This book is—I think—also required reading for the course I’m taking that begins tomorrow. I’ve had a copy for a while now—I got it as part of research for a paper on social aesthetics I had to write in another course a few years back—but I haven’t read it yet. Sometimes when you’re writing a paper you just run out of time and don’t get a chance to read all of the relevant material. Well, now I’m reading it. Today. And if it isn’t required reading for the course, well, it still might be relevant to my research anyway.
In the foreword, Rita L. Irwin obliquely suggests that the book came out of a workshop on collaborative arts practices (viii). “The chapters contained in this volume represent a stunning array of transdisciplinary perspectives that benefited from a unique after-submission event that called the authors together, to perform, to engage, to think, and to question their own and each other’s work in an effort to strengthen, extend, and enrich, not only the published document but the projects themselves,” she writes (vii-viii). She cites Claire Bishop’s suggestion that collaborative art focuses on three concerns: “activation, authorship, and community” (viii). Activation refers to “the ‘desire to create an active subject, one who will be empowered by the experience of physical or symbolic participation,’” Bishop states (qtd. viii). Authorship means “egalitarian or democratic authorial engagement that emerges from or creates a non-hierarchical model of socialization” (viii). In other words, the authorship of the work—if a tangible work is produced by the activity—is collective or collaborative. Finally, community is about “a human need for collective responsibility” and a collaborative production of meaning (viii).
Bishop draws on the work of Guy Debord (I’ve read the text under discussion but don’t remember a reference to Debord, but my memory is fallible) and Nicolas Bourriaud (a touchstone for anyone writing about this topic) to suggest that contemporary artists set out to create new social relationships and therefore new social realities (viii). Yes, that’s true, some do, although it’s not universal. “In this sense artists are creating events as constructed situations and those involved become the medium of their socially engaged practices,” Irwin writes. “Artists are intervening in their constituencies creating situations that interrupt that which is taken for granted. Participants, audiences, viewers, and readers are not simply involved as a way of raising one’s consciousness” (viii). Whose consciousness? Instead, they are “physically involved as ‘an essential precursor to social change’” (Bishop, qtd. viii). Socially engaged artists—and that’s not quite the right term, because many forms of nonparticipatory art are socially engaged in other ways—“are less concerned with observing art as an object or performance and oftentimes perceive time and experience as their medium of choice” (viii). The use of Bishop here is interesting, because she’s notoriously skeptical about social or relational aesthetics, but she did write the text under discussion here, the introduction to a book about participation in contemporary art.
Irwin believes that Conrad and Sinner are interested in activation, authorship, and community, and the workshop from which this book emerged “set up a constructed situation offering opportunities for new social relationships to emerge” and that “physically and affectively offered participants opportunities to renew their commitment to being active subjects, to rethinking authorship in participatory practices, and to reimagine what it means to be committed to an elaboration of meaning within arts communities” (viii-ix). So the process through which the book was produced echoes the kind of art making the papers it includes discuss.
In the introduction, Conrad and Sinner discuss art as a form of research—not surprising, since they are both professors of art education and thus social scientists as well as art practitioners. They suggest that arts research “is often framed as partnerships, set within community contexts, and involves deeply collaborative work, frequently residing on the academic margins as fertile yet sometimes suspect sites of inquiry” (xiii). That positioning generates several questions:
How might we begin to understand what we sense to be different in the fluid, sometimes contradictory, even provocative demonstrations of intimate, embodied, and often messy expressions of scholarship? In what ways to the arts as research support new forms of creating collaborative understandings? Why does arts research matter across disciplines and within diverse communities of practice? What is our responsibility as arts researchers to create those very spaces that we know are needed to foster the scope, depth, and breadth of scholarship, which Rita Irwin so aptly describes as the arts with, in, and through our research? (xiii-xiv)
I don’t really consider my work to be a form of research—not literally, in the sense that Conrad and Sinner consider their work to be research—and in my experience, art that is considered as research is often more research than art. Maybe I’m reacting to the bad writing I’ve seen in autoethnographic texts that claim to be both art and research. It’s hard enough to learn an art practice; demanding that practice function as research makes it even more difficult. But that’s just my take on this, and I could easily be wrong. I’m sure that Conrad and Sinner would say that I am.
This book, Conrad and Sinner continue, is about “multidisciplinary arts research practices as sites for critical conversations central to defining, exploring, and investigating current practices,” and it takes on issues related to the arts that include “what constitutes expression and how to define the merits of creative scholarship to advance conceptual development and facilitate the maturation of creative research design,” issues that emphasize “theoretical, methodological, and practical considerations in ways that help highlight the conditions, as well as the emotional and embodied qualities of creating knowledge through the arts” (xiv). Whether the arts are intended to create knowledge is another question, one that’s not asked.
The collection includes “paradigms of thought about arts research that are defining this time and place in Canadian academic scholarship,” and that’s why the editors have put together chapters about “participatory, community-based, and collaborative arts practices as ‘through-lines’ for the anthology” (xiv). They note that the contributors come from many different fields outside the fine arts (xiv). The kinds of art discussed include “applied theatre, digital storytelling, photography, mural painting, performance art, and poetry” (xiv).
Next, Conrad and Skinner trace “the genealogy of our ideas, concepts, and orientations to earlier work of Canadian artists and scholars interested in creativity, from which the uptake of arts research across disciplines in Canada has, arguably, been profound” in order to offer “tentative answers to the question of why this work, still in the process of emerging, is particularly vibrant within the current Canadian scholarly context” (xv). They note the ways that “generations of curriculum scholars” have reshaped “perceptions of learning and teaching through creative forms of expression,” including life writing, fiction, a/r/tography, and narrative inquiry (xv). (I Googled “a/r/tography” and couldn’t find a concise, coherent, concrete definition.) They suggest that Canadian funding agencies are particularly open to supporting various forms of research-creation work (xv). They also suggest that arts research is both a way to translate knowledge (from experts of specialists to the general public, I think) as well as “a way to produce knowledge, to contribute to human understanding, and to represent the complexities of human experience” (xvi). It is also a space where interdisciplinary research can take place (xvi).
Next, they discuss the papers included in this anthology. Those papers focus on themes that include process, place, story, embodiment, health and well-being, witnessing and relationship (xvii). Most of those themes are self-explanatory, but it’s worth mentioning their notion of witnessing as “listening, seeing, attunement, and attentiveness, mindful attendance, or ‘with-ness’” (xvii). That kind of participatory practice “is rooted in humility, conviction, trust, and vulnerability on the part of the artist-collaborators and researchers” (xvii-xviii). Relationship, on the other hand, is about “honouring relations with others, with the land, with stories, and with the past” (xviii). The volume’s overarching themes, however, are community, particularly diverse and underrepresented communities; empowerment, “positioning community members as active agents for change”; and collaboration (xviii). The book is organized in three parts. The first looks at participatory arts practices; the second examines community-based arts scholarship; and the third thinks about collaborative arts approaches (xviii). I find myself wondering what the differences between practices, scholarship, and approaches might be. After a summary of the various papers included in the book, Conrad and Sinner conclude that the anthology is “a gathering, a project that has mobilized working definitions of participatory, community-based, and collaborative arts research practices as a conversation offered from many perspectives and places, across a series of openings that are the ideas, places, and peoples that we are collectively” (xxiii). They hope that the book “resonates as spaces of possibilities in which we may find the how and why of sustaining the inquiry that is indeed at the centre of our arts research practices” (xxiii).
The book begins with a section on participatory arts research. The first chapter is “Sharing the Talking Stones: Theatre of the Oppressed Workshops as Collaborative Arts-based Health Research with Indigenous Youth,” by Warren Linds, Linda Goulet, the late Jo-Ann Episkenew, Karen Schmidt, Heather Ritenburg, and Allison Whiteman. The authors begin by noting their personal connections to southern Saskatchewan and to the First Nations that are part of the File Hills Qu’Appelle Tribal Council (3). Their project adapts something called “Forum Theatre” workshops, using theatre games and similar activities, “to create a space for Indigenous youth to critically examine the choices they make that affect their health” (3). These workshops “provide a performance-based, theatrical structure for dialogue on significant social, cultural, and health issues” and “creative imaginative ‘blueprints’ for possible future choices” (3-4). They suggest that these workshops are holistic, “combining arts-based research with education and health,” and that they avoid the notion that the process and product of art-making are separated from each other and that meanings can be hidden from audiences (4). “Based on Indigenous view of holistic health, we use the arts to develop people’s relationships in physical, intellectual, social/emotional, and spiritual domains,” informed by theories of decolonization, Indigenous research, and embodied knowing (4).
