Walking Propositions: Coming to Know A/r/tographically

• In Event: 63.054 - Mapping A/r/tography: Walking for Place-Conscious Pedagogies of Practice

Abstract

Objectives or purposes:
This paper presentation shares ongoing a/r/tographic research from a study group at a Canadian higher education institution, where graduate students and postdoctoral fellows engage in a series of walks as fieldwork. Through powerful, empirically-driven, and multimodal narratives, presenters assert the value and importance of inquiring through arts-based educational research methodologies; generating bodily, experiential, affective, and place-based ways of knowing; and finding personal, reality-based meanings of being with/in the world.

Perspective(s) or theoretical framework:
A/r/tography is the primary theoretical and methodological framework used in this research. As an art and education practice-based research methodology, a/r/tography is dedicated to acts of inquiry through text, visual, and/or artistic forms (Irwin et. al 2008). As living practice and inquiry, a/r/tography focuses on the importance of “embodiment, of continuous engagement with the world: one that interrogates yet celebrates meaning” (Irwin and Springgay, 2008, p. xxix). Our engagement in a/r/tographic fieldwork enables the pursuit of knowing and emergence of concepts through walking practices (Rousell et. al. 2018).

Methods, techniques, or modes of inquiry:
Walking practices serve as generative modes of inquiry for artists, researchers, and teachers. Movement, as a choreographic architecting of experience (Rousell et. al. 2018), allows one to think through embodied ways of being with/in the world and engage in the sensuousness of living inquiry. Walking as inquiry on the Trans Canada Trail opens a range of possibilities for embracing sound, smell, emotion, movement, history and memory into our accounts, illustrating the sensuousness and the capacity of walking as artistic, research, and teaching practices.

Data sources, evidence, objects, or materials:
Data, evidence, objects, and materials come from a monthly study group and graduate course. The transcurricular, transcultural, and transnational stories are multimodally represented, including text, speech, images, and audio/video. They are products of image-based research techniques, such as image theatre (Boal, 1985), photovoice (Wang, 1999), photo elicitation (Harper, 2002), visual journaling (Sinner, 2011), and video case study (Haw & Hadfield, 2011). Archival research methods (Lerner, 2010) (e.g., digital mapping and visualization, geographical coding, and systematic analysis) are also employed to document the fieldwork.

Results and/or substantiated conclusions or warrants for arguments/point of view:
Walking/movement as a mode of inquiry in a/r/tography offers opportunities for new, contemporary understandings of the encultured self and nation(alism) as well as self and other, while allowing for an embracing of historical significance of place-based engagements of practice.

Scientific or scholarly significance of the study or work:
Scholars working in the arts (Triggs et. al., 2014) have been vigilant and rigorous in defending the value and importance of developing personal understandings and subjective truth (Barone & Eisner, 2012; Leavy, 2018). Engaging in a/r/tography as a research methodology, walking as a mode of inquiry, and place-consciousness as a critical pedagogy, inspires simultaneously personal, reality-based, empirically-driven, multimodal understandings of human-land relations, collective and personal interiorities, and global-local implications of movement with/in socio-cultural contexts.

Authors

• Nicole Lee, The University of British Columbia

• Rita L. Irwin, The University of British Columbia

• Ken Morimoto, University of British Columbia

• Marzieh Mosavarzadeh, University of British Columbia