Artmaking as Relational, Wonder-Full, Resonant (Thematic) Analysis (Poster 10)

• In Event: Themes Without Coding: Expanding Approaches to Thematic Analysis

Abstract

This poster illustrates a dialogue between the co-authors around how making in various arts modes expands how we orient to and think about themes. In conversation, we asked: What is a theme? What can a theme do? How do themes function? How do themes differ from other forms of knowledge? As we met each week, dialoguing and reflecting on themes and themeing and our artmaking and analytic practices, our conversation returned to the central question: How does artmaking produce themes differently?

We considered Braun and Clark’s (2012) envisioning of thematic analysis as a brick house and a solar system (Braun et al., 2022) and question the word-centric and hierarchical framing of these metaphors. We also found inspiration in other orientations to theme, for example in the NPR-produced This American Life podcast (Glass, 1995), that pursue more open-ended understandings of theme and theming otherwise.
Ultimately, exploring these questions together, we examine how artmaking helped us engage themes more expansively by:

-revealing more affective, embodied, and material aspects of experiencing;
-making the construction of themes or knowledge more visible;
-expanding representational possibilities of themes and theming, and;
-opening up possibilities for collaborative and participatory knowing.

To further illuminate these four main strands, we include specific examples of how and why we turned to artmaking as analysis in some of our own research projects. Author 1 offers the example of how creating a sound collage enabled them to bring disparate pieces of sound, visual, and text data together in ways that amplified resonances across diverse forms of data and honored the embodied affective knowing at the heart of a particular inquiry. Author 2 provides multiple examples of how using visual and sonic collages and multimodal art installations enabled a layering of thematic finding and representing that sought to engage audiences and make theme-construction more visible, participatory, and open-ended.

Authors

• Shannon Perry, Valdosta State University

• Maureen Alice Flint, University of Georgia