A/r/tography: When Teacher, Researcher, and Artist Roles Combine

France, 2009: I took a travel writing class with instructor Catherine Watson and peer Susan Biel Kerly, along with several art students from Brown University. We spent a week on an artist's colony in the Douaarnenez, France, followed by a few days in Paris. I got to experience the Latin Quarter, Shakespeare and Company, the Impressionist museum, and a region of France that inspired impressionistic paintings, all well before I turned 30. I count myself lucky. That summer was the first time I, without knowing it, dappled with elements of a/r/tography, which I would later read about much later. Additonally, I turned some of the travel experiences I had during college and in my earlier twenties into art. Photographs and old journal entries served as my guides, along with pieces of my memory and snippets of conversations remembered. Journal entries and photographs can turn experiences into art, facts into arts-based research, and blur the line between fact and fiction, Truth and truth.

Irwin, R. & Springgay, S. (2008). Artography as practice-based research. Arts-based research in education: Foundations for practice. Eds. Melisa Cahnman-Taylor & Richard Siegesmund. New York: Routledge. 

Bickel, B. (2008). Who will read this body? An a/r/tographic statement.  Arts-based research in education: Foundations for practice. Eds. Melisa Cahnman-Taylor & Richard Siegesmund. New York: Routledge. 

The roles of teacher, artist, and researcher combine in this methodology, which is why I am drawn to it. These chapters explain that embodiment and critical hermeneutics both influence a/r/tography, along with the desire to use photographs and various forms writing to tell stories. Data collection occurs, as in any form of qualitative research, through such means as photographs, journal entries, artifacts, and interviews. Such artistic forms as music, poetry, student journal entries, painting, and narratives can represent the data. When I first started writing creative nonfiction, I relied on past diary entries and photographs to help me tell my story. The same can be done through a/r/tographic research.  

Many people think of a/r/tographers as practitioners, as they use their arts-based research to teach people about voices and accounts that otherwise might remain unheard. Additionally, a/r/tography can be emancipatory, particularly when it encourages women to escape patriarchal definitions of female roles. It also allows for alternative representations of time, as "artists, poets, performance artists, novelists, and musicians perceive time and space differently. They often speak of time as pausing, enduring, changing interrupting, and pacing, and speak of space as openness, fragmented, endless, confined, and connected. Artists see time and space as conditions for living, conditions for engaging with the world through inquiry" (Irwin & Springgay, 2008, p. 114). Metaphor plays a strong role in such inquiry, along with community. An artist's work is related to interaction with others, which is why it is important to dialogue about our work with each other and with the public community. A/r/tographers should be people who are interested in inquiry and in discussion of how we can continue to move artistic and research fields forward.  

A/r/tography, to me, has roots in hermeneutics, semiotics, and ethnography, all of which I am learning about in my Qualitative Research Traditions course. The added element is the aspect of musical, poetic, creative, or visual expression.  To me, an ideal way of putting this methodology into practice would be to use photographs and interviews combined to tell of a life-changing study abroad experience through prose poems and memoirs.  Through doing so, I would hope to become a greater advocate for abroad travel in a world where only about 10 percent of people have a passport and a proponent of scholastic study abroad programs, particularly for artistic students.