Immersion: Comparative Literature Studies

In this factionalised script, I provide a review of the Critical Autoethnography (CAE) Conference, which took place in Melbourne, Australia, July 21-22, 2016. Participants gathered from across the globe to discuss the themes of affect, animacies, and objects from a critical autoethnographic vantage point.

[onto]Riffology, a “plug in and play” method of inquiry that riffs across technological platforms and with all manner of material, finds easy resonance in mashup and remix, and we turn our riffological sights to the Vancouver Art Gallery which hosted MashUp[1] from February 20th through June 12th, 2016. Creative and combinatorial, mashup is identifiable in popular discourse as fundamentally humanist and epistemological in nature; however, as an interdisciplinary, ontological practise of repurposing and reconstituting, acts of mashup also exist in geological activity, far outside of humanity, and here we apply ontological focus through riffological measures. We are interested not in seeing merely what is being exhibited, but deterritorializing what is being curated. Our emergent senses of new materialisms inform our riffology here as we ceaselessly (re)encounter the exhibition; experienced as a riff arcadeof dream like experience that one mayn’t exit; like the arcades of Benjamin’s mammoth project of 1927 to 1940.

We interweave arts-based inquiry, painting, and autoethnography, to critically examine one researcher's fearful narratives around cancer, death, dying, and family myths. These methods give us the distance to deconstruct Christine's past schema in order to take away its powerful influence on her life. This destabilized illness narrative leads to a transformational narrative of peace. Arts-based inquiry invites the viewer/reader to engage in similar acts of deconstruction and transformation.

In this paper, the author employs concrete research poetry as a visual representation of a metaphor analysis. Using autoethnographic methods, she explores the experiences of eight single mothers of children and young adults with mental illness. She conducts a metaphor analysis of semi-structured interview data and generates concrete poetic structures from metaphors that emerged from the data. In the process, she transforms data into art.

This purpose of this inquiry is to explore how an a/r/tographic model of shared inquiry led to deeper insights about learner-centered pedagogy. Invited to teach and redesign a very large ‘Art & Society: Visual Arts’ course at a large university with a 21st century issues-based focus, together with my commitment as a constructivist, learner-centered teacher, the current phenomenological study was born. The phenomena studied was whether a large, lecture-style class taught from a more non-traditional, non-lecture, art-as-experience, learner-centered epistemology might affect students’ balanced thinking and perceptions about their learning. Students’ perceptions, along with the regulatory role of emotions, are critical factors in motivation and behavior; students’ self-beliefs about learning and their capabilities affect their behavior, resilience, and persistence in the face of challenge.