Reconceptualizing Educational Research Methodology

Editorial: Researcher positionality and race in color-evasive Nordic educational contexts

2025-04-02T17:37:17+02:00

The editorial introduction to the special issue on researcher positionality and race in color-evasive Nordic educational contexts frames the necessity of this inquiry into historical and contemporary forms of racism and current discourses of Nordic exceptionalism. Reflecting explicitly on researcher positionality with respect to race and Whiteness can be seen as an act of interrupting the silence and avoidance that tends to characterize Nordic educational research. The articles in the special issue are summarized and connected to these overall aims.

Special issue: Turning the tides; the child and the political. Methodologies for integraled child politics in education

2024-12-20T12:30:18+01:00

This Special Issue concerns the child and the political: the political child.

The call for papers asked for immanent and minor (transpolitical, transgenerational, decolonized…) perspectives in which child and childhood are seen as moulding collective futuring forces in a globalized world. The call asked to refrain from rights perspectives in a narrow juridical sense to avoid any type of categorization and compartmentalization. The call also asked to avoid universalized, major, or idealistic politics of the child, and as Marina Garcés (2022) asserts: “The western humanistic tradition must leave the expansive universalism and learn to think of itself from a mutual universality” (p. 92). Being human is thus seen as a collective and collaborative activity ultimately repealing any divisions between subject and object, adult and child, nature and culture, body and mind. What can children teach us about politics, we asked, and how can the child become more than an object of policies? Further, we asked what kind of childhoods are desirable, necessary, and possible to future?

The political child

2024-12-20T12:09:59+01:00

This essay is an attempt to write un unruly force field in sustained expansions about the political child, life, philosophy, policies, and science. Unruly as in messy and stammering but open. Unruly about the political child as a force and carrier of immanence, unencumbered, and as an expression of a future. It implies a view of the child born with inalienable rights as a political subject and force of material and social transformation, and temporalities of writing being transformational techniques. Writing ultimately treated as an ecological practice and method that facilitates the production of collective subjectivities. Thinking the child, life, science, and the world politically means thinking with Chantal Mouffe’s (2015) concept agonism in combination with writing as continual Deleuze and Guattarian (2004a) becomings, active in life itself. There are thin walls between realisms, dreams and fabulations, and this essay is an attempt to strike a blow for freer, humorous, more philosophical, and political mindsets in our pedagogical sciences and imaginations. Therefore, there are also unruly words and sometimes not yet present.

Reflection on racialization, whiteness, and researcher positionality as 'not-quite-white' in the field of educational studies

2024-12-05T20:45:36+01:00

This article draws on two autoethnographic vignettes from an ethnographic field study conducted in a Danish elementary school over six months. By unfolding two vignettes from photo-elicitation interviews (PEIs), the study analyses how researcher positionality relates to students’ experiences of marginalization and makes feelings of being racialized or othered come to the fore. The study proposes the notion of ‘sticky’ emotion and affect as an analytical lens that provides a more critically reflexive analytical framework to address the interactions between the researcher, racialized students, positionalities, and the research process. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the discussion and reflection on racialization and whiteness to challenge the pull of racialization. The theoretical framework draws on the concepts of whiteness and racialization, which is followed by methodological reflections on researcher positionality.

Keywords: researcher positionality, vignette, affect, ‘sticky’ emotion, racialization, whiteness, Nordic exceptionalism, ethnography, racialized students

Affektive orienteringer af hvidhed:

2024-11-20T21:38:40+01:00

Denne artikel er et opråb – og et nødråb – til de af os, for hvem det hvide privilegie kan være lige så usynligt, som det kan være behageligt. Med afsæt i et kritisk etnografisk inspireret feltarbejde gennemført i to danske børnehaver, stiller artiklen skarpt på affektive responsers ’gøren’ i relation til hvid forskerpositionalitet. Artiklen viser, hvordan hvidhedens affektive ladninger er socialt cirkulerende og magtfulde i deres orienteringer af kroppe, steder og (forsker)praksisser og dermed bidrager til opretholdelsen af den (u)synlige hvide norm. Artiklen argumenterer for, hvorfor affektive responser, som for eksempel vrede og usikkerhed, er gode at tænke med, når forskningens ambition er at forstyrre diskursivt medierede forståelser af normativ hvidhed, der optræder som en situeret del af racialiseret forskerpositionalitet.

