D.3.1 Balancing Care, Ethics, and Creative Risk Taking with Youth Co-Researchers

Gabrielle Moser & Jeff Newberry, York University

Photography and Biopolitics is a 5-year research project that asks youth co-researchers questions about their experiences of privacy, surveillance, and which bodies matter in society. Creating a podcast series that combines interviews with tech experts, academics, policy analysts and contemporary artists alongside first-hand accounts by youth, our aim is to increase public understanding of the benefits and risks of photographic exposure and to explore the ways artists and young people use glitches and hacks to speak back to photographic control. To gain an understanding of high school students’ perspective on these topics, we assembled a Youth Expert Action Group (aged 14-17) to participate in the research-creation process and to advise on salient issues based on their lived experience. Following pedagogy theorist Robert Boostrom’s distinction between safe spaces and brave spaces, our goal in involving youth in our research creation process was to provide space for them to collectively encounter and share their experiences with the difficult knowledge (Deborah Britzman) of pervasive self-surveillance practices. To, as Boostrom writes, create a space where “Learning necessarily involves not merely risk, but the pain of giving up a former condition in favour of a new way of seeing things.”1 In this spirit, we aimed to create a brave space, rather than a safe one as we navigated the process of facilitating difficult conversations within our ethical framework.

This paper reflects on our research in progress, sharing the successes and failures of balancing care, ethics and creative risk taking with youth co-researchers. Working with teenagers who are under surveillance all day at school and on public transit, and whose behaviour is under constant adult scrutiny, we felt a responsibility to invite student-led conversations outside of traditional teaching and learning spaces. Participants were invited to talk back to oppressive and discriminatory structures and speak freely on challenging and personal topics. We employed various digital, creative, and inquiry-based tools, and aspects of dialogic and critical pedagogy to encourage our Youth Expert Action Group to express themselves unreservedly, think critically, and engage bravely in meaningful conversations.

1 Boostrom, R. (1998). "Safe spaces: Reflection on an educational metaphor." Journal of Curriculum Studies, 30(4), 397-408.

keywords: youth, biopolitics, surveillance, privacy, pedagogy

D.3.2 The pursuit of ‘Joy’ in the ethico-aesthetics of research-creation

Matthew-Robin Nye, Concordia University; Curation as Research-Creation Collective (CRCC)

Throughout the month of October, I will be exhibiting a research-creation project titled Goodnight Moon: a Rhythm, a Tempo at Sunbury Shores Arts and Nature Centre in St. Andrews, New Brunswick. The work features a sustained engagement with artists and practitioners, audiences and institutions in situ and the academic and cultural milieus of Montreal, with the aim of activating the aesthetic and political potential of the source text.

Goodnight Moon (1947) by Margaret Wise Brown’s rests at a nexus of modernist literature and queerness (exemplified by direct influences of Gertrude Stein), process philosophy and its accounting for subjective experience (William James and Alfred North Whitehead), and contemporaneous radical pedagogical movements—including the Bank Street School in New York and the Montesori educational program - as demonstrated in its ‘seen-and-heard’ methodology (Lucy Sprague Mitchell, Leonard Marcus). Artistically, connections to insistence and repetition in Stein’s writing, the tutelage of Clement Hurd, Goodnight Moons’ illustrator, by French painter Fernand Léger (cubist/pop art progenitor), and the book’s environmental dramaturgies drive my curiosity. The exhibition itself is process-led, motored by a research-creation methodology: A process of making and thinking, activated at the hyphen, which “does not know itself [or its outcome] in advance” (Erin Manning, The Minor Gesture).

Using this exhibition as a case study, I will argue for an ethico-aesthetic which is particular to research-creation’s potential to alter thought itself, notably by taking ethics to be not about morality, but about joy and affirmation. Following Spinoza’s conception of joy, research-creation is a practice of speculative immanence, an unleashing of thought’s potentia in service of the immanence of thought in the act of making-thinking. Deleuze notes Spinoza’s “Ethics is a voyage of immanence; but immanence is the unconscious itself, and the conquest of the unconscious. Ethical joy is the correlate of speculative affirmation” (Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, 29). Research-creation’s ethics are a rejection of what is known and valued, favouring instead an appetite of what has not yet been thought.

keywords: ethics, research-creation, transdisciplinary art, process philosophy, pedagogy

D.3.3 Doing Research in a Good Way: Settler Responsibility to Indigenous Ethical Protocols in the Yukon

• Aubyn O’Grady, Yukon University and Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (University of Toronto)

For this panel I am proposing to present my research-creation dissertation work on the Yukon School of Visual Arts (YSOVA). Because this research takes place on the territory of a self-governing first nation and involves an organization that is co-governed by the “local” First Nation, the Trʼondëk Hwëchʼin Government is a partner on this research. As a non-Indigenous artist-researcher, with deep connections to the community where YSOVA exists, one of the questions I ask throughout this research is, “whose ethics am I accountable to?” I have signed ethics agreements with the various academic institutions I am connected to, however, for the large part, these agreements do not attend to the ethics formed in-and-of the place I am conducting research. Tr’edhude, or going through the world in a good way, is an ethical framework and plan for living derived from the land that guides Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in (McLeod & Beaumont, 2020, p. 21). It is described as “an environment, or web, that we live in and develop within ourselves and among others that allows us to flourish physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually” (McLeod & Beaumont, 2020, p. 21). These ethics are extended to humans, the land and to the non-humans who occupy the territory. As a settler, I cannot fully engage with the ethics embedded in the land here, my ethics were formed elsewhere, on different grounds. To adopt Tr’edhude as my own ethical framework would constitute appropriation. I have also come to understand that sometimes my own ethics come into tension with those of the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in. In these moments, I aim to be a respectful, (uninvited) guest and listen in relation with the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in knowledge system. With this study, I hope to provide a (hyper-localized) best-practice guidelines for settlers conducting research on the territory of a self-governing first nation.