The project’s participants included youth between the ages of 12 and 18 from different First Nations, and First Nations and non-Indigenous professionals (4). Theatre games helped build trust in the group. The adult professionals involved are part of the group, not outside it. “We strive to address issues of power through more equitable interaction structures, such as talking circles,” the co-authors write (4). A community Elder “who speaks to and models First Nations values” was included in the workshops (5).
The co-authors note that the work takes place in the context of colonization and decolonization. Colonization is violent, physical, embodied, but also about beliefs as well (5). Decolonization “is about self-determined action; agency is dependent on having a well-developed imagination” which allows people to envision what needs to change and the steps involved in making that change (5). “More important, one needs to have the volition and agency to enact the imagined changes,” they state (5). Decolonization “involves resistance to colonization and generating new ways of being that involve youth co-creating new possibilities for relating to each other and to use as facilitators,” and in the workshops this resistance happens through “an embodied process of interaction, overcoming the imaginary separation of body and mind, where the future is modelled and transformed through an aesthetic and playful process” (6).
However, “the delivery of theatre workshops can also become a colonizing process” if adult “experts” focus on instructing and correcting the youth who are participating “without questioning what contributed to their challenges of situations” or if organizers go into communities and disregard “the theatrical traditions already in place there—in other words, repeating the colonizer-colonized relationship that is present when working with Indigenous communities” (6). The co-authors tell us that they are mindful of those aspects of their work, “questioning when we might be perpetuating oppressive ideologies and behaviours as opposed to being engaged in a collaborative process with both the community partners and the youth participants” (6).
The co-authors cite Cree scholar Walter Lightning’s discussion “of the relational and embodied nature of coming to know,” because learning is not a transmission of knowledge but “a process of creating and re-creating knowledge in a mutual relationship of personal interactions” that is cognitive, emotional, and physical (6). It also involves observation and sensory experience (6). All of these qualities are engaged in the workshops (7). Those workshops apply “concepts of co-determination and shared authority to describe adult-youth relationships” (7). “We set the direction for the general activity, then use situational leadership, where authority is retained, shared, or relinquished for a time depending on the learning needs of the group,” the co-authors state (7). The creative work “is co-determined and built upon the four Rs of research with Indigenous people”: respect, relevance, reciprocity, and responsibility (7). The relationship between the adults and the youth participants is dialogical, and leads to an emergence of knowledge through the artistic process (7).
The workshops involve talking circles (8). They begin with a prayer, led by the Elder, which “acknowledges and values the cultural protocols of Indigenous communities; links the youth to their heritage, spirituality, and language; and brings those links into the workshop space” (8-9). Then the sharing circle begins. Theatre games draw the youth into the workshop activities through playfulness: “In the dramatic space created by the games, they lose themselves in the fun, as their bodies are able to let go and move beyond the tightness of oppressive relationships where they have set roles or relationships to power” (9). The games also “open a space for decolonization and self-determined learning” (9). Playfulness creates a feeling of freedom (9). The “kinaesthetic approaches” of the workshops “are part of the knowing that emerges in our work and informs every level of the creative process rather than just remaining at the level of simple ‘warm-up’ games or energizers” (10).
One challenge is that few of the youth have been exposed to drama; they find it difficult “to bring the rough work to the clarity of expression needed to communicate with an audience” (10). Multiple facilitators help keep the young people, working in small groups, focused on refining their performances (10). “We have found that because our creations are often group creations, the youth who find the art form engaging will encourage others’ participation, either directly or indirectly,” the co-authors note (10). The workshops challenge the youth participants, “enabling them to extend themselves and explore new aspects of themselves” (10). They develop “social, intellectual, creative, emotional, and physical skills” (10). The games enable the group to “find the balance between freedom and control, which is necessary to help people discover and explore the different facets of their personalities,” but those games are also “sufficiently structured to be ‘safe enough’ to build up a pattern of relationships within a group,” which generates “the security to take risks” (10).
Most of this discussion is focused on the games rather than the production of work for an audience, and I find myself wondering if the games aren’t perhaps more important than that goal. “Games become a process of re-engaging the body’s senses with the world,” the co-authors tell us, and the “chaos of play situates the body in dynamic relationship with the environment and transforms the relationships between the youth and their peers and their world, especially when the activity creates a physical connection among youth” (11). The games develop collaborative leadership (12-13).
The next step in the workshops is “Image theatre, where bodies in relationship are a language, enabling participants to create static, and silent, at least at the first stage, group images to represent their stories” (13). Through this interactive process, they discuss “alternative ways to change power relationships,” which “leads to reflection, as well as possible solutions tested in new images, leading to a new round of possible actions” (13). The youth participants are guided “in constructing images of health concerns, as well as images that depict community power dynamics and perceptions of risk” (13). Those images “are used as a platform for animated and embodied short stories about a particular situation” (13). Workshops address topics like bullying and lateral violence (both physical and emotional) (13-14).
The workshop organizers have been experimenting with “different debriefing techniques to encourage responses from youth because of experiences [they] have had asking questions that might not have been culturally appropriate”—or perhaps questions from non-Indigenous facilitators that repeat colonial histories without meaning to (15). Trust needs to be created before those debriefings can work (15). But the workshops cannot be “disconnected from the realities of the youths’ lives (and the colonized history of those realities) outside the workshop room” (15).
A power dynamic emerges during the workshops: “This power shift can be among the participants, between participants and the facilitators, and among facilitators. If this complex, evolving process is not managed, either implicitly or explicitly, the collaborative process can collapse” (15). Shared authorship means that the facilitators “do not always know the specific direction of the learning that is happening, so uncertainty is at the core of collaboration” (15). Situational leadership and shared authority create spaces where the youth “can be self-determining, making decisions about the process to reflect their lived experiences” and where the facilitators provide guidance and set parameters “within the boundaries of the acitivity and the workshop norm of keeping self and others safe while taking risks” (16). The facilitators “are thus always in the ethical space between freedom and control” (16). The facilitators also try to collaborate across their diverse backgrounds:
we learn collaboration as a team through collaboration with youth, who are also learning through collaboration with us and with each other. The workshops become a space where we can explore how we might interact with each other differently, and at least momentarily experience and work together outside the box of colonization, pointing the way to what decolonized relationships might look and feel like. (16)
The project, the co-authors conclude, “is constantly being redefined and new challenges or realizations emerge” (16). I find myself wondering when the project ended, or if it is still going on; I know that some of the facilitators are now doing other things, but others might have stepped in to carry on the work.
The next chapter, “Uncensored: Participatory Arts-based Research with Youth,” by Diane Conrad, Peter Smyth, and Wallis Kendal,” discusses High Risk Youth Uncensored: An Educational Exchange, a participatory research project using arts-based methods that was a partnership between iHuman Youth Society, Edmonton and Area Child and Family Services High Risk Youth Unit, and the University of Alberta (21). The term “high-risk youth,” as defined by the Alberta provincial government as young people between the ages of 14 and 22 whose drug or alcohol use interferes with their daily lives, “whose decisions may jeopardize their safety,” who lack healthy connections with adults, and who “have experienced multiple residential placements and multi-generational child protection involvement” (21). To that definition, the co-authors add mental health struggles, involvement with the criminal-justice system, experiences of racism, and “negative experiences at school leading to being pushed out or dropping out,” all of which makes their survival “precarious” (21). These characteristics were common among the youth engaged in the project, although they told the organizers that they don’t like that label (21).
Research that “works towards concrete improvements” in the lives of these youth is necessary (21). Participatory research, like the Uncensored project, “is a potential vehicle for such engagement” (22). The co-authors also describe the project as “an example of social innovation” and as “vernacular culture” that is “context-dependent, local, flexible, and diverse” and “in which all are encouraged to participate, focusing on community and relationships” (22). They cite the work of Gaztambide-Fernandez, who “re-envisions the arts as cultural production involving ‘practices and processes of symbolic creativity’” in which people “remake the world around their concerns and issues as part of our common culture” (qtd. 22-23). (Shouldn’t artists be re-envisioning the arts, rather than education professors?) Another term can be used to describe the Uncensored project: cultural democracy, which provides access “to the means for cultural production and decision-making” to communities and facilitates their engagement (23). “Cultural democracy is a powerful basis for driving participatory arts practices and scholarship,” the co-authors state. “The arts conceived in this way are integral to social justice initiatives through which academic scholarship that uses participatory arts-based approaches is making a contribution to social innovation” (23).
