Required

Day 2: Setting up Logs

Maloley, C., & Jones, C. (2018). Accessibility in the Classroom with Dr. Eliza Chandler [podcast]. https://soundcloud.com/user-305224768-967971769/2-accessibility-in-the-classroom-with-dr-eliza-chandler

• Eliza Chandler is an assistant professor at X University (formerly referred to as Ryerson). She teaches in the school of disability studies and engages prolifically with the confluences of art and disability in Canada. Her conversation with Curtis Maloley and Chelsey Jones moves from classroom and pedagogy accessibility practices to how audio media environments might change to both invite disabled participants and creators, and how to differently experience communication and interaction through sound and broadcast.

Day 3: What is available as sensory information?

Aluli-Meyer, M. (2006). Changing the culture of research: An introduction to the triangulation of meaning. Hülili: Multidisciplinary Research on Hawaiian Well-Being, 3(1), 263–279.

• Manulani Aluli-Meyer writes and speaks extensively about how she conducts research from her Indigenous Hawaiian epistemology. “[A]ll ideas, all histories, all laws, all facts, and all theories are simply interpretations… [y]our rendition of your own experience is now the point.” This paper is an excerpt from Aluli-Meyer’s (2008) chapter published in the Handbook of critical and Indigenous methodologies, which goes on to detail the triangulation of meaning as “a framework that describes the future rigor of research” through hermeneutic engagement with mind, body, and spirit (or, sensing, interpreting, and feeling). A helpful table is provided to explicate and expound on these categories. Spirit, perhaps the least accessible of the three, “is all about seeing what is significant and having the courage to discuss it.” Explained in this way, spirit is the essence of presearch. So, as we walk, let us consider all three pillars: the empirical, sensuous body; the meaning-making mind; and the spirit-fueled “answers you will remember in your dreams.”

Day 4: Photography

Walker, R. (1993). Finding a silent voice for the researcher: Using photographs in evaluation and research. In M. Schratz (Ed.), Qualitative voices in educational research (1st ed., pp. 72–92). Routledge.

• We will read this paper twice, once for Day 4: Photography, and again for Day 14: Captioning. Reading and re-reading reinforces the importance of repetition and makes explicit the themes that string the course material together. With nothing to say of ocularcentrism, Walker focuses on the subjugation of the visual in social sciences, calling writing “an apparent escape from the tyranny of empiricism.” “Voices without words,” begins Walker, whose aspiration is “to find a silent voice for the researcher” through the use of photography as a research medium. Most important for us here is not the photograph per se, but its wordlessness. In this class we have structured wordlessness into the ways you are asked to record your encounters, through media, without using words. Whether photography, audio, video, or drawing, waiting to add words until some time after the encounter has passed can touch “on the limitations of language, especially language used for descriptive purposes.” Wordless media can be keys to memory and “instrument[s] for the recovery of meaning.” Might this wordless practice lead to “ways of thinking about social life that escape the traps set by language”?

Day 5: Audio

Kanngieser, A., & Todd, Z. (2021). Listening as Relation, an Invocation. CTM Festival: Discourse Series – Critical Modes of Listening, Berlin. https://youtu.be/kGe0DYMroEg?t=4140

• It feels rude if not impossible to summarize this video compilation and two-person spoken word essay. The medium suits the method suits the content. Zoe Todd and AM Kanngieser alternate through a beautiful and important series of poetic prose snippets. In lieu of an annotation, here is an excerpt: “The kind of listening that we are attempting to theorize and play with here is unequivocally arduous, slow, and constitutes many lifetimes work and thought undertaken by many people across many places. It seeks to undo how we know, live, relate, and comport ourselves. It also seeks to undo abstractions of harm, capitalist extraction, domination, and complicity. It places us in a definitive relation with how, where, and what we inhabit and need to claim. It asks of us to really think about who is impacted by what we do. So, what is at stake then, in this listening, is a dismantling of what we think we know toward an imagination of becoming otherwise” (Todd).

