Cut as Catalyst: Collage-Making as Data Analysis and Representation of “SpiRitual Languaging”

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Saturday 11:45 am - Gold 4
  In Roundtable Session: Arts based educational research methods and methodologies

Abstract

Drawing from the presenter's ethnographic multiple case-study on the translingual practices of three women singer-songwriters based in Tio’tia:ke | Montreal, this paper explores collage-making as an alternative method of data analysis and representation—foregrounding the “cut” not as fragmentation but as a generative site for meaning-making. Guided by land-based literacies and conceptual translanguaging, the study theorizes “spiRitual languaging,” linking creative expression to deeply-rooted cultural knowledge, ecological consciousness, and resistance against colonial erasure. Findings reveal how artists engage the Land as collaborator, center spiritual ways of knowing, and engage with cultural production as archival resistance. Collage-making, cutting, arranging, and assembling parallels the women’s own practices of cultural production illuminating overlooked dimensions of minoritized language practices affirming literacy as ritualistic, layered, embodied, and emergent.

Author

• Bianca Gonzalez, McGill University