Uncensored began in 2009. The chapter’s authors “were the project’s primary facilitators” (23-24). After much discussion, exploratory sessions with youth began at the University of Alberta (24). (Why not somewhere in the community?) “Work began with discussions around a big table about what youth felt service providers needed to know about their lives,” the co-authors recall. “The youth immediately bought into the process, seeing it as an opportunity to tell their stories, to get their messages to service providers, and to help other youth experiencing similar challenges” (24). Seven themes emerged: “relations with law enforcement, educational issues, access to health care, the social services system, worker-client relations, family dynamics, and other youth experiences” (24). They surveyed service providers to gauge their interest in participating in workshops; the results helped them refine the project (24).
The project’s research questions were “How can we educate service providers to better prepare them for working with high-risk youth? What are effective methods for doing so? What is the role of youth in this process? What is the role of the arts in this process? To what extent are service providers receptive to such an educational undertaking?” (25). The project was intended “to develop curriculum and facilitate workshops for service providers and evaluate the outcomes from service-provider representatives” (25). The youth were to be co-researchers, rather than research participants, according to the participatory research design (25). The youth were paid for their time (26).
The methodology for the project drew on participatory research (PR) and arts-based research (ABR), with the former functioning as “an overarching philosophy” (26). “Rather than generating knowledge for knowledge’s sake, PR is interested in finding practical solutions to pressing community issues,” the co-authors write. “It produces reflective, embodied, practical knowledge that helps people to name, and consequently, to change their world” (26). Community partners were involved at all stages of the project (26). Uncensored used a number of art practices, “including applied theatre, storytelling, creative writing, poetry, rap, visual and digital arts, as well as drawing on content from youths’ experiences, as ways of engaging them to express and analyze issues that they identified as relevant” (27). The artworks created by the youth “were presented as starting points for the discussion and the interactive search for solutions or alternative responses” at workshops for service providers (27).
For the first two years, the project held weekly sessions (27). Some 100 youth participated (27). Most were young women (27). The majority were Indigenous (27). “Ideally, in a participatory project, the participants should take a major role in contributing to all stages of the research process,” the co-authors note. “For our project, although the youth did determine the substantive content of our work, it was the adult facilitators who initially identified the need for the project and shaped its direction” (27-28). The adult facilitators also did all the organizational and administrative work, because “assigning the burden of responsibility for societal change to youth is problematic” (28). At most of the sessions, the youth worked on their art projects; frequently they shared their stories (28). At the workshops for service providers, the project was introduced and the youth performed short scenarios; they ended “with an open talkback between the youth presenters and the audience” (28). The scenarios adapted Augusto Boal’s forum theatre style, in which scenes are presented without solutions, and audiences are asked to intervene in the action and to develop, collectively, “strategies for dealing with the personal and social issues raised” (28). The co-authors suggest that “the philosophy underlying our adaptations of forum theatre remained liberatory, with the aim of helping individuals and communities, through the theatrical process, to identify issues of concern, to analyze situations, and to look for solutions” (28).
The project’s theoretical perspectives were interdisciplinary and included harm reduction, alternative conceptions of justice (including restorative justice and therapeutic jurisprudence), psycho-social theories, rethinking the term “at risk,” and arts interventions (29-30).
Some 25 workshops were held over two years (30). Workshop participants were surveyed (31). The facilitators “sensed great benefits for the youth involved beyond just the material benefits of payment for participation,” and so further research was conducted that asked some of the youth who had been involved about their experiences (32). That research found that the project allowed the youth to have fun and enriched their lives; that they felt accepted and that the weekly sessions were safe spaces for them; that they developed interpersonally by building relationships with others; that the project encouraged personal development and helped the youth build positive self-images; that the experience was empowering; that the youth gained practical benefits, including money and structure; and that the project enabled the youth to give back to their community by helping others (32-33).
Feedback from the service providers suggested that the youth were appreciated, “admired for their courage, and accepted as teachers” (35). In the project, “the arts offered a way to engage youth in exploring their experiences and for communicating youths’ issues to service providers,” and the participatory arts-based methods “have a role to play for innovation in all areas of social life,” the co-authors conclude (35).
The next chapter, “The Co-Creation of a Mural Depicting Experiences of Psychosis,” by Katherine M. Boydell, Brenda M. Gladstone, Elaine Stasiulis, Tiziana Volpe, Bramilee Dhayanandhan, and Ardra L. Cole, documents their use of “arts-informed inquiry as an alternative form of data collection and representation to further illustrate the pathway to mental health care for youth experiencing psychosis” (39). The youth involved in the project worked with an artist to create a mural that was installed in a high school (39). “The overall goal of the project was to explore the impact of a form of research representation as a research methodology,” the co-authors write, and so the production of the mural was documented, the pathway to mental health care for young people was represented, and awareness and understanding of first-episode psychosis was promoted (39). This chapter focuses on the documentation of the mural creation process (39).
The projects methodology, qualitative arts-informed health research, “combines traditional qualitative strategies such as participant observation, informal interviewing, and structured group discussions with methods informed by the arts” (41). “The use of the arts i knowledge creation allows for an appreciation of the intricacies and multi-dimensionality of creating new knowledge,” the co-authors state (41). Such forms of knowledge can be disseminated easily (41).
Eight youth between the ages of 16 and 24 were recruited “through first-episode clinics in a large Canadian city” (41). Studio space and art supplies were provided (41). The work was drawn and painted on a 5 by 12 foot canvas, so that the mural would be able to travel between schools (42). The creation process was documented by participant observation by members of the research team (42).
During the production of the mural, dialogue about the participants’ experiences of illness was facilitated, and they were led through drawing and painting exercises “designed to help them see in new ways, to challenge preconceived ideas about what ‘art’ is, and to discuss what it means to learn to use non-representational visual language to express emotion” (42). Participants drew portraits of each other and mixed colours (42). They heard excerpts from a qualitative study on psychosis “to inspire them to think about themes for their own drawings” (42). Some tried painting blindfolded (42-43).
After those workshop sessions, participants were led through “a collaborative ‘thought exercise’” in which they developed themes for the mural by brainstorming “different concepts to represent their experiences” (43). In this way, the participants developed a visual narrative (43). This process is not easy: “Learning to use a visual language and think abstractly is often a difficult task if one is not familiar with this approach. The group attempted to unearth layers of their experiences, moving away from more literal representations and explicit symbols, searching for deeper connotations and more abstract representations” (43). The facilitator assisted with this process (43). “Tension between aesthetics and the representations of collaborators emerged, and we began to consider how these tensions were playing out in the mural creation process,” the co-authors recall (43). The facilitator steered the youth away from the use of clichés, which would support obvious assumptions about the mural’s meaning (43). All of this generated increasing tension “as a result of difficulties in moving beyond simple clichés” (43-44). The facilitator had to compromise with the youth over the inclusion of some clichés (44).
Then the group’s narrative was transferred to the mural canvas (44). The participants worked individually in boxes on the canvas (44). They “learned to visually deconstruct their experiences as they worked to build layers onto the large canvas” (44-45). After it was finished, a focus group discussion was held, in which each artist “was invited to talk about the images he or she had selected to include on the mural as well as what it was like for them to participate in such a research project” (45). The participants described the experience in terms of empowerment, camaraderie, and expression (46-47).
When the mural travelled to schools in Ontario and Prince Edward Island, it had descriptions and explanatory text travelling along with it (45). The text explained the symbols used by the artists (45-46). That would seem to work against the facilitator’s suggestions that some of the stories included might be hidden or not revealed, and that the layers of paint used are “emblematic of participants’ journeys with mental illness” (45).
In their conclusion, the co-authors find that the project had challenges, and that research conducted through participatory arts-informed methodologies should not be assumed to generate “superior data” or engender “balanced power relationships” (48). However, the participants’ experiences of camaraderie and empowerment, the opportunity to work together and learn from each other, and the way the project normalized mental illness were all important (48).
The next chapter, “Participatory Action-Based Design Research: Designing Digital Stories Together with New-Immigrant/Refugee Communities for Health and Well-being,” has one author: Naureen Mumtaz. She describes her master of design thesis in this chapter, Journeys and Voices Together, which “was undertaken on the premise that design can influence positive social change in the context of new-immigrant/refugee communities’ health issues” (51). She used an “emergent design approach” in order to explore “how collaborative/participatory methods in design process could contribute to initiating and sustaining effective communication for healthier communities” (51). The questions that guided this study were:
How can access to health-care services for new immigrants and refugees be improved through a participatory design process? Can collaboratively designed artifacts give health brokers and new-immigrant/refugee clients a better understanding of each others’ needs? Can a design process, based on creative participation and collaboration, influence awareness about better health in new-immigrant and refugee communities? (51)
According to Mumtaz, this research project “contributes to an ongoing conversation with professionals and scholars interested in community-based participatory design methods and/or specifically focused on practices in ethno-culturally diverse contexts” (51).
