Stephanie Springgay

This chapter introduces several essential features of a/r/tography within practice-based research. A/r/tography is informed by feminist, post-structuralist, hermeneutic, and postmodern approaches to knowing. Building on the work of action researchers understanding their work as a living practice, a/r/tography enacts and embodies the practices of artists, researchers, educators, and learners as a form of living inquiry. In doing so, a/r/tographers facilitate the conditions for creating new ways of knowing and being through inquiry-laden practices, and as a result, often create communities of practice. The research conditions for a/r/tographic practice reside in several notions of relationality such as relational inquiry, relational aesthetics, and relational learning. Complementing the research conditions are conceptual practices referred to as renderings. In this instance, concepts rather than research methods are used to engage a/r/tographers with their inquiries. The chapter identifies several possible renderings: contiguity, living inquiry, metaphor/metonymy, openings, reverberations, and excess. These may act as guides for inquiry and lead to new insights and offer opportunities to engage in deep encounters within the relational conditions. In summary, a/r/tography resides in the in-between spaces of intercorporeality, relationality, and process, and insists on the artform and text being integral to the whole process. One does not speak for the other, rather, both are needed as forms of relational inquiry.

Western thought splits women's identity into “mother” or “other” – the perception that women cannot be both. Re-thinking mothering from the perspective of “performativity” recognizes the relationality between mother and other. Mothering and family life are frequently not recognized as relevant to the workplace. Therefore, visual art makes my/breastfeeding/academic/working mother's reality known. Motherhood is a practice that is always incomplete, indeterminable, and vulnerable. A relational understanding of m/othering opens up the possibility of an ethical form of exchange between self and other. Thus, it is not simply a matter of making oneself visible as a mother in the academe but about changing the way that mothering has been understood, conceived of, and practiced. This re-conceptualization of m/othering refuses to be split, while also remaining ambivalent.

In this Editorial, we discuss WalkingLab’s approach to critical walking methodologies grounded in queer-feminist, anti-racist praxis, and argue for the need to critically account for understandings of place in times of ongoing crises. We then introduce the articles featured in this special issue. Authored by international scholars, each article in the special issue engages critically with walking methodologies and the concept place from oblique angles.

This paper engages with the artistic practice and work of Vanessa Dion Fletcher (Potawatomi and Lenapé) from my perspective as a non-Indigenous academic and curator. Dion Fletcher and I have worked together over the past several years through discussions about her work, studio visits, and various events. In her art practice, Dion Fletcher uses porcupine quills and menstrual blood to inquire into a range of issues and concepts including Indigenous language revitalization, feminist Indigenous corporeality, Land as pedagogy, decolonization, and neurodiversity. In particular her work confronts the ways that Indigeneity, the queer and gendered body, and disability are rendered expendable. In this paper I engage with Dylan Robinson’s “sovereign sense”: a transcorporeal mode of perception that is affective, land-based, and formed through relations between human and non-humans. Dion Fletcher’s work makes palpable this sense of sovereignty through its unruly and mutating feltness. Further, her work makes visible feminist Indigenous artistic acts of resurgence alongside the frictions at the intersections of settler colonialism and disability. Following Karyn Recollet, I contend that Dion Fletcher’s work activates an Indigenous affective experience of futurity and creative intimacy that in turn imagines disability and Indigeneity as sites through which new pedagogical relations can be formed.

At the invitation of Professor Carlson, this paper responds to his questions regarding the meaning, value, and the future of (post)qualitative research, and takes up some of the issues and provocations I raised with his graduate students: reciprocity, relationality, stewardship, and an ethics of care. These conditions, or what I call feltness, are deeply embedded and entwined in my doings of research, or more specifically the practice of research-creation. This feltness shifts research to become a practice of intimacy. The paper commences with a brief introduction to research-creation which is potentially a parallel methodological intervention to (post)qualitative research, as it challenges what counts as disciplinary and academic knowledge, and inherited forms of value in the institution.

This paper seeks to re-evaluate the pedagogical and curricular influence of Fluxus artists who have been under addressed in curriculum studies scholarship. Between the late 1950s and early 1970s this group of avant-garde artist-pedagogues experimented with new ways to think about curriculum and pedagogy in institutes of higher education and in their artistic practices. We argue that a Fluxus approach to curriculum and pedagogy can be understood through the concepts of class as art, multiples and intermedia. We draw on interviews with contemporary artist-pedagogues from a research-creation project to illustrate the ways in which the influence of Fluxus is ongoing in contemporary post-secondary settings.

Archives, as repositories of culture and knowledge, are closely linked to colonial power, control, hegemony, and conquest. In recognizing the limitations and problems of conventional archives, scholars and artists offer counter-archiving as a method of interrogating what constitutes an archive and the selective practices that continuously erase particular subjects. Unlike static, stable, and linear colonial archives, counter-archives are grounded in accountability and reciprocity. Similarly, the anarchive is concerned with what it can do in the present-future. As such, anarchiving is less a thing, then a process or an action. This article examines anarchiving as research-creation practices through three provocations: anarchiving as indeterminate transformation, anarchiving as felt, and anarchiving as response-ability. We examine a particular anarchiving project Instant Class Kit dedicated to radical pedagogies and social justice. Anarchiving is fundamentally about practicing an ethics based on response-ability, stewardship, care, and reciprocity that center relationships to land, territory, human, and more-than-human bodies.

In education, walking has typically been used as a pedagogical strategy to move student bodies from one point to another, emphasizing creativity, discovery, health, and mobility. Although there are important reasons to advocate for walking in schools, the tenuous link between walking and creativity can be easily commodified and normalized by neoliberalism. Further, when walking is equated with discovery and mobility it enacts a progress narrative of time. To formulate an understanding of futurity that is counter to such normative articulations, we turn to scholars who conceive of space–time outside humanist reproductive logics. If chronos time accelerates, rendering some bodies and subjects successful in schools, while simultaneously pushing other bodies and subjects ‘out of time,’ then different configurations of time are necessary in order to think otherwise about learning. In this paper, we discuss two walking research-creation projects in school contexts (elementary and secondary) that engage with counterfuturisms and queer enactments of temporality. Departing from an outcomes-based model of walking that is inscribed in neoliberal temporal schemes, we consider the complex ways that students can engage in walking as a method of inquiry into their spatio-temporal world-making.

Bodily methodologies that engage with the affective, rhythmic, and temporal dimensions of movement have altered the landscape of social science and humanities research. Walking is one such methodology by which scholars have examined vital, sensory, material, and ephemeral intensities beyond the logics of representation. Extending this rich field, this article invokes the concept trans to reconceptualize walking research through theories that attend to the vitality and agency of matter, the interconnectedness between humans and non-humans, the importance of mediation and bodily affect, and the necessity of acknowledging ethico-political responsibility. While theoretical and empirical research about embodied, emplaced, and sensorial relations between moving bodies and space are well developed in the field of walking studies, their entanglements become profoundly altered by theories of trans – transcorporeality, transspecies, and transmaterialities. Taking up trans theories we experiment in thinking-with a sonic art performance, Walking to the Laundromat, which probes bodily, affective, and gendered labour.