Cut, Paste, Layer, Repeat: Thinking in and Through Collage as a Collective Medium of Possibility (Poster 8)

• In Event: Artful Inquiry in Qualitative Research: Philosophies and Enactments

Abstract

Objective:
Collaging is a process of cutting, layering, pasting, arranging, exploring, playing, and experimentation. In this paper, we think with the process of collage as a concept for examining what artful practices as a mode of inquiry provoke in how we orient, how we encounter, and how we move with/in our artful inquiry work.
Perspective(s):
In this paper, we think with collage as a conceptual model to layer and juxtapose our understandings, reflections, and provocations produced through engaging with artful inquiry. In qualitative inquiries, collage has been used to construct narratives and engage in reflective storytelling (Welkener & Baxter, 2014); metacognitive concept mapping (Butler-Kisber & Poldma, 2010); and an invitation to “safe space” for trauma-informed practices (Trip et al., 2019). Researchers use collage to think with theory and method in ways that are beyond prescription. This honors subjectivities as rich and expansive wells that prompt memory making, and unveil the beauty that exists between the craft and the crafter (Vaughn, 2005; Wilson, 2018) focusing more on the process rather than the product.
Modes of Inquiry
During the spring of 2022, students met weekly in a class titled Visual Inquiry to explore visual methods and methodologies and their use, tensions, constraints, and affordances across the landscape of qualitative inquiry. This paper, written with eight of the students from the class and their instructor reflects on this experience. We collage our layered, shifting, and multifaceted responses, reflections, and uses of visual methods to explore the awakenings, reflexivities, and resistances that engaging with artful methods produced.

The eight students from the class whose voices layer in this paper speak from a variety of disciplines (social work, education, and art) and work with/in a range of paradigms and theories (posthumanisms, Black feminisms and critical feminisms, queer theories). They came to the course with a range of experiences: teaching, clinical work, ministry, and community activism, and their identities differ across race, gender, class, sexuality, and citizenship. Across and through these differences, the course was a shared space with a commitment to exploring what an orientation to the visual made possible or provoked.

Scholarly Significance
We think with the practices of collaging: shifting and layering materials and ideas, playing and experimenting, composing and juxtaposing, as a way to explore our shared and distinct experiences of awakening, resistance, and reflexivity that engaging in artful inquiry provoked. As Freeman (2016) writes, modes of thinking “put into action particular ways of seeing and organizing the world, and, as such, alters what is taken to be the world itself” (p. 3). Thinking with collage as both an artful and conceptual practice, then, shapes how we think and conceive of artful inquiry as a mode of thinking, and opens the inquiry process to experimentation, play, and process.


[References omitted here due to word count (form lacks a separate field for references). See submission document.]

Authors

• Kiana Willis, University of Georgia

• Maureen Alice Flint, University of Georgia

• Venessa Silveira, University of Georgia

• Ashley Williams, University of Georgia

• Brandon Isome, University of Georgia

• Jennie Pless, University of Georgia

• Joy Green, University of Georgia