Learning with the Senses: Diffractive Arts-Based Research in Rural Kazakhstan

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Friday 9:45 am - Gold 4
  In Roundtable Session: Arts based educational research for unfolding provocation(s)

Abstract

This paper explores how children in rural Kazakhstan engage with more-than-human worlds through affective, sensory, and artistic encounters. Drawing on participatory, arts-based research, including collaborative photography, mental mapping, and walking interviews, I examine how touch, movement, and attention shape ecological learning and relational subjectivity. Through a diffractive methodology, I trace how images of apples, kittens, soil, and raspberries become sites of reciprocal exchange, care, and world-making. Rather than extracting meaning from children’s creations, the research attends to the ethical conditions of co-presence, embodied knowing, and multispecies reciprocity. This study contributes to arts-based educational research by offering a methodological framework that centers affect, relationality, and decolonial refusal: refusing mastery, objectivity, and the anthropocentric gaze.

Author

• Dilraba Anayatova, Arizona State University