Arts-Based Methods as a Means to Disrupt White Supremacy Cultural Values in Research

• In Event: Disruption, Collaboration, and Healing: The Roles of Arts-Based Research in Doctoral Education

Abstract

Purpose
The purpose of this particular paper is to a) briefly reflect on the role that white supremacy cultural values have played in my own educational life as a teacher and student; and b) analyze how my use of arts-based educational research became a tool to disrupt them.

Theory
Theoretically, I layer two frames to make sense of the impact arts-based research had upon me as an educational researcher. First, I draw upon critical whiteness studies, which works towards dismantling racism by surfacing and disrupting white dominance. More specifically, I utilize Okun’s work with white supremacy culture (2022), which helps me analyze the overwhelming presence of white cultural values in most U.S.-based educational contexts. The second theoretical frame I use is Rose’s (2016) work on visual materials in three sites: the sites of production, the image itself, and audiencing. Weaving these frameworks together, I am able to analyze my use of arts-based methods at multiple sites and how it helped me unravel some of the white supremacy cultural values I internalized across my thirty-plus years in educational spaces as a student and teacher.

Methods & Data
This paper draws upon my qualitative dissertation study exploring antiracist professional learning in New York City. The specific data sources I rely upon here are the 30 visual artworks created during that dissertation, my 60-page researcher journal detailing my research and making processes, and photographs from an art exhibition that shared my dissertation findings with educators interested in racial justice in schools. I analyzed these data sources using Okun’s (2022) work on white supremacy culture first, I then intersected those initial patterns and their relationship to my visual materials with Rose’s sites for further analysis.

Initial Findings
While word count limits me from elaborating upon my findings with much depth, my analysis revealed that the white supremacy values of perfectionism, right to comfort, and individualism were closely linked in my educational experiences, but by centering art-making in my dissertation work, I made space for discomfort in generative ways. From my journal, I wrote, “I don’t have to have this big justification and explanation of it all. I can just let it… be… but that actually feels really quite scary to me.” I grappled with letting go of my rigid and controlled ways of doing research at the site of production, letting go of the perfectionist notion that there is one right way to inquire. I also resisted individualism at the site of audiencing. Uneasy with a lengthy manuscript siloed away in academia, I worked to resist my internalized right to comfort by presenting my findings as an accessible art exhibit, a mode of communication I had little experience working in (Figure 1).

Significance
As doctoral students seek out multimodal means of representing their data, critical reflections upon arts-based methods offer important considerations for future work - both mine and my peers.

Author

• Abby C. Emerson, Touro University