Understanding Entangled Relationships Between Un/interrogated Privileges: Tracing Research Pathways With Art, Duoethnography, and Pecha Kucha

• In Event: Rethinking Pecha Kucha as Inquiry: Intersecting Multisensory Preparation and Performances to Construct Knowledge

Abstract

Purposes
In this pecha kucha presentation, I explore how the use of a bag portrait activity, duoethnography, and a mixed medium layering method of arts-informed analysis in a doctoral level qualitative research class allowed for enhanced understanding of concepts that are traditionally deemed too complex, abstract, and alien to newcomers in academia and qualitative research. Using pecha kucha as a form of preparation and performance allow for integration of the visual information generated from students’ projects, their narratives about their projects, and my reflection of how knowledge was constructed and paths of inquiry carved. Pecha kucha offers the possibility of storytelling that invites crystallization, connection, speaking and performing with empowered authenticity so that audience members can identify multiple entry points to the performance, thus making the work live beyond the classroom and/or beyond the academic spaces where the work was conceptualized and created.

Perspectives
This project is grounded in Goffman’s (1959) figuration of front- and back-stage performances as a form of presentation of self, post-oppositional theorizing and in navigating teaching and learning as a nepantlera (Anzaldúa, 2009; Keating, 2013). Post-oppositional theorizing allows for an understanding of oppositional discourses within and outside academia and calls for expanding and creating spaces beyond oppositional discourses, to imagine and enact possibilities. Nepantlera refers to a threshold theorist who can travel between multiple worldviews without the need to belong in any and yet valuing the working with the contradictions of the worldviews.

Methods
In-depth interviews were conducted with students from a doctoral level qualitative methods class where they specifically explored their understanding, challenges, and breakthroughs in participating in a bag portrait activity and duoethnography projects.

Data sources
Data sources include interviews with 6 students, project artifacts of all students in the class (n=19), and written assignments related to the projects of students (n=19), generating 400 pages of raw data.

Results
Results reveal how participating in the above-mentioned projects created a sense of ease for students in navigating through complex ideas in qualitative research (ontology, epistemology, theoretical framework, methodology, analytical framework), discover their un/interrogated privileges as they related to their research interests, develop a sense of interrelatedness, and understand the implications of larger sociopolitical discourses. Additionally, using pecha kucha as a format will also offer opportunities to reveal how this format aided in inquiry and knowledge construction as a project, as a result of the performance and audience interaction.



Scholarly significance
Creativity in education has been marginalized, especially in doctoral research classes, as if creativity is alien to inquiry. Yet, significant discoveries are made in science and social sciences when the inquirer engaged in creative ways of thinking. Exploring how creativity can be integrated in education not only creates a space for inquiry, but also creates a future generation of scholars and scholarly practitioners who would begin to value and use creativity in their professional spaces. Additionally, art as inquiry serves as a bridge to create spaces for multiple worldviews in graduate education and brings an embodied intelligibility to understanding complex ideas in research.

Author

• Kakali Bhattacharya, Kansas State University