Creolizing reflexivity:

2024-11-07T14:15:17+01:00

This article contributes to ongoing debates on generating interconnected transformative possibilities for decolonizing knowledge production in Nordic educational research without erasing power differences and tensions. Drawing from my PhD research, I entangle various research practices from the previously ignored or discredited margins, which go beyond hegemonic gazes and approvals for legitimacy. I particularly highlight everyday knowledges stemming from multiple senses, encounters, and unexpected connections, which might seem from a scientific perspective less rigorous or considered research at all. These may disrupt Nordic exceptionalism and color-evasiveness in researchers’ racialised positionalities. I show how the concept of creolization intersects with the method of autoethnography as Anzaldúan autohistoria-teoría with the aim of entangling multiple unequal knowers and knowledges, imagine and experiment with unforeseeable possibilities in and beyond research, and thus creolize reflexivity. This can expand the research imagination with regards to what constitute data generation and analysis, co-researching, co-writing, co-authoring publications, and presenting the research to wider audiences.

Beyond 'Where do you really come from?':

2024-11-07T12:29:27+01:00

Engaging with the complex dynamics of positionality, racialisation, and social demarcation, this study situates itself at the intersection of critical race theory (CRT) and understandings of reflexivity and positionality. It aims specifically to challenge and expand traditional understandings of ‘positionality’, which have largely centred on introspective concerns, such as how researchers’ individual experiences influence their methodological choices. As such, the paper argues for a more nuanced application of positionality, beginning from the Nordic exceptionalist post-colonial context where the societal self-perception is that Nordic countries are free of colonial legacies and uniquely progressive and egalitarian. To this end, the study employs a reflexive methodology deeply rooted in the authors’ own intersectional lived experiences. The paper critically engages with the potent, yet often unspoken question, frequently posed to people of colour in Nordic countries: ‘Where do you really come from?’ This intrusive curiosity is not just one of geographic origin but is intricately tied to perceived racialised positionality (PRP), highlighting a clear connection between the question and assumptions about identity and belonging. Furthermore, the query serves as a mechanism of social demarcation that separates ‘us,’ the presumed native Nordics, from ‘them,’ the racialised ‘Other.’ By focusing on this divisive question, the paper aims to dissect the social, ethical, and methodological implications of ‘perceived racialised positionality’ (PRP) – a term which captures the essence of how others’ perceptions of our racial identity can influence teaching and research specifically, and more generally processes and outcomes of scholarly enrichment of the ethical and intellectual landscape in Nordic settings and beyond.

The paper critically engages with the potent, yet often unspoken question, frequently posed to people of colour in Nordic countries: ‘Where do you really come from?’ This intrusive curiosity is not just one of geographic origin but is intricately tied to perceived racialised positionality (PRP), highlighting a clear connection between the question and assumptions about identity and belonging. Furthermore, the query serves as a mechanism of social demarcation that separates ‘us,’ the presumed native Nordics, from ‘them,’ the racialised ‘Other.’ By focusing on this divisive question, the paper aims to dissect the social, ethical, and methodological implications of ‘perceived racialised positionality’ (PRP) – a term which captures the essence of how others’ perceptions of our racial identity can influence teaching and research specifically, and more generally processes and outcomes of scholarly enrichment of the ethical and intellectual landscape in Nordic settings and beyond.

