Collage as Visual Narrative Method: On Shame and Peer Reviews

• In Event: 66.076 - (Re)Imagining Narrative Inquiry: Dis(s)/Trust in the Peer-Review Process

Abstract

Objectives
In this paper, we introduce and highlight the affordances of arts-based research practice in delving into faculty experiences with peer review. Blind peer review, often positioned as a rational, impersonal step in the process of producing knowledge within a scientific community, can be experienced quite differently--with the emotional and embodied coming to define the experience just as centrally as cognitive dimensions. Leavy (2009) and others argue arts-based research is particularly useful for research goals aiming to describe, explore, or discover emotional experiences (Leavy, 2015; McNiff, 1998; G. Sullivan, 2010).

Perspectives
Arts-based research adapts the tenets of creative arts (literary, performance, and visual art genres) in social science research projects (Barone & Eisner, 1997; Chilton & Leavy, 2014; Cole & Knowles, 2008; Leavy, 2015), inviting new ways of understanding within the inquiry process (Eisner, 1991). Visual art genres depart from linear trappings of written or spoken thoughts by working first from a feeling rather than an idea.

Methods
In this paper, we leverage the visual arts genre of collage, the process of cutting and gluing materials onto a flat surface, to explore its potential for multimodal (re)storying of the peer review process. Collage was selected due to its accessibility to all ages and levels of artistic identity and its potential for collectively conceptualizing a phenomenon of interest rooted in direct experience (Butler-Kisber, 2008).

Data sources
We worked separately to create collages based on one ‘shared’ visceral/memorable peer review experience: receiving peer comments on a collaborative AERA 2018 proposal. A particularly affect-inducing excerpt from those reviews included the following line: “feels like we have seen this sort of thing before -- it feels intellectually generic -- in other words draws on deep thinking in surface level ways, for my taste.” In the result section below, we (de)construct the use of collage as an inquiry tool for making sense of emotion-filled, felt experiences of engaging with peer review.

Results
In Figure 1, the researcher-artist took a more spatio-temporal approach to the experience, explicating initial emotions produced when encountering peer review while eating breakfast, riffing on “intellectually generic” by juxtaposing the review with a generic brand of cereal. In Figure 2, the researcher-artist took a comparative approach (left to right), considering the emotional weight and work of receiving this peer feedback on a co-authored piece (“we”) versus a single authored piece (“one person”). Stark differences in artistic approach, focus, and affective tenor highlight the potentialities of collage as an arts-based inquiry tool for better understanding deeply personal experience(s) of participating in peer review.

Scholarly Significance
We argue for some scholars, the experience of peer review involves a form of secret-keeping that carries emotions like shame, anxiety, jealousy, and loneliness alongside joy, relief, skepticism, and pride. Collage offers a unique way into knowledge production around these vulnerable experiences, enabling us to “[arrive] at meaning in a very different way--accidentally, capriciously, provocatively, tangentially” (Davis, 2008, p. 250).

Authors

• Beth A. Buchholz, Appalachian State University

• Julie Rust, Millsaps College