Anthropology…] [Grasseni…] “the immediacy of fleeting sounds. Ineffable odours, confused emotions, and the flow of Time passing” ([Fabian 1983]:
‘skilled visions [which] are embedded in multi-sensory practices, where look is coordinated with skilled movement, with rapidly changing points of view, or with other senses such as touch’
British and Spanish research participants decided whether or not they would clean their homes based on multisensory evaluations and knowledge that they verbalised in terms of how clothes, or sinks or floors look, smell [p. 14 ] or feel under foot. .
[Anthropology…] [Stoller’s work in The Taste of Ethngraphic Things, Sensuos Scholarship shows…] anthropological practice is a corporeal process that involves the ethnographer engaging not only with the ideas of others, but in learning about their understandings through her or his own physical and sensorial experiences, such as tastes (e.g. 1989) or pain and illness (e.g. 1997, 2007).
recently anthropological studies that attend to the senses have been done ‘at home’, or at least in modern western cultures. This has included a focus on everyday practices such as housework (Pink 2004) and laundry (Pink 2005b), gardening (Tilley 2006), leisure practices such as walking and climbing (e.g. Lund 2005), clinical work practices (e.g. Rice 2006; Lammer 2007) and homelessness (Desjarlais 2005). Such sensory ethnographies both attend to and interpret the experiential, individual, idiosyncratic and contextual nature of research participants’ sensory practices and also seek to comprehend the culturally specific categories, conventions, moralities and knowledge that informs how people understand their experiences.
question of the relationship between sensory perception and culture, engages with questions concerning the status of vision and its relationship to the other senses, and demands a form of reflexivity that goes beyond the interrogation of how culture is ‘written’ to examine the sites of embodied knowing.
[Sensuous Geographies, Ethnographies and Spatial Theory] ‘An object or place achieves concrete reality when our experience of it is total, that is through all the senses as well as with the active and reflective mind’ (Yi-Fu Tuan)
‘to offer a more integrated view of the role of the senses in geographical understanding: the sense both as a relationship to a world and the senses as themselves a kind of structuring of space and defining of place’ (Rodaway 1994: 4, original italics).
micro-sociology [Simmel, Sociology of the senses]
First, our ‘sensory impression’ of another person invokes emotional or physical responses in us. Second, ‘sense impression’ becomes ‘a route of knowledge of the other’ (1997 [1907]: 111).
‘smelling a person’s body odour is the most intimate perception of them’ since ‘they penetrate, so to [p. 18 ] speak, in a gaseous form into our most sensory inner being’ (1997 [1907]: . 119).
[Low examines role of smell…] ‘attempts to move beyond “absolutely supra-individual total structures” (Simmel, 1997 [1907]: 110) towards individual, lived experiences where smell may be utilized as a social medium in the (re)construction of social realities’ (Low 2005: 298).
Christina Lammer (e.g. 2007) and of Jon Hindmarsh and Alison Pilnick (2007), which involves the use of video methodologies and sociological approaches to understand the sociality and multisensoriality of interactions in clinical contexts.
intercorpreal knowing [Hindmarsh, Pilnick]
Sensory Ethnography and Applied Practice… consumer research and health studies.
health research… documentary video Making Contact, CORPO realities [Lammer, sociology, interventional radiology]
…’teaching neophyte nurses to attend to their senses and their embodied responses, in order to better understand the lived experiences of patients and their families’ (Edvardsson and Street 2007:30).
Sensory Ethnography and Arts Practice
Parallel to, sometimes overlapping, and in some cases in collaboration with interest in the senses in ethnographic disciplines has been attention to the senses in arts practice
ethnographic filmmaker David MacDougall
audiovisual practice of Christina Lammer
soundart and ethnographic representation
John Levack Drever has identified commonalities between theory and practice in ethnography and soundscape composition, suggesting they share a focus on: ‘fieldwork through sensuous experience and the creation of an outward response to that experience from the inside’; ‘a holistic approach to the environment and to its people’; and a concern with ‘translating their findings into condensed itinerant forms’ (2002: 24).
Installation and performance art…. walking as a method of researching (e.g. the arts practice of Sissel Tolaas (see Hand 2007) and the ethnographic practice of, for example, Katrín Lund (2005, 2008), Jo Lee Vergunst (2008) and others),
Interdisciplinary Context for Sensory Ethnography
The extent to which this work will emerge in interdisciplinary projects that combine approaches from, say, anthropology, history and arts practice, rather than in the form of multidisciplinary edited readers and in the journal Senses and Society, still remains to be seen.
INTERESTING CITATIONS AND DEFINITIONS
Howes, D. (Ed.) (2005) Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader . Oxford: Berg.
