Artistic Research as a Seminal Series ARSENAL

ARSENAL: Making Meaning of Artistic Research Professor Tone Pernille Østern

NAFA inaugurated the first session ARSENAL (Artistic Research is Seminal) series with Professor Tone Pernille Østern, an active Artist/Researcher/Teacher with a special interest in socially engaged (dance) art, dance in dialogue with contemporary contexts, choreographic processes, performative research, and bodily learning.

In this session, Professor Østern shared her perspective of artistic research, its key characteristics, and defined the paradigm of performative research with reference to a forthcoming publication. Building on the writings of Haseman, Bolt and Arlander, Professor Østern discussed at length about performative research as a paradigm, challenging the traditional ways of qualitative and quantitative research. This led Professor Østern to share her own choreographic self-study which culminated in two outputs – one artistic, by way of a 10 February 2021

toddler performance called “Oranges and Lemon"(2001), and the other, a reflection based on the choreographic self-study conducted.

As the inaugural kick-off to ARSNEAL, the broad strokes in this seminar would set an intonation for the performative paradigm to provide a space and framework for subsequent sessions that would explore the different facets of artistic research.

ARSENAL: Dis/Entanglements of Research with the Arts in Multi-Professional Teams Dr Sofia Jusslin

In the second session of NAFA’s ARSENAL series, Dr Sofia Jusslin, a postdoctoral researcher in education shared the outcomes of her recent dissertation Dancing/reading/ writing: Performative potentials of intraactive teaching pedagogies expanding literacy education. The session was organised in two parts: first, covering the context of the research (which Jusslin loosely called disentanglements), and the entanglements that were experienced by those involved in the research.

Sharing from her past experience with Education Design Research (EDR), Dr Jusslin likened the researcher to “a fly on the wall”, like an outsider, while the educator that implemented “the design and doing the teaching” (Iverson & Jonsdottir, 2018). This led her to explore the possibilities of artsbased research (ABR) as an alternative. As Dr Jusslin combined both research methodologies in this research, she was also conscious that she lacked the formal training of an artist, a dancer in this case. This naturally led to the question: who may conduct ABR? Dr Jusslin found her assurance in Patricia Leavy’s opinion that if one were to embark on ABR, and does not have the formal artistic training, one can immerse oneself in the craft through various ways – through literature review, examples from the field, taking classes, and/or collaborating with artists (Leavy, 2020).

Dr Jusslin shared her experience of dis/entanglements to highlight "the entanglements are also entangled with each other, affecting each other in multiple ways”, a manifestation of agential cuts, a concept by Karen Barad.

Concluding the session, the Q&A segment had a myriad of questions ranging from Dr Jusslin’s research, ABR itself and how it can further impact teacher education. In light of the current pandemic, there was also a question on whether such (embodied) research can be done in a virtual space.

ARSENAL: Performative Autoethnography Runa Hestad Jenssen (Nord University)

The third instalment of NAFA’s ARSENAL series saw Runa Hestad Jenssen take a more performative, and multidisciplinary approach in her sharing. The session opened with a performance of two traditional pieces on the Hardingfele (or hardanger fiddle in English), a traditional Norwegian instrument. The performance provided an insight to a slice of Runa’s identity and heritage, providing the springboard for the seminar.

Runa weaved together words and pictures (mostly drawn by her friend Ingvild), in a story-telling fashion, providing an added dimension to allow her attendees to be part of her world. Starting with her research interest as soprano, she shared a series of drawings to connect between being a soprano and moving into her researcher voice. By so doing, she expanded her ways of knowing – a knowing through being. In turn, such insights offered epistemological and ontological ways of thinking for those experiencing similar encounters. “ I was sitting reading about how to do research, how to do interviews, how to transcribe, how to organize and make categories. It was so difficult for me. I was reading about I needed to be objective researcher. Is that even possible? I was having worries about representation, what experiences could I represent? But I was really sure that I wanted to challenge the dominant approach to teaching and researching the singing voice.”

Runa Jenssen

ARSENAL: Learning to unlearn: failing with arts-based participatory research Gry Ulrichssen

Failures offer a possibility to unlearn, to learn how to learn again. In this seminar, Gry traced her own research practice in a process of un-learning from an individual self-reflexive approach to one of diffractive practice, where different knowledges and different knowledge resources are explored and developed. As one strives to unlearn, the possibilities of unlearning gives one the chance to interrogate one’s own positionality, and to disrupt from a eurocentric, theoretical, epistemological and methodological aspects of science and of art itself. This allows us to critically scrutinize the complicity, practices, theories and methods within the arts and the arts education embody.

As an artist-researcher, she struggled to find methodologies, frameworks within methodologies, scientific methodologies that goes hand in hand with how the artist works, and still being applicable. She shared how an arts-based methods can hold the potential to lower hierarchies, increase multi-vocality, and develop new and more transparent forms of participatory research and interventions in the field. In her own words: “It is a continuous struggle to develop other mediating knowledge resources to link the material, the discursive, the practical, and the reflexive. And to develop methods that emerges from the Arts, and from the discipline that are being investigated.”

Gry’s striving towards the participatory paradigm turned her attention to the relational aspects between people, materials, discourses. And in the process of trying to build the collective, she struggled with the co-construction of knowledge. She reminisced that in the discourse on art- based participatory research, there is somehow a naive and romantic approaches to the use of terms, like participants as coresearchers, non-hierarchical relationships, people’s pedagogy, public scholarship, equal collaboration with non-academic participants, and co-constructing knowledge.

ARSENAL: Engaging with a Reflective Matrix for Artistic Research

Dr Danielle Shannon Treacy (University of the Arts, Helsinki)

In the fifth session of NAFA’s ARSENAL series, Dr Danielle Shannon Treacy, provided an overview of a reflective matrix that focused on ensemble practices, teamwork and collaborative learning in the arts, and its potential for artistic research. The matrix was developed based on the recognised need to reimagine and deepen reflective practice in higher arts education as explicit, collaborative, and integrally connected to artistic practice. It was created through an extensive critical analysis of literature on ensemble practices and teamwork in dance, music, theatre, and visual fine arts, and refined against interviews with twelve University of the Arts Helsinki professors and lecturers.

Dr Traecy delved into the rationale and process of developing the matrix, highlighting that with collaborative ways of working on multi/inter/transdisciplinary levels being prevalent, it is crucial that artists are able to develop reflective skills not just in their own practice, but with other practices too. This would facilitate specific observations from artists that could translate into meaningful exchanges between disciplines. The matrix could also be used for pedagogical purposes, where it could be used as a tool/extension to enhance pedagogical approaches for teaching team work and collaborative learning in higher arts education.

A post-ARSENAL survey conducted at the end of the session conveyed that colleagues had developed valuable insights and potential on the uses of the matrix. Some were taken by how the matrix was constructed to take into consideration other artistic context beyond music. Others felt that with this matrix, reflecting in a collaborative project could be "well structured and meaningful”, where “re-thinking that could be exemplified into useful actions later on”. Colleagues saw the possibility of encouraging students to use this reflective matrix while embarking on research projects, or even as a checkpoint for collaborative learning.