Artistic Gestures as Knowledge-Generating Practices in Nomadic Inquiry

• In Event: 44.046 - Exploring the Intersections of Post-Qualitative Inquiry and Arts-Based Research

Abstract

Objectives:
This paper addresses a methodological framework that supports nomadic inquiry. It proposes a series of five gestures, based on specific artistic contributions, as a more appropriate way for doing research that is not equivalent to data. This position draws on Elizabeth St. Pierre's (2002) questioning of why a qualitative research experience is treated as data; her objection is that it is not through “data” that we come to know (or experience) a research event.
Theoretical framework:
In response to a fieldwork experience carried out with youth that produced intangible results, I turned to what Deleuze and Guattari (2004) have described as a following model—also referred to as a nomad science—in an effort to approach the fieldwork as something more than data. Moving away from a framework based on reproduction has repercussions for the conceptualization of both method and methodology, where the aim is not to create a reproduction of a real already out there, but a documentation of what research brings forth. Nomad science involves “all kinds of deformations, transmutations, passages to the limit, operations in which each figure designates an 'event' much more than an essence” (p. 362). In other words, nomad science is a framework where the research participants (myself included) are articulated in an assemblage, they are not represented as their/our essential selves but become figurations that emerge in the event.
Modes of inquiry:
This nomadic inquiry proposed here does not follow a traditional path for research and instead engages in: framing, wandering, sifting, layering and spiraling. These research gestures are introduced through artworks, to provoke a nomadic shift into other types of non-textual representational strategies. The included artworks suggest modes of knowing that escape or at least emerge differently than they do in academic writing and analysis.
Data sources:
This methodological reflection is grounded in a fieldwork experience carried out with six secondary school students. Our aim in this collaborative project was to develop narratives about where and when youth engage in meaningful learning, both in and outside school, to counteract school disaffection. However, due to the ambivalence of the youth, disaffection was not the topic of our inquiry and instead it became a defining characteristic of our collaboration.

Results:
Ellsworth (1997) observes “gestures act performatively, rather than representationally, and resituate the events of places… within a different structure of relations” (p. 146). Moving from data collection into an artistic gesture allows the research to document the performative aspect of the students’ contributions to the project. It allows the study to approach youth learning not as an outcome but as a process, as a gesture that is forever unfinished within the process of becoming-learners.
Scholarly significance:
By using nomadic inquiry to follow the youth contributors in this study, the project develops an alternative framework for post-qualitative research. The artistic gestures shared here allow for speaking of the research experience in its complexity, providing a performatic way of undertaking and interpreting the study, which amounts to more than a reproduction of what took place.

Author

• Rachel Fendler, Florida State University