David MacDougall (ethnographic filmmaker)
Christina Lammer (health research)
POST-READ
A/r/tography as Living Inquiry Through Art and Text
There is a substantial body of literature on arts-based forms of research demonstrating scholars’ endeavors to theorize the production of the arts as a mode of scholarly inquiry and as a method of representation. However, if arts-based research is to be taken seriously as an emerging field of educational research, then perhaps it needs to be understood as a methodology in its own right. This entails moving beyond the use of existing criteria that exists for qualitative research and toward an understanding of interdisciplinarity not as a patchwork of different disciplines and methodologies but as a loss, a shift, or a rupture where in absence, new courses of action un/fold. This article proposes an understanding of arts-based research as enacted, living inquiry through six renderings of a/r/tography: contiguity, living inquiry, openings, metaphor/metonymy, reverberations, and excess.
a/r/tography; contiguity; living inquiry; openings; metaphor/ metonymy; reverberations and excess
A/r/tography as Living Inquiry Through Art and Text Stephanie Springgay, Rita L. Irwin and Sylvia Wilson Kind Qualitative Inquiry 2005 11: 897
Guest Andrew Zealley
Guest speaker: Andrew Zealley, artist, musician, doctoral candidate York University
Auto-ethnography, an alternative method and form of writing, can make for uncomfortable reading. A transgressive account in the context of professional practice opens out a professional’s life, remaking power relations in the process. Relational ethics is an emerging growth area for auto-ethnographers, given the ethical implications for everyone represented in a transgressive telling. Future directions include fresh juxtapositions of layered auto-ethnographic texts and collaborative accounts that break with the self–other dichotomy.
Auto-ethnography, power relations, relational ethics, remaking professional practice, transgressive writing
Denshire, Sally. “On Auto-Ethnography.” Current Sociology, vol. 62, no. 6, Oct. 2014, pp. 831–850, doi:10.1177/0011392114533339.
Autoethnographers have grappled with how to represent others in the stories they tell. However, very few have written about the need to protect themselves in the process of doing autoethnographic writing. In this paper, I explore the ethical challenges faced when writing about a potentially-ongoing disorder, such as anorexia, when the research process triggers previously disengaged unhealthy thinking or behaviors for those involved. In the story-writing process, I felt a strong pull to go back into anorexia, as I immersed myself in my research on this topic. The compulsion to publish became intertwined with the compulsion of my anorexia, illustrated by the need to control both and present a certain “face” as a researcher.
Using a meta-autoethnographic format, I walk the reader through the choices I made in an attempt to protect myself as a researcher in the process of publishing an autoethnography about anorexia. I also explain the lessons I learned, which can be applied to persons doing autoethnographies on topics that may affect their own personal well-being. This paper reveals the importance of writing through our pain in an ethical fashion and that the ethics of doing autoethnography is not just about protecting those implicated in our stories, but also ourselves.
Chatham-Carpenter, A. (2010). ‘Do thyself no harm’: Protecting ourselves as autoethnographers. Journal of Research Practice, 6(1), Article M1. Retrieved [date of access], from http://jrp.icaap.org/index.php/jrp/article/view/213/183
A methodological textbook on autoethnography should be easily distinguishable from the standard methods text. Carolyn Ellis, the leading proponent of these methods, does not disappoint. She weaves both methodological advice and her own personal stories into an intriguing narrative about a fictional graduate course she instructs. In it, you learn about her students and their projects and understand the wide array of topics and strategies that fall under the label autoethnography. Through Ellis’s interactions with her students, you are given useful strategies for conducting a study, including the need for introspection, the struggles of the budding ethnographic writer, the practical problems in explaining results of this method to outsiders, and the moral and ethical issues that get raised in this intimate form of research. Anyone who has taken or taught a course on ethnography will recognize these issues and appreciate Ellis’s humanistic, personal, and literary approach toward incorporating them into her work. A methods text or a novel? The Ethnographic ‘I’ answers yes to both.
Ellis, Carolyn. The Ethnographic I: A Methodological Novel about Autoethnography. Rowman Altamira, 2004.
What is deemed ‘good’ or ‘humane’ care often seems to be underpinned by a standard ideal of an able-bodied, autonomous human being, which not only underlies those ‘social and professional structures within which narratives and decisions regarding various impairments are held’ (Ho, 2008), but also co-shapes these structures. This paper aims to explore how a relational form of auto-ethnography can promote good care. Rather than being based on and focused toward this standard ideal, it challenges ‘humanity’ by showing how illness narratives, public discourse, and policy are framed by ethical questions. It illustrates how normative ideas dictate policy and public discourse. It critically questions this constitutive power by shifting attention to the lived experiences of people with chronic illness and disability. By highlighting and reflecting together on the first author’s life with a chronic illness and his son’s disability, and thereby framing the narrative, it will be argued that, in order to improve care practices, personal illness and disability narratives and the way they interlock with public narrative and auto-ethnographic methodologies should be investigated.
auto-ethnography; care ethics; disability; chronic illness; humane care
Niemeijer, Alistair and Merel Visse, “Challenging Standard Concepts of ‘Humane’ Care through Relational Auto-Ethnography” Social Inclusion, vol 4, no 4. 2016.
Claudia Coca’s Chola Power: Pop Art as Decolonial Critique
Abstract: This essay showcases the work of Claudia Coca, a contemporary pop artist from Lima, Peru whose paintings and drawings critique the links between race, gender, and class in a decolonial, transnational frame. First, the essay explores the way Coca celebrates the Peruvian chola by presenting herself as an empowered subject instead of as an insulted object in her paintings. While the term chola has historically been used derogatorily, Coca reappropriates her chola identity and reclaims it as her own, consequently subverting its prejudicial, racist origins. Second, the essay studies the critiques she performs of the “afterlives of colonialism” on the natural and cultural environment in her most recent series of drawings from 2017. She demonstrates that not only human bodies, but other natural materials are tangled up with the project of cultural colonization. Throughout the article, the work of Chela Sandoval […Differential Social Movement] is drawn on to argue that Coca practices an oppositional aesthetic that makes sensible the perspectives of subjects whose voices and bodies have been disparaged instead of valued within an uneven global capitalist system.
