Relational Invitations Through Play: Event Scores as Research Entry

• In Event: Trans(re)lating Diversity in Academic Terrains

Abstract

Objectives: Rodriguez (2014) points out the dangers of epistemological conquest when imposing one’s sense-making parameters on others, making others think like oneself. We stand beside scholars such as Tuhiwai Smith (2012), Nobe-Ghelani (2018) and Hsiung (2008) to question the formation of power relations embedded in research processes’ underlying assumptions, values, and motivations. Instead, we propose the conscious cultivation of interdependent, complementary orientations among researchers and with participants, beginning our intra-actions by leaning toward one another with a desire to take responsibility for one another. We draw from cultural (Chen & Starosta, 2003; Miike, 2012) and embodied experiential bases (Guttorm et al., 2016; Mark, 2021) as departures from which to design points of relational entries with one another.

Perspective: The rise of the “global university” as noted by Biesta (2011) refers to the fact that more universities around the world seem to be competing for (the same) prestige. This competition highlights a “particular modus operandi of universities” (p. 37) resulting in expectations for academics to produce research outputs at a pace that might resemble an “academicwritingmachine” (Henderson, Honan, & Loch, 2016). The dominance of English as the lingua franca in Academia, the “cybernetic capitalism” (Peters, 2015), and “network time” (Hassan, 2017) are particularly powerful “modus operandi of universities”, the taken-for-granted ways of working that easily disconnect academics (us) from ourselves, others, and the (natural) world in the expected mastery of research outputs (Manathunga, Black, & Davidow, 2020).
Mastery’s converse or undoing is not deconstruction but replacement (Singh, 2018). Mastery defines those beneath him, displacing them from a self or other informed determination (Vimalassery et al., 2016) into a position from which they can easily be ruled (Mamdani, 2012). The opposite of defining is to live with a continual mutual unfolding, involving questioning, play, and study (Silko, 1981; Zhang, 2016).

Modes of inquiry: We are curious to explore the kinds of co-creations we might generate together as two researchers from differentiating cultural backgrounds, mother tongues, and stages of our academic careers. We will start our explorations by creating an event score, whose structure, coined by the Fluxus collective, offers a “perceptual-performative, multi-directional structuration” (Lushetich, 2014, p. 46), potentially engaging multiple mediums and cognitive modalities. It embraces three processes: gameness, acting as an idea-forming, behavior-invoking device; creative-contemplative interpellation, calling participants to develop and engage in exercises that they devise; and pervasiveness, extending an unfolding experience over time (Lushetich, 2014). Event scores allow for sustained dialogue that enables further opportunities to experience the spaces between language (O’Connor, 2019).

Scholarly significance: Relationality is about sustained energy among parties, decentering the self and leaning into the other for mutual transformation (LeMaster, 2019). Research has the potential to be rejuvenating and productive if we intentionally endeavor to sustain one another, looking beyond individualized modes of production and mastery. To find connectedness through our own incompletion (San Pedro et al, 2020), we will make space for a diversity of worldviews whose interweaving contributes to an expanding lattice of inquiry.

Authors

• Lauren Mark, Arizona State University

• Teija Loytonen, Aalto University