Å se skjult rasisme i norsk akademia:

2024-10-28T08:32:01+01:00

This article critically examines the reproduction of institutionalized whiteness in Norwegian academia and higher education. Employing autoethnography, the authors delve into their own racialized positionalities as researchers and educators in Early Childhood Education, reveling their entanglement in a specific pedagogical legacy that emphasizes White supremacist epistemologies and ontologies. The authors argue that this contextual reality is saturated in a color-evasive (Annamma et al., 2017) discourse where race often becomes obscured. Despite the continued influence of racialization processes on people’s life prospects, reinforcing inclusion and exclusion dynamics, Norwegian researchers, teachers, and students notably lack a language for discussing race. This article explores the potential and limitations of developing such a language to expand the discourse on race and racism in Norway. By scrutinizing the volatile and dynamic insider/outsider continuum, the authors contend that institutional whiteness must be critically examined through a decolonial lens, considering Nordic exceptionalism and color-evasiveness. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s phenomenological conceptualization of institutional whiteness, the article conducts a critical investigation into how conversations about race are obscured in Norwegian higher education, particularly within Early Childhood Education. The authors engage in an autoethnographic account of how racism and institutionalized whiteness materializes in Norwegian academic spaces. Our utilization of autoethnography in the form of a conversational exchange serves to exemplify a methodological approach for articulating discussions on race, white privilege, and associated themes in the Norwegian context. This dialogue offers not only a template for navigating conversations within a discourse of color-evasiveness and race evasiveness but also underscores the inherent challenges and necessity for thorough reflexivity in such dialogues.

Editorial

2024-10-15T15:33:31+02:00

This issue of RERM includes four papers that boldly attempt to propose ways in which educational research practices, traditions and methods might be enacted differently. They take seemingly foundational research methods (reviewing literature, ethnographic observation, walking methodologies) and transform them in to something less familiar that invite our readers to stutter and reappraise how else research might be done and with what outcomes.

Firstly, researching from Danish inner cities, Staunæs and Vertelyte draw on affect theory and a concern with moods and felt pedagogies in education to explore how hopes and anxieties are woven through school objects and architecture. Through minor interventions the authors propose that there are abundant possibilities to improve the inclusion of racialized students in the inbetween, and often pathologised spaces of school. This holds the potential to radically shift perceptions, prejudices and behaviours that are not always identifiable but that can be sensed through the minor gesture. The authors attend to the significance of language and what happens through translation and diffractive readings. They stress that concepts that travel require careful consideration when transposed into alternative geopolitical contexts. They take Ahmed’s ‘happy objects’ as a case in point to make visible the specificities of local context and what that means for advancing theory that can pay closer attention to time and space.

The next two papers address ways in which literature reviews – a staple element to any research project – can be up-ended and reimagined when post-foundational theories and practices are put to work. Naomi Pears-Scown makes use of Baradian theoretical concepts to think-with literature rather than merely review what is already known and organize a corpus of knowledge into useful categories. Through literature cartographies, Pears-Scown develops a mapping strategy that makes visible her affective engagement with literature through the crafting of found-poems which tell stories of the ways in which place shapes approaches to arts therapy in various geopolitical contexts. This novel approach to engaging with and encountering literature disrupts received wisdom about how literature should be reviewed and instead invites the reader to sit with the discomforts of expanding how literature stories can be told.

In resonance with Pears-Scown, the next paper written by co-authors Boks-Vlemmix and Aspfors, offers a similar challenge to orthodoxies surrounding what a literature review is and how it should be undertaken. In their experimental piece the authors offer glimpses into what gets generated when the emphasis concerns processes and practices of doing a literature review rather than what it represents. Like the previous paper, the authors are inspired by a cartographic approach that holds the potential to map the processes involved in becoming deeply immersed and affect with a body of literature. They take literature on Teacher Educator Professional Learning as a case in point to explore how mapping and tracing entangled concepts can generate unanticipated insights and present new lines of thought.