Daly, Tara. “Claudia Coca’s Chola Power: Pop Art as Decolonial Critique”. In Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism, Vol. 18 no. 2 pp. 414-444, 2019.
READING NOTES
The tension between a digestible medium and an uncanny message about historical violence is where the power of her art lies. She jars viewers to consider the layers of social injustices that underlie the shiny screens of late capitalism.
an “oppositional” subject to hegemonic norms no longer exists because postmodernity results in a shattering of “the original” or “the normative” (Frederice James)
due to third world social movements and women of color feminisms, an oppositional consciousness to Jameson’s reading of history had already developed out of the 1968 context and continues to evolve as a creative, mutating pattern of differentiation vis-à-vis hegemonic forms of history
shift from a logic of oppression to a logic of resistance. (Lugones)
potential alliances between oppressed subjects as they navigate transnational spaces as part of a broader decolonial feminist aesthetic.
“Bring your flag for a ritual of electoral cleansing”
the power of taking up public space in a peaceful, participatory way, to help embody an oppositional movement and consciousness
example of an oppositional aesthetic project speaks to the power of collective action via a peaceful act built on love and respect for difference within a nation.
Coca’s use of self-representation enables her to connect to people through empathy, and to avoid speaking “for” others, but rather as herself alongside peers.
racism as a structural problem in Peruvian society, whose origin takes root during the colonial era, but at the same time locates the “other,” in general terms, in a field of exclusion with respect to the codes of society
emphasizes duality or multiplicity as identity, not as problems to be resolved.
…ways that products and images from the outside can influence self-perception in Peru.
Coca has turned the lens around by representing herself as the three graces, thus subverting the dynamic between the object of the painting, the subject in the painting, and the painter herself.
eliminates the power dynamic between “painter” and “painted,” or anthropologist and object of study, by collapsing the two and flipping the relationship between outsider and insider and the directionality of the male gaze.
chola women; that is, women of both indigenous and European origin who have been socially disparaged.
But this multiplicity is not paralyzing like the schizophrenic, fragmented subject of capitalism that Jameson describes; rather, it is nomadic and crafty, as Chela Sandoval argues in her revisionist take on Jameson’s “lost” subject in the postmodern era of late capitalism
beauty as an ongoing aesthetic and personal project, not an imported look to attain
feminist visual parodies
term cholo/a (or cholx) is an unstable racial and social category that is acutely dependent on context, and reflects a cultural dynamism that is, at its worst, racially and culturally derogatory, and at its best, celebratory in its symbolization of an emerging, new identity.
This process of cholificatio was fluid[…]a social “becoming” that could not be considered as an immutable identity. Cholaje was not, nor is it, a fixed structure; nor is it subject to hard and fast borders. Rather, it is a porous, soft structure that transforms, that changes
Tate features the word pop as a verb, not just an adjective, to emphasize the action that the word performs; pop art “pops” that which went before it— stylistically, abstraction and expressionism; and culturally, the notion that art could not be inspired by Campbell’s graphics associated with mass production, like soup cans or the Sunday comics.
how does she “pop” racial and gendered stereo types and formalliances within and beyond national borders via her art?
how does she more broadly “pop” colonial legacies projected onto the landscape?
Paul Preciado, in his reconceptualization of the body in reaction to the mandates of modernity, argues that part of decolonization means “making corporeal vulnerability a platform for action and common resistance”
Coca draws attention to the fact that strife is not commonly represented in pop art, even though the affective experience of anxiety associated with social prejudice might be one of the most popular shared experiences that people undergo in the public sphere. Coca makes sensible what is invisible publicly, but might be hyper visible internally to citizens: the doubt within as to why someone else might hate “us” so much.
If hate is the result of neocolonial prejudices, then love is that of decolonial alliance
Sandoval explains the concept of love as a method as “the experience of ‘the originality of the relation’ between two actors that inspire new powers”
“ What Coca asks in her art is “Why do much?” And yet, as viewers she challenges us to reflect on the opposite question: “why don’t we love each other and ourselves?”
viewers look at the beauty of the art and the creative power and are hurt by the hate or marginalization that inspires them, but simultaneously empowered through their reaction
ongoing call for oppositional consciousness to the smoothing over of difference
In this image, Colonizados, the black-and-white thrashing ocean becomes less a symbol of pristine and neutral nature, and more that of a force inscribed with the arrival of a project that transforms the ocean from a shared resource to a privileged imperial space.
speaks to the violence of a colonialism that cannot be located.
the much deeper and more complex systemic violence that fades from our discourse as we point the finger and blame individuals for the symptomatic issues of a diseased system. (Zizek)
denaturalizes colonization and reinstates the centrality of nonhuman nature as a necessary part of sustainable human life.
Our material relationships, across race, gender, sexuality, and even species, are sites of oppositional movement to the tide of exploitative economic and social practices that develop out of empires.