Mumtaz discusses the context of the project, health, and its methodology, participatory design (52-55). Then she lands on the design of her research study:
Building on my previous experience of working with new-immigrant/refugee communities, I have conceptualized this study as a process that would evolve and adapt to the distinctive needs of community stakeholders ‘who are otherwise marginalized by design,’ with the conviction that the people who would ultimately be using the resulting artifact/product should have an active voice in its creative design process. (Nieusma, qtd. 55)
I’m still not clear what she’s designing, though, or how community-engaged or participatory design will address the problems of access to health care. Perhaps that is revealed later on. In any case, she states that her research “combined ethnographic methods (observation, shadowing, visual ethnography)” along with participatory design “for defining the problem, identifying an area for design intervention, and the creative design process” (55). Four interrelated stages—a thick description of the context; digital storytelling workshops; evaluation feedback and expert interviews; and reflection and project outcomes—led to her research plan (55-56). Some of those stages seem backwards—wouldn’t a research plan have to come before project outcomes? What am I missing? In any case, the result of this work is something she calls “a participatory action-based design research model” (56).
Mumtaz “spent time shadowing the health brokers in their various community meetings and community interactions” to learn about “the real-life, emotional, and cognitive aspects of community members” (56-57). That work led to increased trust between Mumtaz and the community (57). The digital storytelling workshops were intended to explain what the community required “to achieve better health and well-being” (58). Also, those workshops became “a means of collaboratively designing artifacts . . . which could be shared through a website” (59). Then came the research evaluation, which seems to mean digital storytelling showcasing events and the questionnaires and interviews that followed them (60-61). “Based on the analysis of our participatory approach of our participatory design approach, the health brokers were brainstorming for future design interventions for their communities’ well-being,” Mumtaz writes (61). Maybe I missed it, but I don’t know what she means by “health brokers” or what their connection to the community might be.
Five digital stories came out of the workshops, each written by a health broker (62). For Mumtaz, this process became one of the project’s outcomes (63). I still don’t know what, if anything, was actually designed as a result of this activity other than those digital stories. Frankly, this chapter is confusing and unclear.
The following chapter, “The Use of Staged Photography in Community-Based Participatory Research with Homeless Women,” by Izumi Sakamoto, Matthew Chin, Natalie Wood, and Josie Ricciardi,” is about “an arts- and community-based participatory research (CBPR) project exploring how ciswomen and transwomen with experiences of homelessness build support networks with each other to survive” (69). It used staged photographs “and subsequent art-related dissemination activities as methods of community-based participatory research informed by principles of anti-oppression, empowerment, and cultural democracy” (69).
I skipped over the lengthy discussion of the study’s context, homelessness in Toronto, and landed on a section entitled “Coming Together Project: Methods and Overall Findings.” the project was a collaboration between the Faculty of Social Work at the University of Toronto and two community agency partners, and it “sought to better understand the strengths, experiences, and marginalization of ciswomen and transwomen who had experienced homelessness” (72). The research team members included university social work faculty, a community artist, students, and the women who had experienced homelessness (72). The research continued over five years in different forms (72). It drew on principles of community-based participatory research and grounded theory “and was guided by an advisory board of research participants with experiences of homelessness” (72). The project’s first phase consisted of semi-structured interviews; the second phase involved staged photography sessions; and the third phase involved feedback sessions and an evaluation focus group (73-74). At some point—when isn’t clear—art-making sessions with homeless women were held (74). “In all settings, the participants expressed how they supported each other on individual and community levels about issues of poverty, isolation, discrimination, and accessing social services,” the co-authors write (74). Apparently, the women also painted the backdrops for the staged photography sessions (74).
Three themes emerged from the project: the importance of networks of social support among women with experiences of homelessness; the recognition that individual experiences of homelessness are often affected by historical and ongoing systems of structural marginalization; and the need for services that build on the strengths of the women while recognizing and addressing the challenges that they face (76).
In the discussion of the project’s methodological “learnings,” the co-authors suggest that the factors that played into the methods the project used included:
drawing on the diverse skills and expertise of the research team members; crafting a particular art modality that was accessible and accountable to the life experiences of ciswomen and transwomen who were homeless; building on pre-existing relationships to mediate the potential “strangeness” of the research process; facilitating openness and building relationships of trust among all research participants, and the fun that research participants experienced in taking part in this study. (77)
According to the co-authors, these factors were interconnected.
The co-authors go on to describe each factor in detail. I skipped ahead to the discussion of the “art modality,” because I still didn’t understand what the chapter means by “staged photography.” The chapter explains: traditionally, in “staged” photography the artists take on the role of director in creating an image, using models (sometimes the artists themselves), props, costumes and lighting to create a sense of theatre that is photographed (79). Cindy Sherman’s work is offered as an example (79). They chose staged photography for several reasons: it is a collaborative methodology (is that always true?); there were time constraints on the photography sessions, which couldn’t be longer than three hours; the activities had to be completed in one session given the nature of the participants’ lives; the art process had to be meaningful and engaging for the participants but the time involved in the learning process would be minimal; and the participants needed to be able to express their stories in a way that showed both their diversity and their strengths, courage, and knowledge; and the participants had to be the heroes of their stories (80). The guiding philosophy for the art process was cultural democracy, which is “committed to promoting and supporting pluralism, participation, and equity in community life” (80). The participants “were asked to engage in a communal leadership process, which gave them opportunities to construct snapshots of their own realities,” they continue (80). They were their own writers, costume directors, makeup artists, and scene and backdrop painters. The artist involved listened, asked questions, made suggestions, and photographed the participants’ stories (80).
The project’s effects included creating a sense of empowerment among the participants, transforming the participants from consumers to helpers and contributors, and “knowledge mobilization” (82-85): “the knowledge generated by this research” had to “be disseminated and mobilized to change structures of inequity and change the situations of those affected by the issues” (85). The project “led a larger collaboration of community-based, arts-informed research projects on homelessness in Toronto” and the knowledge produced was distributed in a variety of forms, including a policy report, a joint art exhibit, and a website (85-86).
In their conclusion, the co-authors state that they believe “that the use of the method of staged photography alone, without the critical conditions mentioned, would not have yielded successful results” (86). By “critical conditions” they seem to be referring to the five methodological factors they describe earlier. “Ultimately, these conditions reflect the importance of attending to the particularities of the context, listening to participants, and building trusting relationships and spaces, which were of the utmost importance for the effectiveness of our community-based research efforts” (86).
The book’s next section focuses on community-based arts scholarship. The first chapter in this section is “The Living Histories Ensemble: Sharing Authority Through Play, Storytelling, and Performance in the Aftermath of Collective Violence,” by Nisha Sajnani, Warren Linds, Alan Wong, Lisa Ndejuru, Lucy Lu, Paul L. Gareau, and David Ward. This chapter is be structured as a collaboration, a collection of voices. Nisha Sajnani begins. She explains that the Living Histories Ensemble “performs at the intersection of oral history, trauma studies, community dialogue, practice as research, and research creation” (93). For five years, ending in 2012, they worked on a “community-university oral history project Life Stories of Montrealers Displaced by Genocide, War, and Other Human Rights Violations” (93). “We care about how performance translates and transforms oral histories and how embodied approaches can help us understand and attend to each other better,” she states (93). It also helps the performers, and their audiences, to understand better the experiences of violence and its aftermath (93).
Playback Theatre (PT), their methodology, “is a form of interactive theatre in which stories (large and small), volunteered by members of the audience, are extemporaneously transformed by skilled actors into words, movement, metaphor, and music” (94). A 90-minute PT performance is made up of a series of “entertaining, improvised sketches” which “coalesces into a dialogic collage” (94). “Done well, PT is a rewarding high-wire act of deep listening, risk-taking and white-knuckle creativity—a unique means for truly honouring stories and their tellers,” Sajnani states (94). This practice reflects the way that applied or popular theatre articulates the ways in which drama and theatre work as research-creation (94). They draw on a number of trends in practice as research, performance inquiry, improvisation as social practice, and embodied narrative inquiry, along with other forms of arts-based research, and understand their practice to be a “living inquiry” because “it involves the simultaneous tracking and transmission of tacit, emergent knowledge through embodied improvisational performance” (94-95).
Next is Alan Wong, who explains that the project was based at Concordia University’s Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling (97). The Life Stories project “brought together dozens of academic researchers and community members to solicit, record, collect, and explore approximately 500 oral histories of individuals living in Montreal who had been displaced by mass atrocities in their countries of origin,” primarily Haiti, Cambodia, and Rwanda, but also the Holocaust (95). The idea of “shared authority” was a heavy influence on the project, and it helped to make sure that “project participants would be empowered as they revisited, narrated, and reviewed the stories of their lives” (95). As the archive of stories grew, “affiliated researchers began using it as the basis for scholarly work in the fields of history, education, anthropology, sociology, communications, and political science. Artists created video documentaries, photographic displays, performance art, and narrative pieces for theatre and radio” (95). The Living Histories Ensemble continues to work “as an independent collective, retaining its focus and expertise in arts-based research related to communities affected by traumatic events” (95-96).
