D.6.1 PROTOHYVE: Creating constellations of care and making

• Emma Biberdorf, Carleton University

Inspired by a series of Research-Creation roundtables at the University Art Association of Canada (UAAC) PROTOHYVE seeks to create a constellation of artists, curators, scholars, and professionals to share resources across so called Canada.

Research-creationists who have attended UAAC Research-Creation Caucus Roundtables have outlined a lack of consistent guidelines for graduate student project assessment; a lack of exhibition space; limited access to research journals and publication opportunities; misunderstandings of research-creation as a methodology from supervisors and colleagues; limited funding opportunities; no training frameworks for undergraduate students practicing research-creation; limited supervision by faculty with experience in research-creation, and minimal examples and support for artist-scholars seeking research ethics board approval.

This talk will demonstrate the ways that PROTOHYVE has worked collectively with artists, curators, students, and parapublic institutions in so called Canada to generate new ways of engaging with and support research-creationists nationally.

keywords: research-creation, artwork, collaboration, ethics, graduate students, collaboration

D.6.2 Research-queeration as methodology

Stephen Severn, OCAD University

My creative practice engages with human-object relations; I work with objects through the interdisciplinary processes of casting, assemblage, installation, photography, and prose. My studio-based research, in support of my MFA at OCAD University, relied heavily on a research-creation framework which supported an animate and energetic relational collaboration between myself and materials, objects, and processes. These processes, these research-creation events, challenged a separation between thinking and making in my practice. But it was not all thinking and making material creation events; the bulk of my thesis research was composed of long bouts of sitting and thinking about/with objects: in disorientation. Sara Ahmed’s theory of queer phenomenology helped me to understand how this disorientation contributes to my overall methodology, which (to coin a neologism) might be better described as one of research-queeration.

For me, a research-queeration methodology provides a framework for working with objects that fail to extend oneself into spaces using heteronormative lines of force. Alternately, my practice involves a turn towards objects that are exterior to the normative, in the background, or not typically visible—objects that may be experienced as disorientation, yet have the potential to extend a person’s line in new and unpredictable ways.

The trajectory of my Master’s research was extended in ways I could not have anticipated were it not for queer phenomenological orientations to objects and materials through research-creation making events in a research-queeration methodological framework—highlighting possible new directions for incorporating research-creation into creative practice and academia.

keywords: research-queeration, queer phenomenology, creative practice, methodology, academia

D.6.3 Learning and Doing the Art of Identity (Re)Construction: A research creation project with racialized migrant emerging artists

Nurgül Rodriguez, University of Calgary

In this research paper, I as a first year PhD student would like to discuss and explore the tension that arouse my professional identity as an artist and an art educator in international school and environment. I want to draw on the concept of research-creation as a method and/or methodology for my doctoral research and my continuing learning and teaching experience as a graduate student. Thus, I focus on my research-creation project and the issue of adapting art-making and creative research methods in both art and education.

My research focuses on the transformative role of art and aesthetics while I focus on a research-creation methodological approach to strive to work with refugee and asylum seeker artists in Calgary, Alberta. My educational research is started interrogating how I can suggest that the combination of narratives and art becomes a potential place and space for transformative possibilities through listening and sharing their experience in an environment as studio-based art practices. More specifically, drawing upon Theodor Adorno’s (1997) Aesthetics Theory, Hanna Meretoja’s (2018) Storytelling and Ethics: Literature, Visual Arts, and Power of Narrative, and Sara Ahmed (2017) The Cultural Politics of Emotion, I aim to discuss the methodological contribution of combining narratives with art forms in creating a “placemaking” and affective studies. Bringing a dialogue and narratives to connect them around the themes of transnational identities, home and belonging is my research aim. Working within the area displacement, forced migration, and human rights, I am looking for the role of the art, artists, and art educators in the process of social inclusion. The transformative role of art and aesthetics is critical for creating spaces for dialogue practice through participatory methodologies.

keywords: research-creation, displacement, transformative learning, aesthetics, affect, placemaking, belonging