36 Minute video to prepare for JP King workshop on tracking research.
READING NOTES
generalized specialist, artist/designer/educator, interdisciplinary challenge of defining self, interdisicplinary critique + respect for methodological origins
method – procedure, methodology – branch of knowledge that deals w/ methods of particular discipline
methodological toolkit map
“in artistic research the method can be seen as a sort of map that informs both the research and the one reading the research, why and in what direction the research proceeded as it did.” mika hannula, juha suoranta, and tere vaden
non-verbal answers to non-verbal questions, masters is attempt to translate artistic practice into verbal language
research question allows for applications to exhibitions, scholarships
flow charts, prints exploring questions, giving away and leaving on streetcars
photographic research, visiting sites
in drafting thesis – how to articulate process? determined subject matter ( waste+relationship) methodological toolkit, techniques (visual documentaion, sensory ethnography, documentary filmmaking graphic design, presentation), process how does it come together (flowchart, what if, collection, transformation, display, what if this becomes that?) diagram = opportunity to talk about transformation of material and value as those things move through different stages of creative practice
class monday, mapping process, idea of experimental system
POST-READ
thinking about my own work, how to map ideas about my own work, the challenges in trying to unite “how do disabled artists keep making” (how does a disabled artist keep making, practice of speculative present) (budgeting of time and energy) and the sensory experiments with fractals and interpenetration/being in the world. how to take the tools i use 1) writing, poetry, narrative, non-fiction 2) photography, video, glitching, distortion 3) print making, illustration, abstraction, ones that i want to use (collage, wax, textile, audio, tactility), come together in a methodology. thinking about the tone that comes with using flat graphic design aesthetic / infographics versus the concept map made by iris haeussler. mapping of frameworks. also the practical challenges i’ve faced in trying to use mapping in the past (cog software, mapping in apt on roncesvalles,), either becomes too much of a creative exercise/presentation or includes too much detail. get lost in trying to articulate too much information.
having a hard time rn and feeling very much like im falling into patterns from undergrad, as much as from the unique stresses of the times as retrograde of my saturn return. focusing on faith and knowing i will get through this time and to cram/execute to the best that i can manage w/o perfectionism.
Experimental Systems and Epistemic Things
Hans-Jorg Rheinberger – “Experimental Systems and Epistemic Things” – A science history text but one that has been adopted by design researchers and research-creation scholars. It does an incredible job of describing how tools and subjects of investigation can switch position as the researcher gains technical proficiency.
READING NOTES
“The sub ject is, as it were, internally excluded from its object.” 2
Procedure does not mean here merely method or methodology. For every procedure already requires an open sphere (offener Bezirk) in which it moves. And it is pre cisely the opening of such a sphere that is the fundamental event in research 6(heidegger)
l’The Experiment as Mediator between object and Subject (Goethe)
“Thus when we have done an experiment of this type, found this or that piece of empirical evidence, we can never be careful enough in studying what lies next to it or derives directly from it. This investigation should conce_rn us more- than the discovery of what is related to it.”1
“the theoretician puts certain definite ques tions to the experimenter,
What does it mean to speak of experimental systems, in contrast to this clear-cut rationalist picture of experimentation as a theory-driven activity?
if a research question were well defined it would be unnecessary to preform it
procedure defined by ambiguity,
systems of manipulation designed to give unknown answers to questions that the experimenters themselves are not yet able clearly to ask
experimental systems-are vehicles for ma terializing questions.
epistemic objects – objects of inquiry, present themselves in characteristic vagueness, embody what one does not yet know
The difference between experimental conditions and episte~ic thing~, there fore, is functional rather than structural
if both types of entities are engaged in a relation of exchange, blending, and mutual transformatin, why then not cancel the distinction altogether? does it not simply perpetuate the traditonal, problematic distinction between basic research and applied science, between science and technology?
it helps to assess the game of innovation, to understand the occurence of unprecedented events, and with that, the essence of research
The Chimera of Method
Jeroen Boomgaard – “The Chimera of Method” (p. 57 – 72) – A text focused on artistic practice and research-creation with a more relevant discourse. It intersects with Rheinberger well in that Boomgaard also discusses how artists use objects to investigate objects and the flexible relationship between these.
READING NOTES
resistance to art as research often focuses on the question of the method.
Popper wanted to provide science with a de pendable basis with his ‘principle of falsification’ (i.e. a theory can only be regarded as truly proven when it is in principle possible to prove that it is incorrect), Kuhn demonstrated that scientific principles are constructs (paradigms) which stand until they are replaced by another outlook…
method has something to do with power as well: it is a manner of doing research but also a manner of speaking and/or writing that by definition structures the research and furnishes it with its power base.
every artist determines that method for himself and the idiosyncratic character of the rules lends art the aura of freedom and arbitrariness.
How can an artist who wishes to gain a PhD deal with a scholarly approach that in one breath calls itself into question and in the next breath ad vocates a compulsory but individually customisable system of rules as a means of production for art? How can artistic research derive its own methodology from this?
The question of the method, which is often timorously avoided in discus sions about research in the arts, is in fact axiomatic
Artistic research renders something visible, or furnishes an insight or knowledge that another form of research cannot ac complish, and that ‘something’ resides in the fact that art plays a pivotal role in the research.
how a method of research focused on dissemination can be combined with the non-dis power cursive of the work of art
The mode of research – asking questions in order to find answers – is complemented by a working method which prescribes how the re search – the questions and the answers, the process and the outcome – is written up and disseminated.