That work, Sajnani states, involves four “overlapping, repetitive cycles of analysis”: closed rehearsals; preparatory discussions between members of the Living Histories Ensemble and community representatives, which always precede performances in the wider community; the performance itself; and debriefings and follow-up conversations (96-97). The first two of these “cycles of analysis” are described in the following pages—the chapter’s discussion of the group’s methods (97-101). Then the group describes its toolkit, the “standard ‘forms’” they use in performance, usually short-form sketches, which are “effective in gently moving an audience into a collaborative trusting space to deeply reflect on the aftermath of genocide and displacement” (101). They note that interviewers often experience vicarious forms of trauma (102). The members with histories of trauma have told their own stories and have seen them “transposed into metaphor,” which “created an interesting aesthetic distance” that evoked unexpressed feelings and permitted critical reflection (103). After that discussion of short-form sketches, the authors discuss the longer improvisations they create with audiences (104-06). They note that the end of their performances are “often marked with a cascading, embodied summative reflection of the images and stories that emerged” during their “improvised, performative conversation” (106). They conclude by suggesting that their practice is grounded in a relational aesthetic and in “relational authenticity” (Rowe, qtd. 107) and note that it demands “a willingness to fail in our best efforts to remain flexible and open, to live, and create amidst uncertainty and loss, to offer vulnerability and responsiveness to each other and our audiences, and to commit (again and again) to the members of our ensemble and to the integrity of our art” (107-08).
In the chapter’s final paragraphs, Sajnani states, “Trauma challenges our sense of safety and trust, making it harder, yet all the more important, to find ways of acknowledging and expressing experience while remaining in relationship” (108). She contends that their “living inquiry is, in fact, a loving inquiry in that it relies on the simultaneous tracking and transmission of tacit, emergent knowledge discovered via mutual encounters held within the framework of a compassionate, respectful, improvisational performance practice,” and that “collaboration—moving together in relationship with shared authority—is at the core of finding hope, making meaning, and summoning the will to survive in the aftermath of violence” (108).
The next chapter, “Co-Activating Beauty, Co-Narrating Home: Dialogic Live Art Performance and the Practice of Inclusiveness,” by Devora Neumark, begins with the three historical factors that “were recalled in the shaping of one of [her] most recent series of live art events”:
the establishment of the State of Israel and concomitant oppression of the Palestinians; the role that has been attributed to the beautification of home as an integral part of the survival of the Jewish people; and the Jewish cultural affirmation of home(land) as exemplified in the multiple iterations of the theatrical production entitled The Jewish Home Beautiful in the United States and Canada from the 1940s onward. (111)
Her work seems to consist of “critical re-enactments” of that production in which she examines “the ways in which Jewish cultural narratives and religious ideologies have made it possible to not only ignore the plight of the Palestinian people, but also to create official policies and unofficial actions that exclude, dominate, and oppress them” (112). Her “dialogic live art performance events” are “intended to explore the possibility of co-creating new narratives of nonviolent resistance” (112).
By “dialogic live art performance practice,” Neumark is referring to a process-oriented practice that is “capable of provoking social change” and “nurturing the emergence of new ways of knowing” (112-13). “Within such projects, especially those that are deliberately engaged with the interrogation of power dynamics and motivated by the desire to address injustice, collaboration is often embraced as a locus of and agent for an encounter with the aesthetic, social, and political forces that shape individual and communal life,” she writes (113). The specific of “dialogic live art performance practice” are not clear from this description, however. She states that she engaged in three re-enactments of The Jewish Home Beautiful in Montreal in 2010 and 2011 with a number of other performers. (What theatre or performance practice is not, on some level, collaborative?) She cites conceptual artist and philosopher Adrian Piper’s notion of a “modal imagination” here, and suggests that imagining what is possible “is necessarily rooted in the past and the present” and that it “requires a collective effort, in the political realm as much as in the artistic” (113). She also believes that “art seeking to practice inclusiveness” must be relational (114). Given her use of the term “dialogic,” it’s not surprising that she cites Grant Kester’s work as well (114-15).
Next, Neumark describes the three versions of The Jewish Home Beautiful (115-18), which were performances in which the audience was encouraged to participate, food was served, and objects that “paid homage to a particular ancestor” were shared and discussed. “Each event gave rise to the next as people’s comments led to changes in form and intention,” Neumark states (119). In addition, “all the events were unscripted and open-ended. What emerged was specific to the individuals and the unique configurations of individuals who attended each particular event,” which could not be repeated (119). The third event was very small, almost private, since the participants were Neumark’s friends (121).
Neumark suggests that these dialogic live art events “can signal a cultural and political reframing of the exigencies of home and beauty within an increasingly precarious, changeable, and uncertain world,” but suggests that the “dialogic process does have its limits” (122). “Not only must we remain vigilant to not exclude those we disagree with, we must be willing to sit with the awkwardness that often arises when we are faced with a conflict of opinion,” she states. “Dialogic performance, in which co-reflexivity and co-creativity are deliberately interconnected, calls upon each participant to sit with their discomfort long enough to hear and acknowledge each other” (122). Of course, the subject matter Neumark’s performances addressed would have been unlikely to lead to recognition or acknowledgement.
Neumark also talks about her work as sense-making, “a complex and multi-dimensional social activity that includes introspection, retrospection, interpretation, and discernment,” which is “a particularly important aspect of co-creative narrative construction because while it is context-specific, it can also be transferred to other situations” (122-23). She suggests that “what emerges in the live art dialogic process is simultaneously experienced both in the symbolic realm and in/as real life” (123).
According to Neumark, audiences members—or participants? it’s not clear who she’s talking about—felt powerful emotions, memories were shared, ideas were challenged, and new connections created in the creation of the events as well as in the conversations she had with participants afterwards (124). “Such co-activating of beauty and co-narrating of home is indeed not without its risks, especially since the stories shared and shaped within the performance space are not intended to be experienced only on a symbolic level,” she states. “Perhaps the greatest risk was allowing ourselves to be vulnerable enough to listen deeply enough to others as to connect with their suffering and their hopes” (125).
In her conclusion, Neumark states, “The aesthetics of memory and the aesthetics of present experience act upon one another in the co-activation of beauty and the co-narration of home. Here engagement with the material world is both equally connected with and influenced by the realms of dialogue, reminiscence, collective imagination and creativity” (126). As a form of research, dialogic live art involves risk: it assumes “that conditions that allow for intimacy among strangers and the sharing of tender, even traumatic, memories are to be thoughtfully established within the performance frame” (126-27). She suggests that “the very capacity to experience truthfulness and vulnerability in public . . . awakens a shared humanity and reminds each and every one of us of our individual power to act in the fact of injustice,” and that process is not without risk (127). However, it’s clear that she believes it’s not without reward, either.
The following chapter, George Belliveau’s “Using Drama to Build Community in Canadian Schools,” looks at two Canadian schools where “teaching artists are integrating participatory forms of theatre and drama to develop artistic and community engagement” (131). He suggests that these initiatives, one in Halifax and one in Vancouver, are forms of community-based theatre (CbT) and thus a form of applied theatre, “associated with approaches such as theatre for development, theatre for social change, and popular theatre” (131). “Contemporary CbT generally consists of artists working with a community to assist or guide them in sharing their story, to address a social, historical or political issue of concern,” Belliveau writes (131-32). He frames this research as a case study, an approach which “provides a rich descriptive lens to discuss the nature and nuances of learning that emerged within the communities through artistic developments initiated by the teaching artists in the schools” (132). His data collection methods included interviews, field observation, and “available literature about the schools and artists,” whatever that means (132). His initial analysis “included a search for recurring and outlying themes,” which was “followed by a close examination of the data for resonances among both sites, as well as moments where the arts-based work stimulated participatory opportunities within and for the communities” (132-33). By communities, I wonder if he means the schools themselves, or the wider communities in which those schools are located.
Next, Belliveau describes Carrigan Academy in Halifax, and the Zuppa Circus, which works with students there (133-35), followed by a description of Cedar Springs Elementary in Vancouver and the UBC Teaching Artists (graduate students in theatre education) who are engaged with students in that school (135-37). Then he discusses his findings. “The nature of the theatre and drama initiatives appears to have fostered positive support for building school community and nurturing school and community initiatives,” he tells us (139). What students learned in the theatre classes has helped them understand and verbalize schoolyard conflicts (140). It has also encouraged social responsibility (140).