Finally, Louisa Allen explores the potential of smell, with all the senses and beyond the human, for educational research. She takes the reader on ‘smellwalks’ which presented themselves as an unlikely research method during pandemic lockdown. Allen provides detailed accounts of the ways in which smellwalks came into being in a small coastal town in Aotearoa-New Zealand and enabled a deep exploration of pandemic-transformed life at a daily and local level. The paper offers a theoretical examination of smellwalk methodology as a means to consider smell through multisensory conceptualisations where human senses are understood as distinct but overlapping. Further, the paper theorises the act of smelling as unbounded and ultimately, always more-than-human. A series of research moments are examined to demonstrate how smelling involves a multisensory experience that emerges with/through the material landscape.

Together these papers offer important ways to reappraise approaches to research methodology in education that have become so deeply embedded that they unwittingly shape conventional expectations of how research should be done, has always be done. Each of these papers offer exciting invitations to interrupt this routine way of thinking. Respond to the invitation to pause, to ask, must we do it that way? The way it has always been done? What happens if we question and dare to experiment with alternative approaches? When theory is mobilized through research that seeks to pursue alternative lines of inquiry, what then? When theoretical concepts are taken up in/to ‘foreign’ spaces what happens to them? How do they travel? What do they agitate? What do they make possible? Aligned with the aims of this journal, these papers individually and collectively, invite a pause to business-as-usual in educational research.

Jayne Osgood

Camilla Andersen

Mona-Lisa Angell

Ann Merete Otterstad

Editors

Brown researcher, white schools:

2024-09-11T09:57:54+02:00

This article is a cross-racial reflexive analysis between a biracial brown researcher and two researchers racialized as white in the same research project on (anti)racism in Finnish lower secondary schools. Building on three vignettes, the authors highlight several ways in which a researcher's racialized position as non-white and as white can impact ethnographic fieldwork in a context dominated by Nordic Exceptionalism and normative whiteness. The authors problematize the position of insider gaining access and gatekeepers’ trust, before looking intersectionally at the dynamic of being a racial outsider, the conflicts and affects that come with it, and conclude with the onto-epistemological challenges of doing school ethnographic research and contributing to antiracist knowledge production. This contribution crystalizes under-researched dilemmas that call for the development of new ethnographic designs which center researchers’ racial positions and further reflection on the ethical, methodological and ontological implications of producing data on racism at school.

Hopeful Things as Minor Interventions in Educational Atmospheres

2024-09-05T14:59:06+02:00

Drawing on scholarship on affects, moods, and affective pedagogies in education, we explore how educators in a Danish gymnasium weaved hopes and anxieties into a school space and the specific things, such as books and bookshelves, to address and improve the inclusion of racialized students in school life. Based on a feminist new materialist and diffractive reading through translation of English-language based concepts through Danish grammar and language, we explore how the concept of the "happy object" as delineated by feminist scholar Sara Ahmed takes on a more hopeful interpretation when analyzed within the Danish educational context and language. We argue that ‘foreign’ concepts require careful consideration and adaptation to suit another (Danish) linguistic, cultural, and racial context. Making such adjustments is not just a matter of taking specificities of local contexts seriously, it is also a means of advancing theory that can inspire analyses conducted in a wider range of educational time-space-coordinates.

Slow and affective becoming-with in early childhood education as the initiation of cultivation

2024-03-29T12:06:30+01:00

In this paper, we explore slow and affective becoming-with in early educational contexts as the initiation of cultivation. A slow approach advocates varied pace and rhythm, diverging from goal-driven approaches. Affective intensities, including feelings, bodies, and sensory elements challenge Western understandings of child and childhood. Our starting point for this reconsideration is the Finnish scholar J.A. Hollo’s (1895-1967) educational thinking, emphasizing Bildung as a process and the initiation of cultivation. Exploring postqualitative and non-representational methodologies, we focus on the messy and mundane in-betweens in early childhood education. That is, altering how we perceive place by refocusing our gaze from a physical location to intricate, intertwining becoming-withs. By refocusing our gaze on the slow and affective here and now – by thinking, seeing, and feeling with Hollo – we aim to contribute to ongoing discussions on a post-developmental and post-neoliberal ECEC.

