Dear Reader: I’m currently not writing much on Research Notes as I am enrolled in a Master of Art in Art Education program at NSCAD University in Halifax, NS. But here’s the beginning of a short series titled “Dear Carrie” for which the newsletter seemed a perfect vehicle.
Screenshot of a post on Instagram by @spuriouscarrie (Carrie, there are so many pictures of abandoned mattresses in your feed/Vancouver, but in Halifax, I don’t recall seeing any abandoned mattresses so far!!)
November 8, 2022
Dear Carrie,
Look familiar? Yes, that’s from your Instagram. I’ve been looking at your stream and thinking about my community mapping project for a class in my MA. I am exploring the question “how do you conceptualize community?” To begin to answer this, I am developing an inquiry practice which could be called walking research-creation, or it could be called a/r/tography. Both are methodologies (I hope I won’t bore you with this but writing this out helps me think through it). Even though you don’t know it, I am walking with you—you’re in my head. My mind flips back and forth—Vancouver/Halifax…which is home, where do I belong? What does community mean to me? Where and how do I find it? Carrie, all of this makes me think how you yourself embody the walking researcher role. You walk critically. You trouble Vancouver’s mainstream image of a beautiful city with a striking backdrop of the mountains; a city, they tell us, where you can go skiing in the morning and walk along the seawall in the afternoon. But who gets to do those things? Not the subjects of your research. They’re the other Vancouver (or one of the many others). The gritty, filthy, lost Vancouver that tries to communicate with someone if only they’d listen. But you listen, you notice, and you dialogue in your own very unique way. And me, how am I in dialogue with Halifax? I don’t know. I think it takes a while to develop a relationship with a new place. I’ve been walking downtown where the school is, but I’ve been frustrated with those walks. Carrie, there are no back alleys here! Practically none! I miss back alleys! I miss the way you can avoid traffic and people and get a different look at the city. Looking at your Instagram brings me back to that place, that city—I realize now how well I know that place, and that the history I have with it is not nothing. It goes back to 1980. I’ve had many coffees with you there. I wish we could have one now and talk about this. We first met at a networking event (2010ish?) at one of the character older buildings on Hastings Street (I think). Do you remember? I noticed your cool skirt which you said you got in Montreal when you were studying there. We talked about that and I’ve no idea what else. It’s funny the things that stick in your head.
But…I should backtrack a bit and expand on a couple of words I dropped above. Research-creation is a method of research that combines creative inquiry with scholarly research. Kind of what I’m attempting here…going on walks but walking critically, what do I notice, what do I not notice and why? I’m walking with awareness, making field notes, audio recordings, collecting data (not in the traditional sense), connecting my walks and your walks, reading scholarly works, connecting ideas, troubling assumptions, or at least trying to. “Research-creation can be described as the complex intersection of art, theory, and research” (WalkingLab, 2021—there’s a series of podcasts there that I think you’ll find interesting.)
And what the heck is a/r/tography? This too is a methodology, it blends art, research, and pedagogy. “A/r/tography is an arts-based form of inquiry that disrupts standardized criteria of research while evoking and provoking alternate possibilities for understanding.”[1] A/r/tography is a term that has come out of academics/researchers at UBC. This connection to UBC is funny…not only do you work there but I took some courses way back in the art education department and met a woman who it turns out, has done her PHD with my current professor for this project. Academia, I realize as I write this, is currently a (temporary) community for me…I am thinking along and with it… at the moment I am connected to it, it is engaging me.
More thoughts next time. Keep on walking,
Laura.
[1] https://oxfordre.com/education/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190264093.001.0001/acrefore-9780190264093-e-393#acrefore-9780190264093-e-393-div1-2