Day 6: Video

Myers, N., & Liberona, A. (2017, November). Alchemical Cinema, Take 1: Nightfall in an urban oak savanah. Becoming Sensor. https://becomingsensor.com/portfolio/kinesthetic-imaging/

• Natasha Meyers in her long term project becoming sensor is interested in thinking with material environments, and specifically plants, in service of moving away from extractive practices and entering the planthroposcene: “an aspirational episteme and way of doing life in which people come to recognize their profound interimplication with plants” (Meyers, 2017, 299). This particular articulation of her process art-ifies perception and makes the choice not to engage explicitly with the politics of Land and plants that allow such creative work to emerge. This short film is an example of one of many arts-based practices that Meyers incorporates in her articulation of the planthroposcene. Clerical impressions could be as follows (though the film opens space for more whimsical interpretations): sound of walking (in the snow?); images of light squiggles; tree silhouettes in the moonlight, light stretching up and down, and sideways; sound of feet stop at some point, though I don’t realize until they start again; running sounds toward the end; and a street corner.

Liberona, A. (2010). Keepers of the Water: A Little Documentary. Wandering Eye Productions. http://www.keepersofthewater.com/home.html

• This film is a montage of 15 Indigenous youth living in Fort Chipewyan, Alberta and the Land from which they live and with which they play. What they don’t do is swim, because the water is polluted. Rates of cancer in the community are wildly high and food webs are endangered. This is a call to the people working the Alberta tar sands to stop: “they better shut down after they hear our sound,” the children rap at the end of the short film. Images of the Land are received very differently in this film than in Meyers and Liberona (2017). Here there have been no artsy interventions. We see the land, and we hear it’s in trouble.

Day 7: Drawing

Reason, M. (2018). Drawing. In C. Lury, R. Fensham, A. Heller-Nicholas, S. Lammes, A. Last, M. Michael, & E. Uprichard (Eds.), Routledge handbook of interdisciplinary research methods (pp. 47–52). Routledge.

• Reason shares his experience of and mildly advocates for the use of “draw me a picture” as a research method and methodology. Drawing, “often described as a ‘projective technique, … enable[s] participants to ‘project’ their feelings through mediating activity.” While they criticize drawing as a “magical process that is revelatory of inner or authentic truths,” Reason understands “draw me a picture” as having the “potential to produce different kinds of insights and understandings.” Highlighted here is drawing’s unique characteristic of involving both duration and immediacy, allowing corrugation to occur within the time period that a drawing is being created. “It is at once an active doing an also a quieter, reflective thinking. Through this duration it is possible for thoughts, realizations or insights to come into knowing in a manner that is less about discovering something pre-existing and more about constructing knowledge through the process itself.” Reason expands the definition of drawing to “[v]isual or expressive ‘mark making'” (emphasis added), which both allows for activities and outcomes such as collage and opens up space for drawing to be a meaning-full activity for those who are blind or partially sighted and may not think of the act of drawing as visual (though Reason does not address this later point).

Day 8: Walking

Burke, G., Lasczik Cutcher, A., Peterken, C., & Potts, M. (2017). Moments of (aha!) walking and encounter: Fluid intersections with place. International Journal of Education Through Art, 13(1), 111–122.

• This piece, part photo essay and part paper, is both an articulation and example of a methodological “provocation of playfulnes” through “walking and mapping in singular and collaborative encounters with place.” Similar to our Attentive Repetition mandate, the authors begin with a provocation: “Walk collaboratively, apart and together… sensually cognizant and engaged. Find and extend your creative consequences through individual and collaborative means in dialogue, both visual and poetic.” Informed by a/r/tography, their practice explores embodied attentiveness beyond the human experience, resulting in poetic photo compositions, one part of which speaks to corrugation: “pleating” (119).

Day 9: Repetition

No reading assigned.

Day 10: Duration

McCloud, S. (1993). Blood in the Gutter. In Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (pp. 60–93). Tundra Publishing.