When artistic research is chiefly defined as an investigation in and through the arts and when the textual component is also re garded as a justification of the research – a descrip tion of what was done as well as an appraisal in the light of existing studies or other art projects – then that textual notation functions as a precept that struc tures the research in advance.
their research proves to be incapable of escaping this formulation during the process
How can it be discussed, received and evaluated as research?
Hallmarks of research, such as text, diagrams, statistics, documents and reports, then form part and parcel of the work of art.
The work wants to be visible as a form of research, but primarily to be seen and discussed as a form of art.
Formulating a research ques tion which can be investigated with the aid of existing scholarly disciplines as well as by means of their own artistic production is a way of preventing one of the two approaches predominating.
The basic premise is that the academic re search and research through art can complement or even comment on each other, but they cannot con verge.
combine a closed form with an open end, and it can there fore prompt an investigative direction of travel, but can never take it to a conclusion.
causes the conclusions that were apparently drawn in the text to be suspended again, with the work of art’s complexity forcing open the hermetic methodology of science.
INTERESTING CITATIONS AND DEFINITIONS
a priori: deductive, : relating to or derived by reasoning from self-evident propositions (MW)
axiomatic: taken for granted(MW)
discursive: marked by a method of resolving complex expressions into simpler or more basic ones (MW)
Why has there been such an explosion of discussion about sex in the West since the seventeenth century? Here, one of France’s greatest intellectuals explores the evolving social, economic, and political forces that have shaped our attitudes toward sex. In a book that is at once controversial and seductive, Michel Foucault describes how we are in the process of making a science of sex which is devoted to the analysis of desire rather than the increase of pleasure.
Foucault, Michel. “We ‘Other Victorians’” pp1-13, “Objective” pp. 81-91 and “Method” pp. 92-102 In The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Volume 1. Translated from the French by Robert Hurley, New York: Vintage Books Edition, 1990.
READING NOTES
Other Victorians
“the image of the imperial prude is emblazoned on our restrained, mute, and hypocritical sexuality,” “serious function of reproduction,” “utilitarian and fertile,” “Nothing that was not ordered in terms of generation or transfigured by it could expect sanction or protection,”
“coincide with the development of capitalism: it becomes an integral part of the bourgeois order.”
“If sex is repressed, that is, condemned to prohibition, nonexistence, and silence, then the mere fact that one is speaking about it has the appearance of a deliberate transgression.”
mutually reinforcing
“Why are we repressed? but rather, Why do we say, with so much passion and so much resentment against our most recent past, against our present, and against ourselves, that we are repressed? By what spiral did we come to affirm that sex is negated? What led us to show, ostenta tiously, that sex is something we hide, to say it is something we silence?”
“We must not be surprised, then, if the effects of liberation vis-a-vis this repressive power are so slow to manifest themselves; the effort to speak freely about sex and accept it in its reality is so alien to a historical sequence that has gone unbroken for a thousand years now, and so inimical to the intrinsic mechanisms of power, that it is bound to make little headway for a long time before succeeding in its mission”
“Is sexual repression truly an established historical fact? […] Do the workings of power, and in particular those mechanisms that are brought into play in societies such as ours, really belong primarily to the category of re pression? […] Did the critical discourse that addresses itself to repression come to act as a roadblock to a power mechanism that had ope rated unchallenged up to that point, or is it not in fact part of the same historical network as the thing it denounces (and doubtless misrepresents) by calling it “repression”?”
“Why has sexuality been so widely discussed, and what has been said about it? What were the effects of power generated by what was said? What are the links between these discourses, these effects of power, and the pleasures that were invested by them? What knowledge (savoir) was formed as a result of this linkage?”
“disengage my analysis from the privileges generally accorded the economy of scarcity and the principles of rarefaction, to search instead for instances of discursive production (which also administer silences, to be sure), of the production of power (which sometimes have the function of prohibiting), of the propagation of knowledge (which often cause mistaken beliefs or systematic misconceptions to circulate);”
Objective
“By constantly referring to positive technologies of power, you are playing a double game where you hope to win on all counts; you confuse your adversaries by appearing to take the weaker position, and, discussing repression alone, you would have us believe, wrongly, that you have rid yourself of the problem of law; and yet you keep the essential practical consequence of the principle of power-as-law, namely the fact that there is no escaping from power, that it is always-already present, constituting that very thing which one attempts to counter it with.”
The negative relation, the insistence of the rule (binary system, sex is to be deciphered on the basis of its relation to the law), the cycle of prohibition (do not appear if you do not want to disappear), the logic of censorship (affirming that such a thing is not permitted, preventing it from being said, denying that it exists), the uniformity of the apparatus (power over sex is exercised in the same way at all levels)
general theme that power represses sex and the idea that the law constitutes desire, “anti-energy”
“this critique of law [criticisms of lineage from monarchic institutions] is still carried out on the assumption that, ideally and by nature, power must be exer cised in accordance with a fundamental lawfulness.”
