Envisioning Felt Senses of Writing (Poster 1)

• In Event: Nomadic Visual Inquiries: Explorations in Visual Methodologies Across Disciplines and Paradigms

Abstract

Purposes
Writing lies at the heart of how most inquiries are conducted and communicated. Therefore, it represents an essential skill for researchers and professionals across many fields to develop. This first-person visual inquiry explores felt senses experienced in the practice of academic and creative writing. Three main questions guide the inquiry: What felt senses do I experience in the act of writing? How can digital materials be used to explore and communicate felt senses of creative practice? What else is produced in sharing evocations of writing practice in a virtual social media space?
Theoretical Framework
The study is informed by Gendlin’s (2007) concept of felt sense, an embodied awareness of an entire situation that “doesn’t come to you in the form of thoughts or words or other separate units, but as a single (though often puzzling and very complex) bodily feeling” (p. 37). Guided by this concept and Heron’s (1992) whole person learning theory, which asserts that expressive arts facilitates the accessing of affective experiences, including felt sense, this inquiry takes an artful approach.
Methods
Starting with the raw, never fully capturable felt senses of embodied creative doing, I explore implicit aspects of writing practice through the creation of micropoetry, digital collage, sound, and found videos and photos.
Results
The often nebulous felt senses of connection, frustration and wonder which emerge through the ritual of academic and creative writing reveal how affects circulate in creative practices that unfold as entanglement across time and space and between the human and more-than-human (Barad, 2010; Braidotti, 2019). Using artistic methods elaborates the ability of felt senses to reveal aspects of writing processes that are connected to objects, memories, and events which are not always immediately accessible, visible, or understood in the writing moment. Evoking the disparate, multilayered nature of writing complexifies our understanding of how and why writing happens at the nexus of self, community, and society in present moments that encompass both past experience and future desires.
Scholarly Significance
In reading, especially reading “non-creative” writing, it’s easy to forget that a body enmeshed in a complex context created the work. This project seeks to make these often invisible connections come to life. Focusing on the existence and productive capacity of the felt sense challenges dominant constructivist notions of experiential learning as a primarily cognitive activity by dwelling on what emerges from affective, embodied encounters and the body’s non-cognitive relational capacity. It contributes to the field of adult learning and learning, more generally, by approaching experience in a more immediate way, through doing and participation in arts practices, than through the cogni-centric and removed position of reflection.

Author

• Shannon Perry, University of Georgia