Rita Irwin

This dissertation engages with the work of Hannah Arendt as the backbone of this study to question what it means to act for the love of the world at the intersections of art, aesthetics, education, philosophy, and politics. I delve into some of the contentious aspects of her political theory and philosophy as entry points to probe into what it means to respond to world events aesthetically and educationally.This dissertation consists of two parts. In Part I, I explicate why it matters to think with Arendt, one of the most idiosyncratic thinkers of the 20th century. To do so, I first discuss three of what I call Arendt’s un/identified methods: existing in excess as a work of art, engaging in the activity of thinking, and critiquing and prying lose the rich and the strange as a pearl diver. I follow this account with my re-interpretation of her assertion that education is pre-political and must be conservative, as education is that which occurs between Arendt’s notion of the first miracle and the second miracle. Part II transitions into the public, political realm. I begin by placing a spotlight on some of the artworks from the Sichuan earthquake project led by Chinese contemporary artist Ai Weiwei. I then examine contentious aspects of what is considered a suitable political art from the multiple perspectives of political theorists, political philosophers, art critics, and art theorists. To further think critically about Arendt’s notion of political action, I consider her critics’ views on the inadequacy of her thoughts for today’s political sphere and use their criticisms to lay out some of the most fundamental aspects of her work. I contend that Arendt’s scholarly endeavor was neither to incite a new revolution nor to suggest a blueprint of any kind via aestheticizing action. I conclude the study with what Arendt meant by amor mundi (love of the world), or to be concerned for the world, and what we might learn from it.

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In this dissertation, I seek to understand how creative engagement with photo-based memory work might evoke meaningful experiences of teaching, learning, and making and provoke critical, contemporary conversations on ethics in photography and art education. Drawing on my experiences as a photo educator, art teacher educator, curator, and photographer, I situate this study as a photographic inquiry through an a/r/tographic lens, considering the ways photo-based memory work might be generative as an artistic, emotive practice and a pedagogical possibility with ethical implications. I explore my research question alongside a creative community of practice, a group of artists and educators who came together after a course I taught at UBC in 2015, EDCP 405 Visual Arts for Classroom Practice: New Media and Digital Processes. To consider the potential of photo-based memory work and visual lifewriting, we participated in a group exhibition entitled Against Disappearance: A Photographic Search for Memory, an exhibit from May 20th – August 25th, 2016 at UBC’s Liu Institute Lobby Gallery. This exhibition offered thirty-six photographs and one sculpture, highlighting a series of juxtaposed viewpoints on the concept of disappearance from eight unique visual perspectives. As a/r/tographic artifacts, I studied closely the artwork and writing from the show and a series of generative conversations from focus groups and individual interviews for their nuance and narrative. Threading together my poetic observations, our artwork, artist statements, and conversational excerpts, I present the data in the creative form of a lexicon: a fragmented, alphabetical whole that gestures towards an emergent a/r/tographic language for photography. In an extended act of tracing pedagogy beyond classrooms, my research suggests the vibrant potential of a/r/tography for bringing artists and educators together beyond coursework to engage in collaborative art making projects that materialize as significant experiential learning events. New a/r/tographic understandings emerge from this study in a series of artful propositions based on offerings around the notion of trace, expanding vocabularies of possibility for photo-based memory work. This study illuminates the lexicon and exhibition as promising artistic forms for photographic theory, practice, and creation and highlights the potency of a/r/tography as a creative research methodology of potential.

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Drawing from the autobiographical context of impossibility to know and understand a suicide loss, this writing traces concept-based (Bal, 2002, 2009) paths for personal becoming. The work entails an exploration of what it means to cultivate a relationship with the unknown. It illustrates a four-movement conceptual framework inspired by a meditative square breathing exercise: the unknown, attunement, presence, and home. The framework offers a structure to brave the chaotic, tumultuous unknown with the goal of finding peace and equanimity. Though this writing outlines a series of paths, journeying through the square demands individuals to repeatedly meet, adjust, and transform themselves in the process. Navigating the four movements encourages one to live life as a constantly emerging and unfolding revelation. The author makes her journeys in relation to academic, artistic, curricular, pedagogical, and personal inquiries and practices, using methodological compasses of living inquiry (Irwin & de Cosson, 2004; Meyer, 2006, 2010; Springgay et al., 2005), specifically a/r/tography (LeBlanc & Irwin, 2019; Springgay et al., 2008; Triggs & Irwin, 2019), currere (Pinar, 1975, 2004), and contemplative practice (Garbutt & Roenpagel, 2018; Kumar, 2013). The conceptual study of individual movements develops in tandem with an artistic practice, including walking, divination, conceptual art, and textile installation work. Each turn of the framework inspires considerations of the self amidst affective, temporal, spatial, spiritual, and relational entanglements with(in) the world. This tracing demonstrates how attuning to the good, hauling in the world, being at home in it, and crossing into the unknown again are lifelong processes much like breathing. With every conceptual turn, the author faces important lessons of living with an ethos of abundance, of reaching for the beyond with faith and persistence, of worlding while holding fast to ethics and love, and of stepping forward with courage-vulnerability. Transcending the original context from which the author writes, she discovers how mapping life’s challenges along the square propels movement through thresholds. Individuals can be on the path of many squares at once. Each presents a curriculum that teaches and provokes, opening one up to the possibility of living an artful, purposeful, and meaningful existence.