Re-turning the Child in Educational Research Methodology

2024-03-20T20:39:27+01:00

The methodological approaches we explore in this article are anchored in Manning’s (2016) concept agencement and Barad’s (2014) concept re-turning. By re-turning the soil of our doctoral dissertations (Westgaard Bjelkerud, 2022, Moxnes, 2019) and exploring agencement as a way of activating the child in research, we draw attention to minor issues within the ecologies of research practices. According to Manning the minor works through the major as a force from within, problematizing the major’s standardisations, opening norms and experiences to variations and potentialities. We re-turn our doctoral projects to actualise minor events by discussing the child as knower; childspacesmattering and child-events. Hence propose the child as political through agencement, and from this thinking of the child in research differently.

Under the table

2024-03-17T19:18:51+01:00

Centred around a one-minute short film of an everyday activity in a Norwegian early childhood education institution, this article will explore how thinking with video offers the ability to deconstruct and re-imagine taken-for-granted conceptions of children’s political participation. Sensitive to aesthetic dimensions of video, this research-creation emphasises bodily intensities and collective vitality often less noticed in childhood research. Paired with both a close and an in-depth reading of Manning´s (2016) minor gestures as political as well as Agamben’s (1992, 1995) conception of gesture, the use of the cinematic technique of montage enables us to challenge dominant methodological discourses in the investigation of children’s agency. While the major gestures of political child are often based on identifying children’s individualised subject-centred and discourse-based agency, this multi-modal article will explore how video as research-creation might contribute to reconceptualising political child differently.

Superpositioner. Om kvantfysik och barns blivande

2024-03-11T10:41:26+01:00

I denna artikel utforskas vad som kännetecknar barns blivande med superposition, ett tillstånd där allt sker samtidigt och överallt. Ett tillstånd som finns där före det att barnet placeras som subjekt i tid och rum. Med utgångspunkt i två bilder på mig och min farfar diskuteras i artikeln hur det är möjligt att med hjälp av kvantfysik förstå barns blivande. Hur barnets mikropolitiska handlingar kan ifrågasätta etablerade verklighetsuppfattningar och därmed också medverka till en bättre värld. Artikelns bidrar till metodutveckling inom postkvalitativ forskning genom att visa hur begreppet superposition vidgar förståelsen för forskning kring barns blivande (St. Pierre 2011; Myhre Otterstad & Waterhouse Lorvik 2023).

Editorial

2023-12-26T16:00:14+01:00

This issue of Reconceptualising Educational Research Methodology offers the reader a range of insights from scholars located in different disciplinary spaces and geopolitical contexts. This collection of articles may at first appear to address very different topics: early childhood teachers’ stories about ‘culture’ in Australia; on-line YouTube followership as research in the USA; an Artographic approach to Theatre in Education situated in Finland; and the co-creation of data with young people in a Kulturskole in Norway. Yet a deep engagement with each reveals several threads to run throughout the collection that raise important questions when contemplating what else educational research can become when established conventions are questioned or put aside altogether in favour of approaches that foreground theoretically-rich methodologies that refuse formulaic implementation. Each paper invites the reader to question researcher relationships with ‘participants’; and to consider the possibilities available when mobilizing philosophy to reconsider what and how research might be undertaken otherwise.

The issue opens with an article written by Sonja Arndt and Clare Bartholomaeus that seeks to diffract early childhood teachers’ stories about culture in pursuit of more-than-only-social justice, and to reimagine research methodologies. The authors recount their multi-modal, multi-layered approach to researching with teachers that produced collectively entangled stories that reached far beyond anyone individual. They candidly recount the emergent and messy shape that their research project took, whilst finding themselves negotiating and working against research conventions (recognisable methods, ethics applications and so on). Their approach is described as a middling, where they recognise the significance of their own situatedness which found expression in surprising ways as the study took on unanticipated shapes. The article offers ‘philosophy as method’ by drawing upon the work of Julia Kristeva and Karen Barad to disrupt and reformulate ideas about both ‘culture’ and ‘research’. Theirs is a hopeful project that seeks to elevate the ways in which methodologies, when understood as always re-iterative, contingent and in response to relational context, can shift the ground on which research is conceived and takes shape.