The next chapter, “Witnessing Transformations: Art with a Capital ‘C’—Community and Cross-cultural Collaboration,” by Nancy Bleck, begins by noting that community-engaged art practices are not always accepted by the art world (145). She describes her work in the Uts’am Witness project, which operated at the Roundhouse Theatre in Vancouver for ten years, until 2007 (145-46). That project “connected urban city dwellers to their rainforest backyards three hours north, to learn more about Coast Salish culture, ecological issues that affect us all, and the absolute importance of community at the heart of practice” (146). Bleck was an artist and researcher in the project, although she’s a settler (146). She was gifted a name by her First Nations colleagues, but she notes she has no right to speak on behalf of “an Indigenous subjectivity” (146-47). “Instead, I call up what Donna Haraway describes as ‘situated knowledges,’ which involve a positioning of oneself calling for a critical genealogy of subjectivity,” she writes. “This embodied ethical standpoint forms the foundation of my artistic practice and postmodern condition” (147). I have a copy of Haraway’s book and I probably ought to read it, since my position in relation to my research is not dissimilar from Bleck’s position in relation to her research.
“A cross-cultural collaborative methodology informs the scope of the work I describe in this chapter; the nature of this unfixed, messy process precludes any neat structure through which to speak about it,” Bleck writes (147). “The point of the project is to re-vision the future beyond a Western, colonized imagination, while emphasizing respect for the differences and diversity of our multi-species world, at a time when our actions on this planet matter,” she continues (148).
Bleck describes the importance of community in the work, and notes that her experiences in the rainforest were one of “the most valuable recognitions of community” for her (149). She spent a week alone in the rainforest, a First Nations strength-building exercise, a challenge for a woman who grew up in Mississauga (149-50). “It was during this solo week in the wilderness that my intuition became sharpened, heightened, and flexed, and today I consider this to have been an important part of my art practice,” she states (150).
Next, she discusses witnessing through Haraway’s notion of “the modest witness” and in the context of settler and Coast Salish jurisprudence (150-51). “Borrowing from Haraway’s modest witness figuration as a point of entry into the discussion of what it means to be a witness in times of standardized brutality of nature, ongoing racism, and sexism, I consider closely new shifts in artistic practice edging away from the heroic individual towards the messy and complex collective,” she states (151). Always someone who prefers to work alone is dismissed as “heroic”: I’m tired of that description. In any case, Bleck continues: “It is through this shift of the role of witnessing away from knowledge-claims and towards a collective, public, and mixed act of witnessing, that cultural intervention into mainstream modernity’s social may also transpire and take hold” (151).
Bleck suggests that “community-based arts practices may be undergoing what women in the art world have struggled with for centuries—the old hierarchical privileging of a dominant gender and culture, not only male dominant, but also ‘object-world’ central” (152). I’m not so sure about that: in walking art, relational or social practices are now the norm, it seems.
“Cross-cultural collaboration and community building, with the potential of social change, requires careful consideration of a much larger cultural context, beyond an artist negotiating her own individual art position,” Bleck continues (152). She suggest that the Uts’am Witness project “was born from urgency, and came into being through the relationships that were formed and a process that unfolded. the art practice itself was not an outcome, but a means to a new end[:] a newly created space for cross-cultural collaboration and community” (152). Uts’am Witness created “a community of voices, where each was heard. This kind of practice subverts the dominant cultural paradigm of competition and individualism—both hallmarks of colonizing settler culture in Canada (152).
One aspect of Uts’am Witness was weekend camping events in the rainforest north of Vancouver. Actually, because the project isn’t described clearly in this chapter, I’m not sure what went on in the project. Anyway, Bleck says that for her,
photography was the key element for accessing the relationships and building the community collaboration that emerged. Photography in situ places me inside an act, which demands a certain level of attention to light, detail, context, time of day, technical ability, audience, and the public. It sharpens my senses and forces me to pay attention to things such as colour, texture, composition, or historical frames. I am always more aware that I am not photographing a static landscape, but rather and event, or rather a series of events in constant flux of which I am a part. It strikes me as interesting that it was in those subtle moments when I was alone with the camera that my loudest dreams and liveliest images surfaced, and that the most significant outcomes of this creativity were not so much in the photos themselves, but in the experiences of the hundreds of people who encountered a place, on their own terms. It was through my practice of photography that I honed my community-building skills, akin to transforming my own artistic potential. (153-54)
That’s an interesting take on photography: I would’ve thought that the lone photographer shooting the land and people on the land would be much closer to the “heroic” artist Bleck earlier decries. Perhaps its the context in which her photography took place that’s important.
“Each time Uts’am Witness produces an exhibition, event, or gathering, witnesses are called to that event, in keeping with Chicayx(cultural protocol, or law for doing things in a good way),” Bleck writes:
For those who attended those events—whether connected through environmental groups, the art world, mountaineering groups, community centres, ministries, logging townships, or through Coast Salish tradition, what people remembered was not any important steps made in new artistic practices in Canada, but, as Candice Hopkins suggests, the work “resonate[d] in the minds of those who witnessed it as an honourable act.” (qtd. 155)
Situating the art within cultural protocol is at the foundation of Sḵwx̱wú7mesh law, of how things are to be done, according to Chief Bill Williams, one of the co-founders of Uts’am Witness (155). It situates the work within “a ceremonial circle, showing us (not telling us) another way of seeing, hearing, and feeling the world,” and to be invited into that circle is an act “of immense generosity given the historical injustices that First Nations people have gone through, and continue to experience in Canada” (156).
“Artistic practices that have offered reinventions of culture and produced social innovation from time immemorial hold both possibility and risk,” Bleck concludes. “It is exceptionally risky business, and with this high risk, there also exists great potential for failure” (157). However by trusting in “collaborative, imaginative, and intuitive processes when attempting baby steps towards collective leaps into community intensities, we would no doubt be entering spaces of multiple outcomes,” she continues. “We may even become motionless in dark places, or fail at desired outcomes, but new knowledge(s) will happen nevertheless. It is this path of risk that carries with it the capacity to take us there—to places of transformation, by dreaming out loud together with our gifts” (157).
That brings us to the book’s third section, on collaborative arts approaches. I skipped over “Wombwalks: Re-attuning with the m/Other,” by Barbara Bickel, Medwyn McConachy, and Nané Jordan, even though it’s about walking labyrinths, and landed on “Seeing Through Artistic Practices: Collaborations Between an Artist and Researcher,” by Vera Caine and Michelle Lavoie. That chapter begins with mourning: in 2002, one of Caine’s close research participants disappeared and was reported missing, becoming one of the many Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls in Canada (179). Together, Caine and Lavoie use photography “to explore what it means to see the details and to see with clarity” (179). “In this chapter we journey into the borderlands, the common places and the tensions of our working together,” they write. “Yet, it is not a clearly laid out journey, nor is it that we see ourselves as confined to the borderlands of artist and narrative inquirer. Instead we play with out ideas and commitments which sometimes become evident in the co-compositions of experiences and images” (179-80).
Their collaboration began at a communal printmaking studio, where Lavoie taught (180). Caine would talk about her missing friend (180). Eventually they photographed the place where the woman disappeared (182). They began layering the images, looking for the presence of the absent woman (183). They juxtapose those images to text (183-85). “We lay out our images and texts side by side for the reader,” they write. “We ask them to walk alongside us to assemble the fragments, call forth their own experiences, and find their way through the story. This is an invitation to viewers” (186). They make prints, physically scratching and scarring the photographs, inscribing “the story into the place and onto the viewers who are marked by the scar of seeing” (186). I know this work is well-intentioned, but there’s something off about two settlers obsessing over a missing Indigenous woman. I’m not sure how Indigenous people would respond to it.
In the next chapter, “Soot and Subjectivity: Uncertain Collaboration,” Patti Pente and Pat Beaton tell us that soot “is central to the creation of this arts-based educational research, where we, as visual artists, explore our sense of place through collaborative artmaking, informed by the uncertain and irregular rhythms of fire” (191). Their collaborative art practice is about the land, and it “interrogates the nature of subjectivity when it is detached from the normative associations of neoliberal individualism that can predominate contemporary society” (191). Collaboration “within the performance of subjectivity,” they continue, “is based upon unpredictable moments of relationality, where landscape art emerges in synchronic and diachronic synergy. This understanding of the subject as evolving in relation to the other has repercussions to the ways we live together in the land, given that changes of values and attitudes are tied to changes in the self” (191).