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The study Wayfinding Peace: Museums in Conflict Zones reconsiders the approaches peace museums have taken when promoting peace by drawing on the ways ethnographer Sultan Somjee and the Community Peace Museums Heritage Foundation (CPMHF) in Kenya utilize the African humanist philosophy of Utu in their museum practices in conflict zones. The CPMHF is a collective of 16 rural museums in conflict-prone areas. They often lack governmental support and resources and operate on minimal budgets. Through a series of fieldwork journeys, the research illuminates Somjee’s experiences of developing the community peace museums in unstable political and social situations. Overall, the dissertation highlights the 26-year history of the CPMHF using Indigenous peace heritage traditions to resolve contemporary conflict and build peaceful civil society relations. Moreover, the study suggests cultural heritages maintained in traditions of peacebuilding can contribute to bonding communities at large in several ways: 1) sustain children and youth's connection to their Indigenous culture by exploring their peace traditions through art education; 2) provide protection and conservation of biological heritage; 3) offer culturally specific approaches for reconciliation among conflicting minority and majority ethnic groups through agency. The study offers the cultural workers of peace museums an opportunity to learn alternative peace museum themes and approaches based on culture.

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This study explores the playful dialogical process of creating meaning while cooking collaboratively with the teaching staff in a democratic school in Vancouver, British Columbia. All Kindergarten to Grade-12 staff members in the school were invited to participate in this study. Of the 22 staff, 16 chose to participate in yearlong gatherings in which we cooked collaboratively while sharing, reflecting, questioning, and creating meaning with one another’s practices, beliefs, and narratives.Through this artistic socially engaged and participatory research, a new meaning of democratic education was created together and apart. These methodologies invited the staff to be equal participants in complicated conversations within and beyond the walls of the school, as mentors, members in the community, teachers, friends, parents, artists, and at times participant researchers. The four gatherings throughout the year were video and audio-recorded. They included complicated conversations while collaborative cooking took place. The entry and exit small group interviews were also audio-recorded. Those gatherings and interviews assisted participants in creating a new meaning of democratic education for them as collective and as relational individuals.This study situated complicated conversations and cooking collaboratively as an inquiry that focused on creating meaning in which dialogue could engage the community with topics they deemed important. Through cooking and feasting together, we held the intention of creating trusted space with a sense of nurturing and hospitality in which we encountered difficult knowledge together while creating meaning of democratic education.This study may contribute to a greater understanding of democratic education. It offers the understanding that a school community (a) can support an ongoing process of dialogic culture; (b) benefits from engaging in an artistic collaborative process while sharing nurturing spaces that holds feasts; and (c) is capable of making democratic practices for personal growth, compassion, sense of agency, and democratic structures within a community, available and tangible for Kindergarten to Grade-12 students, staff, and families at the individual and collective spheres on the local and global level.

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This dissertation discusses contemporary Canadian painting practices through a cross-Canada research journey, from the west coast to the east coast, visiting approximately 125 artists (who work primarily with the medium of painting) in their studios. Through in-depth interviews with artists about their artwork, process and communities, and exploration of the studios through photograph documentation, my doctoral research examines: How is painting a way of learning?As practice-led research, this research is generated and analyzed within the perspective of my own painting practice. I analyze the research through the lens of new materialist theories to examine painting as performative by drawing from Bolt’s (2007, 2013) discussion of materiality and the performativity of art practice and through the lens of Barad’s (2007) discussion of diffraction. The research is presented as a series of propositions that present qualities of learning through painting with examples from artists interviewed. As a performative practice, these propositions discuss painting as an emergent, embodied, material, affective, relational and experiential process of learning. They propose that through the material process of painting, artists learn about themselves, others and their relationship to the world in which they inhabit. Photographic interludes extend the discussion by presenting the space of learning, the studio. The final chapters present my own paintings that evolved in relation to the research thus revealing a generative relationship between practice-led and qualitative research methods.This research is conceived, developed and analyzed through my lens as an art educator. Within the context of rapidly changing education that includes inquiry-based, experiential and creative approaches to learning that are often at odds within a system that continues to rely on measurable objectives, and within the context of increased emphasis on digital technologies, I propose that this research has significant implications. This study contributes to research about artistic inquiry within art education particularly as it relates to material practices, and highlights the necessity for embracing uncertainties, ambiguities, messiness, affect, embodiment and material engagement within the creative learning process.