• After some existential musing, McCloud moves from the fragmented nature of perception to peek-a-boo, all in the name of closure, “the phenomenon of observing the parts but perceiving the whole.” What happens, as we refer to it in his course, in the meantime: between panels in a comic, between walks, or between encounters? Focusing on fragmented images and how fragments can be put together to in different patterns for different closure effects, this chapter from his book “Understanding Comics” speaks well beyond the medium of comics.

Dolmage, J.T. (2014). For Matt Dolmage. In Disability Rhetoric (n.p.). Syracuse University Press.

• This is a dedication poem. J.T. Dolmage writes to a close friend or relative in admiration and memory. Dolmage brings together words and duration: “you have to pause to talk.” They identify the importance of the pause, as a communication and rhetorical tool as one alternative to words–others are “birds, horns, wide-wale/ corduroy, the wind of passing trains.” Through respect for the pause and the tactile nature of Matt’s communication, Dolmage folds time over into itself: “instantly it’s not a memory/ so long as I count the gears and floors out loud.”

Day 11: Making and holding time and space

Semenec, P. (2021). Earthworks in the school playground: Cultivating an “arts of attentiveness” with children’s (art) making practices. In Visual Arts with Young Children (pp. 73–84). Routledge.

• It begins with an account of solicitation: “I suddenly notice a colorful arrangement of flower petals, berries, rocks, and twigs on the side of the path.” Our goal as educators and researchers, Semenec tells us, is “to attend better to … encounters of making,” and, I would add, unmaking, “and to notice more carefully what other worlds might be taking shape.” This piece is about a researcher realizing the importance of attending to the ways of being of those with whom they wish to work. In this case those beings are children, in a playground, making “earthworks.”  In this class we too are making earthworks of a sort, for though earthworks are defined as “requir[ing] intervention,” and it may not seem that a sound recording, video clip, sketch, or photograph could be considered an intervention, they must. It is valuable to understand that encountering is intervening. There is no passive and inconsequential attending. I challenge the reader to think through child and researcher at the same time, to tune into the Land as first teacher that is prominent here though unnamed. Perhaps we can take inspiration from Semenec’s citation of Rautio (2013, 4): “Children, like any beings, might not need support in encountering the world and expressing to others something of these encounters–this takes place anyway. … They might need an adult to take seriously the things and actions with which they encounter their worlds.”

Day 14: Captioning

Walker, R. (1993). Finding a silent voice for the researcher: Using photographs in evaluation and research. In M. Schratz (Ed.), Qualitative voices in educational research (1st ed., pp. 72–92). Routledge.

• Walker uses a case study of photographing high school students going about their daily business. Despite the “heavy cultural traffic” carried by these image, there is no discussion of ethics approval or consent from those photographed to distribute the photos included in the paper. Though benevolent, this research would not be doable today. Revisiting this paper for our first class in the Language unit, lets us think about the wordlessness of the media with which we are now so regularly engaging. If Walker is right that, “[w]hat is important is not the image in itself so much as the relationship between the image and the ways we make sense of it and the ways in which we value it,” then what is happening in making sense of these images? And How does language play a role in that process? “Susan Sontag,” Walker explains without citation, “has pointed out that the taking of a photograph is not simply the mechanical process it sometimes seems but is capable of generating surprises.” Have you found this to be true? What about when it comes time to make a Log post; are you sometimes surprised by what it is that comes to mind to write as the caption? “[P]hotographs are not just about the things that they portray but also about the ways in which we make sense of them.”

Day 15: Describing

Mills, M. (2015). Listening to Images: Audio Description, the Translation Overlay, and Image Retrieval. The Cine-Films, 8. http://www.thecine-files.com/listening-to-images-audio-description-the-translation-overlay-and-image-retrieval/

Day 16: Silence

No reading assigned.

