Meeting Drawing and Writing Halfway: In/tensions Within the Making of My Ph.D.

• In Event: 79.029 - Reading, Reviewing, Mentoring, and Writing Differently in Higher Education

Abstract

This paper explores the the spaces between writing and drawing or rather, writing-with-drawing, that conceive research processes and research-creation as “more-than-writing” and “more-than-drawing” respectively. As a visual artist finding my way through a PhD study in higher education I am drawn towards Manning's interpretation of art as a process and a way (2016: 28) through which research problems materialise through ongoing encounters in the studio. Deleuze and Guatarri's expanded understanding of art as "an event that is both an object of encounter and the name of the encounter itself" also resonates as I explore the possibilities for art and thought beyond representation (O'Sullivan, 2006: 2).

Paying attention to the immanence of the research process that includes various modes of making in the studio has helped me to find and formulate the concerns of my PhD that is entitled Reconfiguring a history of art and design curriculum in a South African university of technology: Becoming with critical arts-based pedagogical encounters. It matters how these processes/materialities nudge my thinking through-and-around concerns obliquely, and in so doing, open me towards the disparate aspects and potentials of the inquiry at different levels of intensities.

The translation of these thinking/making practices and processes into the standardised logocentric format as stipulated by the academy is challenging. On the one hand, I am constricted by the emphasis on linearity and order, and feel concerned that the seemingly immutable structures of the thesis format might exclude significant knowledges and experiences that continue to in/form the multimodal research approach. However, I also value the rigours of academic writing processes that help me to organise my thinking and plot a way forward for the project.
Rather augmenting the modalities through juxtaposition, I choose to diffract them through one another in order to reveal how the different practices might build on and through their intra-action (Barad, 2007).

The presentation's scholarly significance lies in its commitment to the indeterminacy of the research-creation process. Working with St Pierre's notion of the aside (2017, p.3), I think-write together with ongoing thinking-through-making practices in the studio and embrace post qualitative inquiry's call "to trust that something unimaginable might come out that might change the world bit by bit, word by word, sentence by sentence. Writing is, after all, a method of inquiry. In writing, we can and do invent and reinvent the world" (2017, p.5). As I stumble along the way in my desire to find words that express the ineffable … I pause to allow language to find its way in shaping these encounters and drawing me towards and beyond words (Manning, 2016, p.2).

Author

• Nike Irene Romano, Cape Peninsula University of Technology