Rolling in the Deep: Seeing Differently

• In Event: 41.082 - Meanings, Flows, and Relational Spaces: A Symposium in Honor of Steve Witte

Abstract

Objective: In this paper I feature a six-week research study with adults who have mental health and addiction issues and who lead displaced, itinerate lives. The original objective of the research was to examine how individuals move across different modes of expression and representation from photography to movement to dramatic work to writing, but the more powerful and dominant theme and objective became seeing differently. Seeing their communities in a different light; seeing objects in varied ways; and seeing spaces as filled with promise and creativity.

Perspectives and theoretical framework: A central argument and theory to this paper is that the arts and humanities provide a lens from which to understand the mechanisms by which people come to know and understand the world (Hall, 1997). This approach requires the use of the method of collaborative ethnography, which is being shown to have great potential as a method of participatory research with young people (Pahl, 2014), especially those whose voices tend to be marginalized in projects using more conventional research methods.

Methods and data sources: To conduct the research, the team worked closely with adults to complete the arts-based activities. Taking a participatory approach, every participant analyzed their own learning and how they reacted and engaged with modes. There was significant journaling and visualizing of literacy and multimodal practices. In terms of the corpus of data sources, we interviewed some of the participants about their experiences and reflections on the research; we collected visual artifacts; and, we took extensive ethnographic fieldnotes.

Results: At different points in the research, each participant talked about the openness and freedom of the space that the research team had created. As well, all of them saw things – objects, spaces, people, learning – differently. As a research team, we believe that the different modally complex tasks pushed participants to think and be in different ways and they did not feel marginalized or unheard.

Scholarly significance of study: The research helps to identify ways of encouraging and developing new frameworks for practice, particularly in relation to representation and encouraging and developing more people to become active in communities and to recognize the diverse nature of these engagements and to seeing worlds in a different (less deficit) light.

Author

• Jennifer Rowsell, Brock University