“if it is true that the juridical system was useful for representing, albeit in a nonexhaustive way, a power that was centered primarily around deduction (prelevement) and death, it is utterly incongruous with the new methods of power whose operation is not ensured by right but by technique, not by law but by normalization, not by punishment but by control, methods that are employed on all levels and in forms that go beyond the state and its apparatus.”
“We must construct an analytics of power that no longer takes law as a model and a code.”
“does this example—which can only be considered a privileged one, since power seemed in this instance, more than anywhere else, to function as prohibition —not compel one to discover principles for analyzing power which do not derive from the system of right and the form- of law? Hence it is a question of forming a different grid of historical decipherment by starting from a different theory of Copied under power; and, at the same time, of advancing little by little toward a different conception of power through a closer examination of an entire historical material. We must at the same time conceive of sex without the law, and power with out the king.”
notes from module
critical lense on western practices
object of study comprised of instinct to know in v specific ways
how is knowledge concieved and how does it to expand in multiple feilds?
how do institutions become sites of knowledge to construct subjects in order to govern ex. discipline and punish, prisons reflect other spaces.
power shifting, disappearing, reappearing, Productive not value/moral judgement ie good/beneficial but that it multiplies from many points.
power as social configurations that enable complex+dynamic forces that enable power+resistance (loop)
fouclaut + deleuze + guattari, thinking+writing at moment where frued+marx dominated critical thinking, f+d+g forged alternative to f+m.
power is everywhere not just in law. how is power formed in relations? how to analyse such relations at micro level?
p 83, you are always already trapped
sexualit is way to demonstrate how power operates in contested domains which are dominated by false notion of repression. Power is tied to heteropatriarchy + regulation of disobedient racialized bodies… familiar discourse.
Diguise power and sex as negative relation, blocking and masking. Limitation of undrstanding power – rules as laws. In religious context, prohitiory laws. Identifying what isn’t permitted, imposing ways to prevent = silence. Uniformity of apparatus of power/ law, power from top, legistation vs obedience. This is reduction of power, does not take into account of waht is not spoken. Stems from western histories of monarchy, law replaces king. Contemporary example – Government/settler/otherwise, sustains power, toppling systems would undo dynamics of power, this is top down understanding of power that does not take into account that power does not always come from above.
p 89, dominant understanding of power is localized in law + rely on codes that are observerable. p 90 – “We must construct an analytics of power that no longer takes law as a model and a code.”
power has not governed sexuality to laws
“power must be understood as multiplicity of force relations immanent in the sphere in which they operate, and which constitute their own organization”
struggles, confrontations, transformations, belong to a chain or a system
visualize power as a rhizome, unclear where power emerges
power is excerised “from innumerable points,” not static, part of mobile relations, power is temporal, it grows in relation. not outside relation (deleuze, immanance). Binary between rulers+ruled, blurry, does not encompass hower power is constant changing. Revolts+refusals are not final, they reemerge. Plurality of resistances, each special case. Can only exist in strategic filed of power relations (p 96).
web of relations that become common (disicipline child’s body through repetition ie family, doctor, school), national body politic (Manning) = dispersions of power (Foucault)
(video clip) power is a relation, to govern “one’s behaviour can be determined according to strategies by using a number of tatics,” govermentality hasn’t ceased
Hjorth, Larissa and Kristen Sharp. “The art of ethnography: the aesthetics or ethics of participation?” Visual Studies. Vol. 29, No. 2, 2014, p. 128-135.
White, John Howell and Charles R. Garoian, and Elizabeth Garber. “Speaking in Tongues: The Uncommon Ground of Arts-Based Research” Studies in Art Education, Winter 2010.
Cole, Ardra L. and J. Gary Knowles. “Arts-Informed Research.” Handbook of the Arts in Qualitative Research: Perspectives, Methodologies, Examples and Issues. Sage Publications. 2007. p. 55-70.
Creswell, JW. “Mixed Methods Procedures.” Research design: qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods approaches. Sage Publications. 2014. p. 215‐240.
Guest: Artist Allison Rowe, https://allisonroweart.com/
The Art of Ethnography: The Aesthetics or Ethics of Participation
When Hal Foster noted an ethnographic turn in the art world in the 1990s, he was eluding to broader ‘impulses’ that had haunted avant-garde movements throughout most of modernism, such as surrealism. However, the ethnographic turn did not just have an impact in the visual arts – areas such as cultural studies felt a shift from the textual towards the ethnographic. Two and half decades on, the pervasive nature of ethnography can be felt across the disciplines as ethnographic approaches evolve, migrate and transform, especially through the growing ubiquity of the digital. In this context, various entanglements need to be defined – especially the drawing upon ethnographic aesthetics and ethics in art practice. But is this ethnographic compulsion just a stylistic trend or does it speak of deeper concerns in the arts about engaging with social and cultural practices and reflexive participation? Drawing on case studies in contemporary art, this article focuses upon the haunting of the ethnographic turn in art through numerous guises from relational aesthetics onwards.
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Hjorth, Larissa and Kristen Sharp. “The art of ethnography: the aesthetics or ethics of participation?” Visual Studies. Vol. 29, No. 2, 2014, p. 128-135.
QUESTIONS
What is geo-ethnographies? How is ethnography used as a method in arts, how does “procedural documentation (eg. photographs)” fall short? How does a project ensure it is “critically and reflexively engaged?” What did Foster say about ethnography in arts?
