Speculative a/r/tography
Kathryn S. Coleman, Sarah Healy, Abbey MacDonald, Peter J. Cook · Policy Press eBooks · 2024
This chapter proposes speculative a/r/tography for navigating the not yet as arts-based educational researchers. We foreground a/r/tographic inquiry as a metho-pedagogical and onto-epistemic intertwining of being an artist, researcher, and theorist – as a dynamic method of data analysis and creation, promoting the construction of knowledge through iterative, creative, and reflective arts processes. A/r/tography is captured as an active engagement with self and others, encouraging a radical togetherness and reimagining of life narratives. In this chapter we propose a metho-pedagogical lens to redefine the ‘t’ oft understood as teacher to ‘theory’ within a/r/tography. As speculators we (the authors) tackle complex issues, integrating various perspectives and cultural narratives in a playful dance between theory and practice to explore the core practices of speculative a/r/tography. Through emphasising the potential of ‘not-yet’ spaces where failure and prototyping are as vital as successes, we render the fluidity of speculative a/r/to is an invitation to weave together diverse voices, histories, and perspectives and facilitate a collaborative and participatory research model that is both relational and reciprocal. We are a/r/tographers who work in pre- and in-service teacher education in Australian universities. We write this chapter for researchers interested in encountering and conducting speculative creative inquiry. Data analysis in speculative a/r/tography is an active doing coupled with quiet reflection in the space of ‘not yet’. It is ‘less about discovering something pre-existing and more about constructing knowledge through the process itself’ (Reason, 2018, p 49). Doing data this way advances our understanding of small data via close-to-practice, aesthetically oriented, process-driven, human-scale analyses. This approach to data resists data imperialism and is decolonial, post-human, and activist in its politics – making way for a multiplicity of ontologies, knowledge systems, and methodologies. Our creative methods are informed by an interplay of methodology and pedagogy that contiguously respond to relational understandings of being an artist/researcher/theorist and the many creative (in-)betweens that being a practitioner affords. In this sense, we dance between theory and practice, whereby theory becomes data as much as the artefacts created in and through the a/r/tistic practice. As collaborators, we explore complex problems with similarly curious colleagues and students, bringing together multiple perspectives, sites, and spaces to assemble meaning (MacDonald et al, 2022). This is an important place to begin this chapter on creative data work because it positions where and how we do speculative a/r/tography and what the possibilities might be as you begin to play within creative possibilities. A/r/tography has its roots in education (see LeBlanc and Irwin, 2019). However, our particular iteration of a/r/tography transcends the disciplinary boundaries of education, living and breathing across speculative inquiry, creative methods, and creative data analysis.