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This research is an artistic form of inquiry in which knowledge is generated from a closed school because it is a de-institutionalized and de-commissioned place that has not yet legally been re-zoned, re-sold, or repurposed. Much of the research on the topic of school closure suggests that its aftermath wreaks havoc on cities and neighborhoods. The abandoned school, marginalized and forgotten, enters into a process of neglect and decline (Chambers, 2007). This research demonstrates how acts of ‘re-territorialization’ (Smith, 2010) in the context of the socio-political state of the closed school, holds pedagogical possibility. To complete this project, I photographed multiple closed schools in cities across Canada and I spoke with principals, students, board directors, faculty, and community members about their experiences with school closure. For one of the final stages of my inquiry, I projected images of the inside of the decommissioned school onto the outside’s physical structure and invited the public, community members who experienced the closure of the school, to take part in an immersive experience in which they could project their own stories and imaginations onto the artwork. Encounters with the abandoned school are brought forward in five ‘concessions,’ articulated here as a virtual spatial practice that explores the abandoned school through photographic images and text, provoking readers/viewers to (re)imagine relationships between space, time, place, and memory. I articulate how this inquiry acts as an intervention — an experience that occurs because of art and because of the artist who is working as a catalyst within the context of the everyday. Drawing attention to the architecture of the closed school as an archive — a repository of memories (both individual and collective) that has been locked off from the community in which it exists, the abandoned school brings forth a possibility (however partial) to (re)construct, (re)store, and (re)present stories of the past with our own existing narratives. Conceptualized as a work of art, this exegesis challenges the more traditional dissertation structure. Rather than answering or advancing a hypothesis, it asks that you look at artistic inquiry in a new way, perhaps even provoking a shift in thought itself.

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This study is an a/r/tographic living inquiry that investigates the theme of displacement through visual and textual performances of my experiences of being un/homed. It is an aesthetic (and not anesthetic) self-exploration of my struggles of in-betweenness and unbelonging through and with/in multiple layers of my identity as a Persian-Canadian, and emigrant/immigrant artist, researcher, learner, and teacher. Additionally, this work draws on post-colonial literature to analyze the journey of an artist, researcher and teacher sharing her personal experiences as an emigrant/immigrant struggling with absence and loss, trying to make a place to belong. In the pedagogical process/product of this living performance, I re-visit, and re-member my lived and living struggles with the concepts of home, language, Othering, invisibility, exoticism, pain and ethics, and critically analyze those struggles through a post-colonial lens. What is re-presented throughout this dissertation is a critical self-exploration through art creation (photographs and video installations) and writing. I suggest that through the process of visually/textually writing about home one can create a home for oneself in the spaces of one’s creation. I highlight the significance of the pedagogical moments of being together, with pain and I call for a sensitive pedagogy of representation in art education.

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This dissertation is offered at a time when there is renewed interest in the conceptual overlaps between contemporary art and discussions about pedagogy, along with a desire to provide alternative ways of learning through different forms of pedagogy. Understanding art today often requires a shift away from the art object to the encounter with the work. For example, this research study aligns itself with the notion that network art is a type of art not based on objects, nor digital instruments alone, but on the relationships and processes that occur between the multiple components and individuals that contribute to the work. Artists today work in relational and networked ways in which digital media exists as one part of a larger complex process. Art educators have called for an approach to the post-secondary pedagogical model that responds more to the multidisciplinary practices of contemporary artists and current cultural production. I suggest that a network understanding of both art and learning, drawn from the practices of contemporary artists and complexity thinking, can lead to new ways of rearticulating and understanding pedagogical practices. In this research study I examine the practices of seven contemporary network artists who teach in post-secondary art programs. Through a reflexive methodology of active interviews and narrative inquiry, I inquire into the ways that these multidisciplinary and network artists make art and approach pedagogy. I am interested in how these modes of art production might impact ways of teaching and learning. Based on data collected during interviews, online correspondence, and examination of artworks, I observed three main thematic connections between the participants’ art and teaching practices: dialogical, collaborative, and performative. I suggest that these characteristics are related to notions of network within art and learning. I argue that network art, when looked at through the lens of pedagogy, can potentially be understood as relational learning, or performative learning. I end by suggesting further research into the idea of knowledge being something that becomes performative within our situational experiences.