Next, Maureen Lehto Brewster offers a phenomenological analysis of a researcher becoming a YouTube follower. The paper attends to the methodological implications of such a phenomenon by paying close attention, through event memories, to how and why this comes to matter. The author offers detailed reflections on YouTube culture and considers how it is designed to influence affective relations among creators and followers on the platform. Phenomenology, with its concern to study experience as lived, has the capacity for researchers to develop a lens that makes an ordinary lived experience quite extraordinary. Lehto Brewster pursues the extraordinariness of following with the help of Sara Ahmed’s queer phenomenology. The meticulous analysis throughout the article allows the affective dimensions of the phenomenon of on-line following to be intricately explored by asking: how is this phenomenon lived? Experienced? Productive? How does a feeling shape our worldview? Whose feelings shape the concept? The paper highlights the ways in which relating, knowing and trusting are fundamental to cultivating followers. Connections are then drawn between research and internet use (i.e. following) in which researchers mediate content based upon internal biases, predictive impulses and collaborative filtering. Like, Arndt and Bartholomaeus the inevitable and indisputable entanglement of the researcher is made explicit. Rather than being viewed as something that can (or should) be mitigated, reduced or somehow controlled – both papers make visible how such entanglements are produced, and how they can be embraced to enrich research and the claims that are made from such studies.

Nina Dahl-Tallgren then offers an account of becoming artography by attending to the movements of possibility in four evolving spaces: lingering in-between; transformation and affect; knowing and being; and encouraging diffractions with young people in a Finnish Theatre programme. Inspired by Baradian agential realism, the study takes up a diffractive methodology to read insights and discoveries that consider how ‘artist’, ‘researcher’ and ‘teacher’ intra-act through entangled practices. The theatre project sought to investigate how humans encounter global challenges, find ways to reduce risks and find new ways to think and work towards sustainable action. The role of the artographer was central to the project and facilitated reflection upon - what if, what is, what has been, what has yet to become and what matters - as new ways to understand, engage audiences, and provoke new learning through co-creation. Dahl-Tallgren’s close attention to ‘becoming artography’ allows for diffractive patterns to push all of those involved in Theatre in Education programmes to places outside usual comfort zones. The role of becoming artography then, highlights that when ‘artist’ is foregrounded a sensuous connection with human experience provides dramatic tension for participants; when ‘researcher’ is foregrounded genuine curiosity to explore and navigate through the process becomes pronounced; and when ‘teacher’ is foregrounded scope to be more engaged in what it sets in motions and what that means for participants is set free. With an agential realist lens artography is conceptualised and encountered as inherently dynamic, and constantly shifting and mutating. Like the previous two papers, Dahl-Tallgren makes visible the nuances, intricacies, tensions and affordances of embracing research as situated and relational. All three papers make explicit the potential that is set free when researchers refuse Donna Haraway’s ‘god trick’ and instead work with what the messy, middling of situated research might make possible.

Finally, Mali Hauen and Monica Klungland offer ‘trembling moments’ in their account of data-making with young people in a kulturskole in Norway. The authors co-creation methodologies with young people sought to reach understandings about what kulturskole does rather than what it is. Working with a small group of pupils it became apparent that methodologies that could reach beyond capturing accounts that represented their experiences were needed. Young people wanted to be heard, to tell their stories, and to offer embodied accounts of what being with the kulturskole potentiates. The approach taken brought together critical personal narratives, autoethnography, a/r/tography – which together became a methodology grounded in the physicality of making and creating. As the other papers in this issue gesture toward, following narrowly defined research conventions creates frustrations and false starts. Pushing against such conventions involves being adaptive and flexible; the authors draw upon existing and emerging examples of research-creation from the growing field of postqualitative inquiry. Their study underlines the importance in creating space for research to become something else, something more – where ‘participants’ can express themselves in a wider range of non-normative modalities, in this case through embodied languages. Through rap and the creation of short films pupils were able to engage in an affirmative and vital approach to ‘research participation’ which shifted power, positionality and called in to question what counts as research.

