Mixed Medium of Transnational Shuttling and De/colonizing Research

• In Event: What Shall We Name the Baby? Identifying the Art in Research and Research in the Arts

Abstract

The purpose of this mixed medium arts-based piece is to document intersections of gender, culture, and mindfulness from transnational de/colonizing perspectives. Etched, painted, glued, pinned on a mirror are histories of the body, border crossings, negotiations, re-membering, within the culture of the empire and evidence-based inquiry. The objective of this autoethnographic piece is to demonstrate transnational gendered shuttlings, where paint meets fabric, where drops of memories of cultural traditions are layered with contemplative labyrinthine journeys raising questions about the problems and potentials of empirical, theoretical, and methodological practices and processes of arts-based educational research.

Perspective(s)
This piece lies at the intersection of art and research. Consequently, it is informed by critical arts-based approaches to educational research (Barone & Eisner, 2006; Finley, 2011), transnational feminism (Bhattacharya, 2009a; Kaplan, Alarcon, & Moallem, 1999) and de/colonizing epistemologies (Bhattacharya, 2009b; Mutua & Swadener, 2004; Smith, 1999). Therefore, through the process of creating this piece I critically interrogate positionality as an educational researcher, as a scholartist (Cahnmann-Taylor, 2006) and as a methodologist.

Methods
I collaborated with a local, professionally trained artist. She instructed me to bring objects that aligned with the perspectives in my writing that reflects transnationalism and de/colonizing perspectives. We started a process of painting, sticking paper, objects on a mirror and building layers upon layers. Then we painted organic white shapes, as though they were viewing lenses, revealing some aspects of the painting and hiding others. At that moment the stories, the memories, the representations were fragmented and not viewable as a whole anymore. We then painted on top of the organic viewing lenses to reconstruct another new layer, another reality. Finally we created two nests, and attached one to an intersection in the middle of the mirror and another on the edge. These nests hold an object that can be shuttled from the center to the margin.

Data sources
Due to the autoethnographic nature of this piece the data sources are various memorabilia pieces, memories, and the final mixed methods art piece. If accepted, I will be presenting my paper while displaying the mixed-methods art piece navigating through layers, intersections, and shuttlings.

Results
The result is the final arts-based mixed medium piece demonstrating the intersections of transnationalism and de/colonizing perspectives.

Scholarly significance
This piece inspires discourse that runs a counter narrative to evidence-based inquiry and presents rigorous academic processes of understanding the complexity of transnational border crossings to be more than physical, more than measurable through traditional approaches. Additionally, this work also responds to the recent calls in qualitative inquiry to expand its analytical approaches to include processes that exceed coding, to forge new ways of knowing. I create a dialogic space to reflect on the ways in which art and research intersect to develop scholarship in the field of arts-based educational research.

Author

• Kakali Bhattacharya, Kansas State University