The land, or the landscape (are Pente and Beaton using those terms as synonyms? they shouldn’t be substituted for one another), is important for several reasons:
first, the great expanse of land holds many natural resources that have been, and remain, the backbone of economic prosperity; second, Canada promotes itself to the world as a northern wilderness and this idea shapes national identity; third, issues regarding ownership and use of land remain prominent, given the colonial acquisition of First Nations land. (192)
“Land seen through art coded as wilderness reinforces the notion of uninhabited wealth rather than a homeland, populated for centuries by Indigenous peoples,” they continue. “Additionally, environmental degradation continues to increase locally and globally because of industrial activities and resource extraction” (192). They use the campfire in their work as a symbol of “the culmination of these values and beliefs for us as artists, in recognition of a general societal disposition towards forgetfulness about the land that is part of our national legacy and nationhood” (192).
The underlying point of their art practice is “the question of how we might live in more equitable, environmentally sustainable, and transformational ways in relation to wider Canadian perspectives” (193). They’re interested in the possibility of transforming landscape art, it seems, by shifting it away from representations of wilderness to other kinds of representations that suggest that our current relation to the land is neither positive nor sustainable (193).But they’re also interested in the theories of subjectivity and their effects on collaborative practices (194).
Their research approach is a/r/tography, which they define as “creative inquiry whereby the methods selected align with the specific research topic and the a/r/tographer’s creative oeuvre” (194). That’s not much of a definition, but maybe they figure their audience already knows what they’re talking about. “We consider the written and visual components”—of what? their art practice—“separately and in relation, given the opacity of language and the multiplicity of meanings within images” (194). The slashes in a/r/tography represent disruption—in their case, disruption through “the influence of fire, discussion, and spaces of collaborative unpredictability” (195). They situate their work between cognition (valued in the academy) and felt experience (not valued in the academy) in an effort to erode that “manufactured duality” (195).
Pente and Beaton note that critics of arts-based research “identify major limitations such as a lack of quality in the two areas that are purportedly covered: art and social scientific, educational research,” a problem that arises because the researchers may find it difficult to be experts in both fields (195). “However, in this research, with our unique backgrounds as practicing artists and educators, we are able to lend expertise in both spheres,” they state (195). Yes, but that’s what all arts-based researchers think, isn’t it? “In other words,” they continue, “we live comfortably in the world of education and of art and thus are well paced to address the hybrid nature of a/r/tography” (195).
The subject nature of arts-based research is both a limitation and a strength, “for the ambiguous nature of creative inquiry in relation with others makes for unpredictable processes that can sometimes lead to uneventful pathways, requiring multiple efforts and explorations” (195). In addition, “the multiple meanings inherent in images in juxtaposition to text do not necessarily lead to clearly definable outcomes in ways that academic research and educational policy have historically demanded” (195). Arts-based research data is knowledge in alternate forms from the data generated by quantitative research (195).
In Pente and Beaton’s research, “three methods are triangulated: narration, video interview, and artmaking, which collectively complement and echo the theoretical stance within a/r/tography of three mobile subject positions” (195). That’s a new idea that hasn’t been unpacked. “The data include Pat’s performance and its documentation through photographs; Patti’s art, created from the remnants; a series of three video interviews between us; and Patti’s narration of the research process,” they continue. “In this way, the cloth is a material source of collaboration that is the accumulation of our sense of place: Pat’s response to the familiar Canadian campfire scene, and Patti’s response as an echo of the creative performance in relation to the suburban lawn” (195-96).
“Narrative methods of depicting research experiences are distinctly powerful aspects of this research where the creation of landscape art is combined with prose,” they state, although the text is framed as fiction rather than “a source of self-disclosing truth gleaned from a static identity” (197). “When research is explored narratively, certainty of meaning is not a goal, nor is it relevant, an aim that is contrary to formalist research methodologies that construct and argument based on scientific hypotheses and proofs,” they continue. “The disconnection between the singular voice of ‘I’ found in narration and the stance taken here of subjectivity continually performed, mutable, and contingent upon relationships with others is at odds” (197-98). Affective ways of knowing are important avenues for recounting experience to an audience (198).
“The video camera, as a tool for data collection, is usually a very different tool in artmaking,” they continue. “In this research, this boundary is blurred, as data become raw material for creative and aesthetic inquiry” (198-99). Is “data” the right word for what is produced by this artistic activity? Can “data” escape the notion of something quantifiable? “We reveal a playfulness and awareness that comes from our understanding of video as a form of art, and our acknowledgement of a level of artificiality that structures our conversation as an academic research interview,” they state. “Rather than remaining a talking head in the video segments, the interview is a kind of relational event: an unanticipated collaboration between two artists” (199).
“Various kinds of collaboration ensured in our shared work: in the burning of the cloth and the diachronic creation of art as each of us worked with the product of the other’s creative moment or questions to further the investigation,” they write, noting that Beaton’s mother participated as the audience (199). Their collaboration highlights spontaneity, uncertainty, unpredictability, and indeterminacy at the various states of the work: “in the art that was made, in the dynamic collaboration that was developed, and in the questions that were raised” (199).
Beaton’s work “considers normative assumptions about the tradition of the campfire” (199) and their work assumes “that performance art transforms the social space” (200). Performing for one’s mother adds a layer of “familial meaning” (200). The performance wasn’t documented the way the art world documents such events; the performance remained private (200). Only snapshots, a video narrative, and ashes remain (200).
According to Pente and Beaton, teachers and students, as well as artists, can “instigate shifts in cultural behaviour from a ‘single act’ of creative artmaking” (200): making art collaboratively can be transformative and “a good fit for teaching and learning” and “reflects the importance of collaboration as a shared form of learning about social issues” (201).
In their conclusion, the co-authors note that they have argued “for the advancement of unpredictability within collaboration through a/r/tography, and for the agency inherent in such methods that can disrupt assumed social attitudes regarding subjectivity and relationships with the land” (202). Their case study “combines performance art, visual art, narrative, and theoretical analysis as components in a/r/tographical inquiry” (202). Collaboration, “understood as a continual sharing of creative decision making that embraces ambiguity and play through artistic materials,” demonstrates “the flexibility inherent in arts-based research” (202). In Canada, their investigation “into alternative landscape art practices opens social possibilities to reconsider our communal relationships with the land, anticipating the need for change so that more ecological, sustainable interactions emerge in the future” (202).
I decided not to read the last chapter, “A Poetic Inquiry on Passive Reflection: A Summer Day Breeze,” by Sean Wiebe, Lynn Fels, Celeste Snowber, Indrani Margolin, and John J. Guiney Yallop, because it’s too strange for someone who has been educated in and taught literature to think about social scientists writing poetry without committing to the craft, and so “Arts-Based Representation of Collaboration: Explorations of a Faculty Writing Group,” by Heather McLeod, Sharon Penney, Rhonda Joy, Cecile Badenhorst, Dorothy Vaandering, Sarah Pickett, Xuemei Li, and Jacqueline Hesson, became the last chapter I will summarize here. “In this collaborative self-study project, we demonstrate through our inquiry alternate ways of knowing: specifically, how the arts support participatory practices that contribute to creating new understandings about qualitative inquiry that move beyond traditional notions of what constitutes research,” the co-authors write (209). They are interested in writing as inquiry (209). An eight-member all-woman writing group in the education faculty at Memorial University, they “seek to challenge dominant assumptions rooted in science concerning ‘truth-effects’ through language,” because they are postmodern feminists (209). “By questioning representation, knowledge construction, and collaboration, we identify how women as new academics make sense of the complexity of knowledge, identity, and representation in research,” they write, describing the “critical engagements” in this chapter as including “the notion of cultural elitism; what counts as research and hard versus soft research outcomes; the dichotomy of male-female experiences in the academy and challenges for new faculty” (209).
Their method is inkshedding: “within a set time, all members added their thoughts to an original free-write about each other’s artworks as well as to the comments of others” (209). The inkshedding process “allowed each member to provide written reflections on the artworks to understand, to query, or comment rather than to evaluate” (210). After the writing group had been in existence for five months, the group members decided to represent the collaboration in art, including “locating meaning in found objects and photographs, making a collage, drawing, painting, designing posters, and writing poetry” (210-11). The analysis of that work “indicated the diverse character of arts-based representations, but also revealed common themes and shared understandings,” while it also “exposed vulnerability in the group members, which then helped to solidify group relationships” (211).
Most of the group had no formal artistic training (211). Some were intimidated by the idea of making art (211). However, the group took the position that making art is natural and that cultural elitism and social exclusion in the arts is at the root of such fear (211). They cite Grant Kester’s notion that “artists seek to facilitate dialogue among diverse communities” (211). (Some artists, yes.) The collaborative aspects of their process—the chapter I’m reading and their reflections on collaboration—suggest that Kester’s ideas about collaborative art-making are relevant, they contend (211). They also believed that “creative participation” is “a radicalizing process engendering transformation and emancipation, while encouraging resistance, democracy, and citizenship (212). The group took collaboration as their theme and made work about that idea (212).
