Siting and Citing: Troubling Participatory Binaries in Research

• In Event: Between the How and the What: Negotiating the Messy Middle of Arts-Based Methodologies for Social Justice

Abstract

Objectives
This presentation draws on three storied moments from a multimodal collaborative study of teachers’ radical care work to consider issues of collaboration, power and benefit in arts-based research for social justice. The research grows from an Inquiry to Action Group (ItAG)--a democratic teacher study group–that the author co-facilitated with ten teacher participants. Over six months they worked together to make sense of and reimagine teacher evaluation policies and practices through visual analysis and art-making.

Across a ten-year non-linear span of planning, study, collecting, creating and analysis, the author collaborated with individuals and groups of people (including a co-facilitator, teacher participants, a dissertation advisor, and an interpretive community of artist-scholars) on what would become a solo-authored dissertation (2017) and book (2023). By exploring different forms of collaboration through the frameworks of participatory action research (Fine & Torre 2021), artist collectives (documenta 15 2022), academic publishing (Giles & Castleden 2008; Nagar 2013) and the praxis of Freirian learning spaces (Freire 1970; Darder 2017), the author aims to transparently catalog collective labor, trouble the binaries of social justice participatory research, and consider other collective outcomes of the work.

Framework
This research study is grounded in Cedric Robinson’s theory of racial capitalism (2020) and intersectional feminist critical care scholarship (Valenzuela 1999; Beauboef-Lafontant 2002; Rolon Dow 2005; Lynch 2021; Rivera-McCutchen 2021). The frameworks for collaborative authorship, art-making, research and learning cited above also inform the paper.

Methods
This study takes up a range of qualitative and arts-based methodologies including image elicitation interviews, intertextual analysis (Rose 2023), tracing (author 2023), and collaborative seeing (Fontaine & Luttrell 2015).

Data
Data for the presentation includes fieldnotes, transcripts and interviews collected with the study’s ten teacher participants. The author also discusses data from the participatory art-activist project that she created in collaboration with the participating teachers including drawings, texts, and short video commentaries. Finally she presents a series of video works that she made from and with teacher videos.

Results
The results of this study point both to the critical role of teachers’ radical care work in social justice education and to the possibilities for arts-based methods to enact a research praxis of radical care.

Significance
In her 2023 book on this research, the author argues that it is not enough to take up a study of radical care, but that we must engage the research process with radical care as well. This paper attunes to the “how” of relational processes within an arts-based research study that complicates the either/or binaries of participatory or individualistic methodologies. Drawing on collaborative and co-authorship models within and outside of academic publishing, the author calls for new modes of siting and citing collective research.

Author

• Victoria G. Restler, Rhode Island College