Day 18: Encounter(ing)

Hildyard, D. (2020, April 13). Negative Love. Emergence Magazine. https://emergencemagazine.org/essay/negative-love/

• A podcast/essay about multi-species encounter and entanglement. Hildyard begins describing an encounter with an ash tree and thoughts of its death. She then flows through connections from ash to cow to globalization to COVID-19, with numerous stop along the way. These connections are each their own story of encounter and all encompassed in a framework of the negative: negative action, that which is not done; negative space, that which is not there; negative zones, spaces unthought by humans. This negativity draws out the not-yet-ness of the education of attention, the potential perception, the negative noticing that may be shown “in relief” through attentive engagement.

Day 19: Story(ing)

Jacobs, G., Reasonover, D., Mars, R., Fournet, M., & Pascal, P. (2021). Roman Mars On The Anatomy Of A Good Story [podcast]. https://www.stitcher.com/show/periodic-talks-1995038/episode/roman-mars-on-the-anatomy-of-a-good-story-w-michelle-fournet-roman-mars-pedro-pascal-200230334

• Fournet talks about her work as a marine scientist and Mars speaks to his work as a storyteller. Both of these activities are about learning from the environments in which we live. Each guest tells an origin stories about the curiosities that drive their work. Fournet has a specific research agenda, to improve the well-being of whales in the world’s oceans. She speaks directly to the charisma of her other-than-human research collaborators and tells us her job is to “do good and tell the truth,” that we need both of those things in science (and research more generally). Mars, in answer to the question “how do you know which details are important and which ones matter,” states: “You make the story you want to hear so you look for the details that excite you … those usually aren’t themes, they’re usually not the most important thing necessarily … that little detail that decodes the world in an interesting way.”

Day 20: Corrugation

Armstrong, J. (2006). Water is siwlk^w. In R. Boelens, M. Chiba, & D. Nakashim (Eds.), Water and Indigenous Peoples (Vol. 2, pp. 18–19). UNESCO.

Day 21: Extension in theory

Aluli-Meyer, M. (2008). Indigenous and authentic: Hawaiian epistemology and the triangulation of meaning. In Norman K. Denzin, Yvonna S. Lincoln, & Linda Tuhiwai Smith (Eds.), Handbook of critical and Indigenous methodologies (pp. 217–232). SAGE publications.

• Fitting for this context is an abstract that ends, “So, put on the tea. Here we go.” After reading an excerpt from this chapter on Day 3, we revisit Manulani Aluli-Meyer’s “triangulation of meaning” between body, mind, and spirit. This curriculum has been much inspired by Aluli-Meyer’s writing, which is clear from her pithy prefigured course description: “Knowing with land should help you find out more about your own self, and when that process begins as a researcher, you start to open your own phenomenological inquiry into your origins of space.” Today we are thinking about extension. “Knowledge that endures,” Aluli-Meyer explains, “is spirit driven. It is a life force connected to all other life forces. It is more an extension than it is a thing to accumulate.” Extension is movement and change simultaneous with capacity to navigate the new. Ingersoll (2016) calls this literacy, “a way of knowing that can be translated into other contexts” (30). This spirit-driven knowledge of extension emerges through “the intentionality of process, the value and purpose of meaning, and the practice of mindfulness.”

Day 22: What does all/any of this have to do with research?

Wilson, D. D., & Restoule, J.-P. (2010). Tobacco ties: The relationship of the sacred to research. Canadian Journal of Native Education, 33(1), 29.

• Research practices and findings are shaped by the ways in which researchers have been educated, throughout our lives, to receive and integrate sensory information. That is to say, how our attentions have been educated and what arts of attentiveness we have learned to practice and incorporated into our praxis. The majority of researchers publishing peer-reviewed scholarship today do so while associated with institutions, such as universities, to which they are often accountable for output and impact. Sometimes the weight of this institutional accountability can lead to runaway research agendas unrealistic for the research assemblage of choice. This article describes an example of how researchers can catch themselves in running away with an agenda and recenter through respectful relations and attention to context.

Day 23: Extension in practice

Hutton, N., & Hess, T. (2019, June 13). GUTS. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/591640/recycling-plastics/