Bits of the RD2 I liked

I read the RD2 there were lots of typos and it seemed rushed - it was rushed at the end though and was written for purpose - most of the bits I liked were bastard remnants of earlier version.  It is not a document I'm very proud of - the distance does not make it any better - it holds the sadness of capitulation.

here are a few bits - maybe I will not have to read the whole thing again for a while.

The Abstract wasn't to bad I thought it had moved away from where I was but actually it still covers everything - I think I have come on a long way since I wrote it and all sorts of ways but I can't actually write down what they are.

Abstract

This study investigates the potential of the artist’s residency as a research practice in relationships to place and community. Acknowledging the broad context, history and contested definitions of what it can mean to be “in residence”, it will analyse specifically how the material dimension of visual art can operate as a method of understanding community.  The study will focus on self build and loose parts play activities at an adventure playground. Drawing on new-materialist thinking within educational research the study will contribute to this field through exploring the situated role of the artist residency within a site of informal learning (Ellsworth, 2005).

An initial literature review will locate the historical definitions of the artist’s residency in the context of knowledge production and artists’ relationship to place (Casey, 1997, Bishop,2012). The study seeks to work through my visual arts practice, which explores ideas of materials, making and community at the intersection or agential cut (Barad, 2007) between artistic ways of knowing and social research. This will take place in two sites of artistic practice. These are; working alongside Dr Abigail Hackett in a playgroup in Eastwood, Rotherham in partnership with Rotherham Museums (www.rotherham.gov.uk/museums) and as artist in residence at Pitsmoor Adventure Playground (pitsmooradventure.org)

My intention is to contribute to the field of educational research drawing on new materialist theory (Bennett, 2010 Barad, 2007) and creative practice while working as artist/researcher. I will use an ethnographic approach working with Visual, sensory approaches  (Pink 2013, 2015). I will explore how the diffractive ethnographic lens can enable an understanding of a complex entangled assemblage (Gullion, 2018).  These research methods will allow me to adopt a new materialist orientation to each site. This study will contribute to the increasing body of research that uses and explores artistic ways of knowing within educational research (Springay, 2011 Atkinson, 2018, Manning, 2016).

The relationship between theory and practice within artistic approaches to teaching and learning provides the rationale for conducting this study within the domain of educational research I will explore how art making relates to materiality, through the concept of the assemblages and how this impacts on artistic approaches to research.  I will be working, as artist in residence at both sites and my work will involve building and making with young people.  A new materialist approach affords an opportunity to explore how art and research are entangled. I will be operating in both realms at the same time within a single project between material outcomes.  New materialist thinking brings into question the specialist artist working to author individual works of art. It provides a way to see everything in the world as more equal and independent, yet active and connected. However, the idea of authorship remains part of arts practice; it can offer a place of resistance affording alternative ways of encountering, knowing and doing. This study will challenge how I understand my practice in arts education and research, it will work with ideas that emerge from the residencies and shape its outcomes to fit with what makes sense within the context in which they emerge. It will focus on participants, the materials, practices and practical applications; it proposes a hopeful trajectory for research.

This study starts with an entanglement with place, practice and research; it is unapologetically messy with threads that flow in many directions in both space and time.  The work at Pitsmoor Adventure Playground presents the potential to work with Karen Barad’s proposition of the agential cut (Barad 2010).  The artist’s residency is a self-contained set of actions that involve the space of the playground in all its relations. It is an event that is constituted from the traditions of the adventure play movement, community arts, socially engaged practice, the artistic residency, outdoor play, children’s geographies, the physical material of the site and the histories and plasticity of the materials that will come into view.  The research of this study presents an assemblage that will necessarily entangle itself with specific aspects of the residency yet create a series of agential cuts both within the fields of practice and at a distance. Holding these two aspects of the project in flow will require an ability to create a single field of enquiry and a jumping of scale. 

Erin Manning (Manning 2016) suggests that it does not require new methods rather it needs a ‘re-accounting of what writing can do in the process of thinking and doing’.  Research no longer sits apart from its relationship to knowledge, writing and making as lived experience are unsettled. Research Creation affords useful discussions of how the arts are positioned as legitimising spaces of difference, transgression and resistance to established ways of knowing and doing. 

This bit might be useful to remember;

Working within a frame of residency as method requires a location of the individual artist that takes into account philosophical approaches that present flat ontologies and problematize the human as privileged actor within the social space. This orientation towards the material world of event and affect is taken up in field of ethnographic research by Jessica Gullion in her book Diffractive Ethnography (Gullion 2017). Here she draws on the work of new materialist thinkers including Jane Bennett and Karen Barad to help us to re-engage with ethnographic approaches that question dominant modes of scientific human-oriented ways of understanding the world.  I will develop my methods of research in the field within an ethnographic tradition of trying to describe in detail what I see as happening. I will do this in appropriate ways that include taking detailed field notes and employing visual and sensory approaches. (Pink 2008). Because I will be exploring how young people interact with and build with materials, I will take an age-appropriate collaborative ethnographic approach that will draw on my experience as an artist researcher and will include audio recording and community film making.  All these methods will be imagined as part of an assemblage research machine that will fully integrate with all the work at the site of study.