READING NOTES
concepts central to ethnographic practice
reflexive negotiation of self, power, labour and participation
Bourriaud (Relational Aesthetics)
relational aesthetics – “human and social relations as context and content for art production and consumption.”
contemp art must move beyond 1960’s philosophies and toward internet, co-creation, DIY, etc. Audience is community to collaborate with.
Clare Bishop
relational aesthetics = MO of curator/gallery = “imbalances of power relations that in turn lead to various uneven forms of participation.”
“Has ethnography moved beyond and aesthetic gesture towards and ethical practice in art?”
ethnographic art
not documenting but method and criticality
not co-location but co-presence (Beaulieu)
ethno – centres people (Benedict Anderson’s imagined communities)
“moving from period of networked visual events to emplaced images,” multisensoriality, place-as-event, post-relational aesthetics (Pink)
“reflexive hospitality” (Papastergiadis), artist speedy collaborate/engage w/ community fashions ‘other’ in artistic guise. questions of power, labour, subjectivity.
“cultures… [do] not hold still for their portraits” (Clifford and Marcus)
“negotiate the politics of everyday as dynamic and yet prosaic”
Kester – collaborative methods – needs new documentation/critique that moves away from completed work and takes into account different forms of identification and agency of artist and participant and relations/operations of power (prioritizing ethics over aesthetics)
Bishop – critical of “good intentions,” prefer disrupt and provoke
“[in art] how to respond and adapt to the reconfiguring of identities and practices”
Underground Streams – “emphasis is not on art as a centralised fixed object but rather as a structure through which dialogue is encouraged”
art as “living process” (aucklandtriennial.com)
Place (Geo)
online/offline relationships, symbolic ideas of place
identity politics – geography and ethnicity
multiple forms of presence
digital overlays, “stories-so-far”
“co, net, tele, absent, ambient”
digital/mobile media = shift from co-location to co-presence
mediated by memory, language, gesture
lived, imagined, geographic, conceptual
“evokes cartographies of the imaginary, emotional, mnemonic and psychological” (Massey)
shaped by movement / meshwork of moving things (Ingold)
“[how might art] reimagine the identity and place as something contested, dynamic and contingent?”
“artist does not simply dwell in a place but collaborates with place” (Papastergiadis)
(artist)researcher – in collaborating, active practice of observing, documenting, reflecting, and presenting social nature of knowledge production
danger in using social-practice-art as “lab” w/o power analysis, becomes closed-loop, one ended discussion
INTERESTING CITATIONS AND DEFINITIONS
Beaulieu, A. 2010. “Research Note: From Co-location to Copresence: Shifts in the Use of Ethnography for the Study of Knowledge.” Social Studies of Science 40 (3): 453–470. doi:10.1177/0306312709359219.
Bishop, C. 2004. “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics.” October 110: 51–79. doi:10.1162/0162287042379810.
Bishop, C. 2006a. “The Social Turn: Collaboration and Its Discontents.” Artforum Feb.: 179–185.
Bishop, C. 2006b. “Reply.” Artforum May: 22–23.
Bourriaud, N. 2002. Relational Aesthetics. Dijon: Les Presses du Réel. First published in French 1998.
Foster, H. 1995. “The Artist as Ethnographer?” In Traffic in Culture, edited by G. Marcus and F. Myer, 302–309. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Foster, H. 1996. “The Artist as Ethnographer.” In The Return of the Real, 171–204. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Kester, G. 2004. “Collaborative Practices in Environmental Art.” Accessed February 7. www.greenmuseum.org/ generic_content.php?ct_id=208
Kester, G. 2006. “Reply.” Artforum May: 22–23.
Kester, G. 2011. The One and the Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Massey, D. 2005. For Space. London: Sage.
Papastergiadis, N. 2011. Spatial Aesthetics: Art, Place and the Everyday. Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures.
Papastergiadis, N. 2012. Cosmopolitanism and Culture. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Pink, S. 2009. Doing Sensory Ethnography. London: Sage.
POST-READ
In this text Hjorth and Sharp provide an overview of ethnographic research as applied in arts-practice, and use Kester’s “The One and the Many” (2011) to analysis the balance of ethics and aesthetics in two case studies of collaborative, ethnographic social-practice art. A primary concern in this text is geo-ethnographies in relation to identity, place, and power. “Identity” is connected to geography and ethnicity (grid?), “place” is envisioned as symbolic and changing, and power is an ever present haunting of anthropology’s “othering.” This text argues for the necessity of focus and rigour to maintain and demonstrate critical reflection in arts-based ethnography and collaborative practices. It also emphasizes the need to move away from prioritizing static art resolutions/outcomes towards dynamic experiences of engagement, a move away from judgement and aesthetics to rigorous criticality and ethics.
