Aesthetic Life-Art-Writing for the Pursuit of Truth in Academia

• In Event: Using Arts to Transform Spaces: Arts-Based Educational Research in Administration, Academia, and Classrooms

Abstract

In academic work, a productivity-driven narrative is unfruitful, lacking an ethic of relational em-bodied-ness. Conceptualising life-art-writing as embodied aesthetic-ethical care, we argue for its use in the pursuit of truth in academia and a collective reimagining of higher education. Undertaking assemblage work with written text – prose, poetic and visual art, we address how body-mind contradictions can be tangibly enfleshed as artful scholarship though life-art-writing. Life writing is reconceptualised as vital mattering that encompasses art making, memory work, and storying. We explore the ‘truths’ in our academic lives and what it means to reframe disembodying contradictions as enlivening mind-body shifts for a truthful, relational, co-creative, caring scholarship. Life-art-writing provides a space to question and critique hegemonies in the academy.

Authors

• Guruvsagie Pillay, University of KwaZulu - Natal
  Presenting Author

• Jennifer Charteris, University of New England - Australia
  Presenting Author

• Adele Nye, University of New England - Australia
  Presenting Author