Paradoxical Resistance of Creative Methodologies

• In Event: 30.065 - Productive Methodological Tensions: Intervening Through Creativity, Collaboration, and Critique

Abstract

Objectives: Methodological creativity is challenging to identify, locate, and practice. Once creativity becomes recognized it is also likely to become normative and responsive to existing scholarly expectations. If there are no normative rules for “the unanticipated or unexpected” how to enable creativity in one’s scholarship and what could creativity produce (in potentially recognizable and unrecognizable ways) through its resistance? What could creative methodologies do in the absence of signifying and unifying processes and meaning-seeking practices?

Perspective: According to Annis (1998) functional and theoretical fixedness and absence of knowledge transfer can prohibit creative methodologies and creative (im)possibilities. Klausen (2010) referred to the paradox of creativity that deals with novelty and usefulness. This paper builds from the worry similar to Bogue (2004) who discussed that in the world of recognition learning is “simply the passage from nonknowledge to knowledge, a process with a definite beginning and ending, in which thought, like a dutiful pupil, responds to pre-formulated questions and eventually arrives at pre-existing answers” (p. 333). Furthermore, Bogue emphasized the role of paradox when thinking about novelty by explaining that anything new cannot confirm with existing expectations or does not represent orthodoxy. Instead, new and creative seems often nonsensical. Thus, nonsensical and creative methodologies are becoming and always recreating themselves through their resistance, interactions, and relationships with other concepts, objects, and knowledge systems. Furthermore, for Deleuze, creativity and experimenting is the only mode of thinking (1990, 1991, 1995). To create is to trace a path between impossibilities and to create is to form one’s own impossibilities. Alternatively, creativity might function only as potential for rethinking the doing. According to Whitehead’s process philosophy (1968) “existence (in any of its senses) cannot be abstracted from ‘process’”(p. 96). Creative processes, scholars, and ‘creative products’ are all interrelated and connected through various lines, cracks, and ruptures.

Method and data sources: In this paper I draw examples from soundscapes where creativity interacts with texts, sounds, silences, and vibrations. For example, through soundscapes scholars might inquiry into the sounds, silences, cracks and lines of life, material rhythms, vibrating environments, sounding landscapes and so on. In my example I draw from the iterative production of noise and gossip surrounding interviews with undocumented college students in the Southwest. Various sounds were recorded, found, compiled and passed around and around. In this soundscape some sounds gave a pause, created questions, and disrupted the flow of students’ experience. In some cases we produced sounds that in some ways related to the experiences of the undocumented students (i.e., fabricated conversations between friends at a bar, dads at the park, or political rallies) whereas other sounds had more or less of a symbolic connection.

Conclusions and scholarly significance: Once qualitative researchers integrate (creative and maybe artistic) resistance and experimentation as a part of their everyday scholarship they may be more likely to become comfortable with uncertainty and partially unfinished thought and practice. It might also be possible that uncertainty, rawness, and creative chaos prompted by doing, engaging, and collaborating through failure and unfinishedness can be conceptually stirring and methodologically transforming.

Author

• Mirka E. Koro-Ljungberg, Arizona State University