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Speaking in Tongues: The Uncommon Ground of Arts-Based Research
In this article, we explore whether or not arts-based research engages different ideas and processes—different nouns and verbs—when the art form is understood as design, craft, or “fine” art. We propose that the fine, craft, and design arts each provide opportunities for conducting research, that their identities are built upon mutual support and willful self-separation—”I am a crafts artist not a designer;” that the distinctions mark the boundaries of our research but aren’t fixed; and, that they provide a framework for a comprehensive art education program in which the disjunctions among the three disciplines provide opportunities for critical discourse. The disorder, the complexity, and the contradiction that the three disciplines of craft, design, and fine arts bring to one another is further complicated by art educators’ and their students’ knowledge, primarily the memories and cultural histories that they bring to their craft, design, and fine art making practices and research. In doing so, the discourse about craft, design, and fine artmaking is forever unfinished in the classroom. This article is the authors’ attempt at introducing a writing style that best exemplifies the ambiguities and incompleteness of arts-based research. We have chosen aphoristic writing to provide art educators opportunities to enter the fray, to intervene in the openings between our writing by reading between the aphorisms that follow.
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White, John Howell and Charles R. Garoian, and Elizabeth Garber. “Speaking in Tongues: The Uncommon Ground of Arts-Based Research” Studies in Art Education, Winter 2010.
QUESTIONS
What is the difference between artist, designer, craftsperson and why do they separate themselves? What opportunities and barriers are there in having different identities and vocabularies for similar research practices? What do memory and cultural histories have to do with it?
READING NOTES
crafts/design/fine arts – identities formed+held through “networks of people, actions, objects, histories, and economies.” (William James + Ludwig Wittgenstein).
aphoristic methodology – challenges chronological and analytical approach to history (Walter Benjamin)
aphorism used to avoid hierarchical order
transitivity, indeterminancy – correspondences w/ relational aesthetics – “forever unfinished discursiveness, a never recaptured desire for dissemination” (Bourriaud)
aphorism + collage – perpetually unfinished, “the dictum says Something. The aphorism shows Something else… the dictum must be complete or it is nothing… an aphorism is pertpetually unfinished, always reaching beyond itself” (Gary Saul Morson, lit theory).
misreading, aphorism does not conclude but opens opportunities, liminality, ambiguity that are being applied to arts language in this text
disquieting objects – juxtaposition between prayer meditation bowl and porcelain cup – cannot wear ring because blood diamonds, cannot put up flower house numbers because of presentation – ghost of prophecy, materiality, order, tradition – control for fear of falling into abyss – craft verb/craft noun – “the encounter w/ materials as the point where personal history is problematized”
Disquieting actions – “make-it” phenomenon – mechanics of crafting+play – action in crafting, enjoyment of watching to seek techniques and skill to express experiences, ideas, emotions – The Pencil story, logic and rationality suspended, “walking stick of research” – returning/rememberance/research/resonance, the past is not the presence, traction (methods and results) and slippage (novelty and variety)
INTERESTING CITATIONS AND DEFINITIONS
aphorism: a terse formulation of a truth or sentiment : ADAGE (MW)
transitivity (transitive): characterized by having or containing a direct object(grammar); being or relating to a relation with the property that if the relation holds between a first element and a second and between the second element and a third, it holds between the first and third elements; relating to, or characterized by transition
POST-READ
i made a nice egg and cheese and veg scramble. craft/design/fine art objects create tension the same way, craft/desgin/fine art mechanical movements are acted on the same way.??
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Arts-Informed Research
Contemporary American artist Martha Rosler (cited in Gever, 1981) states, “[If you want to] bring conscious, concrete knowledge to your work . . . you had better locate yourself pretty concretely in it” (p. 11). We are life history researchers with deep roots in meaning making systems that honor the many and diverse ways of knowing—personal, narrative, embodied, artistic, aesthetic—that stand outside sanctioned intellectual frameworks. To begin this chapter we surface these roots.
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Cole, Ardra L. and J. Gary Knowles. “Arts-Informed Research.” Handbook of the Arts in Qualitative Research: Perspectives, Methodologies, Examples and Issues. Sage Publications. 2007. p. 55-70.
READING NOTES
dissatisfaction and disillusionment
academy – use vocab to explain phenomena experiences processes context systems, although it feels false
transforms rich life stories and emotions into something dry
using integrity, relevance, accessibility, engagement to reach audience outside academy
enter the arts
arts-informed research
defining elements and form
ways and means for finding form
qualities of good arts inormed research
INTERESTING CITATIONS AND DEFINITIONS
logical positisim
technical-rationality
POST-READ
vagueness and ambiguity are big themes ive been readng
Mixed Methods Procedures
Creswell, JW. “Mixed Methods Procedures.” Research design: qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods approaches. Sage Publications. 2014. p. 215‐240.
READING NOTES
mixing 2 data types makes better understanding of problem/question
qualitative – open ended
quantitative – close ended
1) intent + def of design of mixed methods 2) reasons, value 3) choose mixed methods design 4) discuss data collection, analysis, interpretation, validation 5) discuss anticipated ethical issues
“Trying to talk to climate change scientists about the future and their feelings,” 2018 was the most interesting to me because of the way the narrative got shorter and more succinct as the interviews go on. The lack of visual / audio exhibit materials is fitting for a project where the participants unanimously did not feel it appropriate to respond. It also illuminates how the artist came to develop a later project, “Emotional Labor Specialist, Climate Change Hotline” 2019, wherein the specialist is often absent. I wonder how the work she has done at Artscape Gibraltar Point connects to the research and theory we have been reading.
Allison Rowe Green Skies- Exterior View, Installation, 2017