The Editors

Jayne Osgood, Camilla Eline Andersen, Mona Lisa Angell, Lotta Johannson and Ann Merete Otterstad

Literature cartographies

2024-02-19T16:39:43+01:00

If traditional literature reviews in academia tell stories of what is known about a topic, this article proposes a way to engage in this knowing differently through cartography, geography, and poetry, informed by Baradian theory. This writing details the creative method developed to think-with literature using geography as a mapping strategy, called ‘literature cartographies’. Through affective engagement with literature, geographical found-poems are presented that tell stories of how place shapes identity in arts therapy across the globe. The creative method of literature cartographies disrupts traditional literature review writing by inviting us to consider expanding how we tell and are affected by literature stories.

A Cartographic Review of Teacher Educators’ Professional Learning with an Aesthetic Approach

2024-03-18T15:57:03+01:00

Experimenting with innovative and creative ways to conduct a literature review aligns with the paradigm shift from qualitative to post-qualitative research, which is concerned with doing and becoming rather than being. The aim of this article is twofold: to unfold the process of a cartographic approach to conducting a literature review; and by exploring the literature to discuss what an aesthetic approach activates in teacher educators’ collaborative professional learning activities. Inspired by Deleuze and Guattari (1988)’s cartographic principle of the rhizome, and post-qualitative inquiry more generally, this review generates knowledge through connections of concepts across 21 international research projects from teacher educators that use an aesthetic approach in their collaborative practices. New components of professional learning are found by mapping-and-tracing entangled concepts. A discussion of encounters within an aesthetic approach to professional learning shows how the processes involved in a cartographic review generates new directions in thinking, such as becoming-professional.

The Smell of Sunshine

2024-01-23T10:30:52+01:00

This paper explores the experience of trialling smellwalks during the pandemic for use in educational contexts. It details how these walks were designed and mobilised in a small coastal town in Aotearoa-New Zealand to explore how the pandemic transformed life at a daily and local level. The paper has two aims which entail a theoretical examination of smellwalk methodology. Firstly, to rethink a multisensory conceptualisation of smell where human senses are understood as distinct but overlapping. And secondly, to theorise the act of smelling as unbounded and involving non-humans. A series of research moments are examined to demonstrate how smelling involves a multisensory experience that emerges with/through the material landscape. Barad’s (2007) notion of intra-action is drawn upon to re-conceptualise the idea of smell as led by the nose and reconfigure it as an indeterminate bodily experience.

Becoming Artography

2023-07-27T13:40:09+02:00

This study focuses on mapping Theatre-In-Education (TIE) practices through the research methodology artography. The study is inspired by agential realism, using diffraction as a way of reading different insights and discoveries with an artographic lens and how these multiple dimensions intra-act as an entanglement. The article provides an example of TIE artists co-labouring their practice as research by exploring the entangled intra-action between the positions ‘artist, researcher, teacher’. This study aims to explore how the multiple perspectives offered by an artographer’s lens contribute to significant knowledge in the art-making process of the TIE programme The Clearing. Learning for the TIE artists involves moving in and through spaces of possibilities folding and unfolding new understandings, a becoming intensity of an entangled artist, researcher, teacher. The process of becoming artography in TIE produced movements of possibility in four evolving spaces: Lingering in-between, Transformation and affect, Knowing and being, and Encouraging diffractions. The study also produced artistic and pedagogical principles regarding dramaturgical thinking concerning how to structure an aesthetic learning process and how it is facilitated.