Next the co-authors discuss writing groups and collaboration. “Transitioning into a faculty position is a time of stress, uncertainty, and emotional upheaval,” they state, suggesting that writing groups can function as a means of “beneficial support” and “help new faculty develop confidence and a sense of identity,” particularly for women academics (212). In universities, “collaboration and collaborative teams are becoming more common” (213). Teams of researchers tend to achieve greater goals than individuals (213) (not in the discipline where I’ve spent most of my career). Collaboration has rewards and challenges: it requires a supportive work environment “and the freedom to pursue novel ideas,” but time management and balancing priorities can be problems (213). Other challenges include territorialism, communication, scheduling, and effects on tenure (214). Women tend to value collaboration more than men, according to research (214).
“Arts-based educational research (ABER) encourages teachers, students, and community activists to experiment with materials and techniques to produce creative works,” the co-authors state (215). ABER “can help make the familiar strange,” which is relevant because as they sought to understand their own process, they might end up presenting their group “in an unrealistically positive light” (215). Artistic methods was a way to “suspend our preconceptions of familiar territory and help group members’ unique insights be understood,” they write, and those methods “provided a common platform for dialogue” because it avoided straightforward “mutual understanding” (215).They suggest that “traditional concepts of ‘worthy’ visual art and what makes one a ‘good’ artist are steeped in oppressive colonial value systems,” while in ABER art is communication and “reactions to the artwork outweigh considerations of the quality of the pieces measured against external aesthetic criteria” (215). They decided to adhere to a perspective on the work that asked “whom and what purpose” it served and whether it contributed to change (215). “Our artistic scholarship,” they state, “would be viewed as successful because it effected change in the makers” (215).
Next, they describe their process: “members first crafted their arts-based pieces individually and then wrote a reflection about their creation. Next, as a group we viewed the works and members read aloud their written reflections. The group discussion was audiotaped. Before beginning the following session we reviewed the audiotape” (215). In that following session, they engaged in freewriting, naming the works’ visual elements and the relationships between them and discussing how those elements and relationships connected with each of them (216). Those freewritten texts
circulated around the group using a method called inkshedding, whereby within a set time of three minutes each member added their thoughts to the original free-write as well as to the comments of others. Thus with 8 free-writes in response to each creative piece which then circulated around 8 members, there were 64 comments about each work. This method allowed us to build on each other’s thinking and also to delve deeper than our initial first thoughts to elucidate meanings in response to each work. Greater depth was possible because each member provided a written reflection on the artworks to comment, question, or understand, rather than to critique. Further, the process allowed us to gather our thoughts, to provide written comments before oral discussion, and to have a voice that was valued. (216)
The co-authors provide four examples of this process, both the descriptions of the works, the creators’ reflections, and the comments from the group, which “highlight communal thought” (216-21).
In the chapter’s discussion section, the co-authors state that the project allowed them “to reflect on the diverse nature of arts-based representation in relation to personal meaning and situated individual knowledges, as well as on common emergent themes and shared understandings” (221). They revealed their vulnerabilities, and so relationships in the group grew stronger (221). The process enabled them to confront “key issues that are important to successful writing groups, including trust, commitment, and meeting individual needs” (221). They have come to see writing as a process that ebbs and flows (211). “Nevertheless, the arts-based project worked in extraordinary ways to develop a group based on trust, strong relationships, and support,” they write, and it also showed that they “need to focus on communication and to value the unique contributions of all members” and that they “can communicate in new ways” (221). “By representing our thoughts through the arts we learned how liberating it could be,” they continue. “We also come to realize that respect and trust had been established in the writing group. Group members felt safe enough to allow themselves to be vulnerable. This newfound trust within the group has encouraged group members to be more willing to expose themselves again as they move forward with their own research and seek feedback on their own writing” (221-22).
In addition, the group members found the process therapeutic and energizing; it allowed them to think in new ways; it helped them to express complex ideas in images before expressing them in words (222). They learned about the ways that arts-based educational research “can bridge cultures as well as academic disciplines” (222). And the process “effected change in us as the art makers” (222). It was transformative (222). They critiqued notions of cultural elitism—“what counts as academic research and hard versus soft outcomes”; “the dichotomy of male-female experiences in the academy and the challenges faced by new faculty” (222). (There were no men in the group, so how did they explore men’s experiences in the academy?) They encourage other researchers to take up the practices because of the benefits they experienced (222).
The writing group continues: “we have created something new. We now expect and receive effective, timely, and substantial support when we bring our current work to the group” (223). They have also gained a reputation as “a significant group of strong academic citizens in the faculty” (223). “Therefore we conclude that our exploration shows some of the powerful ways that the arts support participation and collaboration in creating understanding,” they write. “In the face of a dominant discourse pushing us towards individualism, collaboration for new faculty is novel, boundary pushing, and counter-hegemonic” (223). Their collaboration is noncompetitive and supportive (223).
The project led to more research, and while those did not involve an arts-based approach, the bonds they formed through the arts-based work made those investigations possible (223). The research they conducted has been published (223). In addition, they are exploring “how reflective writing helps academic professional project,” as well as “charting our non-traditional paths into the academy” and “examining how family and career can be balanced on the academic tightrope” (223). They have other ideas about research as well: the chapter ends with questions they might explore (223). So, for these professors, the collaborative writing group, and the ABER work it carried out, have had tremendous benefits.
I’ve taken a course on social and relational aesthetics, and while I haven’t read all there is to read on that topic, it’s not new to me. I enjoyed Theo Sims’s The Candahar, a relational aesthetic work, when it was presented at the Mackenzie Gallery in Regina. I’ve participate in walking events curated by my friend Hugh Henry, an artist and historian living in Swift Current, Saskatchewan, and I’m so grateful for those experiences. In fact, social or relational or dialogic projects are now pretty standard in walking art: now it’s the individual, solo, durational projects that are outliers—those are now the projects that are rejected as insufficiently convivial or participatory. So if people want to make that kind of art, I’m fine with it. I do resist the notion that all art now needs to be collaborative or participatory, though. I also question the recurring argument in this book that art needs to make social change happen. I know those socially engaged projects are worthwhile; I’m not arguing that they aren’t. But does art have to be useful? Is it possible that by demanding that art be useful, proponents of socially engaged art are treating art practices in an instrumental way? If so, is that instrumentality a sign of the way that neoliberalism has crept into the thinking of even those who set out to oppose neoliberalism? Can’t art step outside of the criteria of usefulness? Can’t it simply exist? Can’t it do something other than address social issues?
I also wonder about social scientists making art—about the idea that it’s too difficult for people to succeed in two distinct areas of activity, both of which require a full-time commitment. Ars longa, vita brevis, said Hippocrates: art is long and life is short. Chaucer said something similar: “The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.” It’s hard to become good at making art of any kind; it takes a lot of time and effort and commitment. The authors here avoid that problem by refusing to consider whether the art they make is good, and by suggesting that the art world’s criteria of evaluation are colonialist or elitist. Maybe that’s true. But it’s just as possible that those criteria of evaluation are part of a process of peer review—something with which social scientists are very familiar. There’s nothing wrong with making bad art as a hobby, if it’s something you enjoy doing in your spare time. Why not enjoy making things? However, I’m not sure that abandoning notions of art succeeding or failing is really a convincing argument.
Collaborative or participatory art can be a way of giving back to a community, something Eve Tuck and Marcia McKenzie tell us is an ethical obligation for social scientists and, by extension, for artists. There’s no reason artists can’t engage in participatory work and also in practices that create objects. And there’s no reason why participatory or relational work can’t be evaluated according to criteria established by artists and critics over the past 30 years during which kind of work has been made, either.
But I do not accept the idea that doing things on your own makes you “heroic” in some indefinably bad way or individualistic in the sense of neoliberalism’s alleged demand that we all be individuals. Collaboration is fine; so is working by yourself. Why simply reverse the binary? How does that get you out of the problem that binary creates? All this postmodern thinking, and we can’t do deconstruction any better than that?
Work Cited
Bishop, Claire. “Introduction/Viewers as Producers.” Participation, ed. Claire Bishop, MIT Press, 2006.
Conrad, Diane, and Anita Sinner, editors. Creating Together: Participatory, Community-Based, and Collaborative Arts Practices and Scholarship Across Canada, Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2015.
Tuck, Eve, and Marcia McKenzie. Place in Research: Theory, Methodology, and Methods, Routledge, 2015.