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This a/r/tographic research investigates the partially accessible forces of movement that engender and co-substantiate experience. It renders an image of a vital socio-geologic ecology consisting of feelings of the energies of movement of all bodies made through struggles of rendering manifest the fullness of experience in its every example. In regards to teacher education methods, this is addressed as both an ecological and aesthetic issue. Feelings of capacity for being affected and for affecting generate more reality. Rather than attempting to separate, unqualified feelings emerging within affects’ temporal events add qualities with an existence and energy of their own. Increasing standardization, accountability schemes and attempted control of quality pose problems for the ecological significance of feelings of capacity to vary. This research addresses methods rather than just the subjects engaged in them to generate an image of a more tightly imbricated ecology that also includes the affects of our practices. It seeks educational experiences where subjects of all kinds subsist to the extent that they resonate with feelings of capacity for being moved and for moving within this ecology. Each chapter re-poses the issue of conveying experience’s simultaneity of continuity and discontinuity. Aesthetic practice and art-making are needed for feelings that precede cognition and for more repeated availability of making determinations within experience which are not simply opportunities for direct exchange but rather tokens of trust for invention and unprecedented space. Drawing concepts from a variety of disciplines, each chapter re-poses educational experience in ways that do not put methods in charge and through aesthetic experience, reconnect to the world by opening to the non-human world of which we are a part. Tending towards teacher education as currere, a living curriculum, this study suggests three qualities of assessment: availability, arrival, and the analog. Through initiating and proliferating creative practices, a/r/tographic methodology in teacher education is encouraged to draw on art’s methods of generating productive entanglements. Repeated affective engagement in creative practice is suggested towards augmenting and sustaining a more inhabitable present and future.

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In this research I examine the experiences of four Conservatory style trained actors, who go onto complete teacher education programs. In keeping with a/r/tography this research uses social science methods and creative methods of data collection. Interviews and reflective writing about the participant’s educational and experiential backgrounds were complimented by the writing of monologues. Themes from the data collected during interviews, reflective writing and monologues led me to understand that: there is a connection between developing consciousness and having a noetic experience; actor-teachers want to talk about their noetic experiences; residue is an a/r/tographic rendering used to describe the way that having an illuminating experience in theatre school affected the participants; and an immanent curriculum can be understood by theatrical engagement. In addition to exploring the interview data and monologues, time is spent understanding the works of Antonin Artaud, a prolific theatre artist and a/r/tography, a method of arts-based research. This theoretical and a/r/tographical investigation leads to the creation of Interludes. These Interludes, theorized as rhizomatic curricular offshoots, allow for multiple entry points into the new understandings.

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What understandings are provoked by concepts of dress when related to artist, researcher, and teacher identities? An artist/researcher/teacher recruited a public secondary school art teacher and her students to join this participatory study. Participants were invited to investigate concepts of dress while inquiring through artistic processes. The written rendering of this dissertation is a mashup inquiry—a nondeterministic bricolage or ludic play—of images, text, and diverse theories, which gives rise to understandings of artist, researcher, and teacher identities. A key understanding from this study is the redescription of artist, researcher, teacher, and student identities. For example, redescribing a teacher as one who occasions learning rather than solely transmits fixed bodies of knowledge generates new understandings. Teaching and learning co-exist as neither fully separate roles within the identities of teacher and student nor as perfectly balanced and equal; they are processes that are relational, shifting, and shared. Likewise, as inquiry and research are redescribed alongside artist, teacher, and student identities, spaces of the possible or as-yet-unimagined emerge. The qualitative arts-based research methodology a/r/tography, which is utilized as the primary methodology in this study, is also conceptualized here, as a pedagogical strategy where the teacher becomes teacher-researcher and students become student-researchers. This places inquiry at the center of the curriculum. Participants in this approach to education work as independent and capable a/r/tographers moving toward an emancipatory form of artistic creation and inquiry. This study investigates how a secondary art course centered in inquiry can open perception to new possibilities as opposed to viewing a teaching/learning relationship as simply shaping perception to existing frames. Anti-oppressive forms of pedagogy may surface when the classroom is decentralized and the inquiry is nonlinear and outcomes are not pre-determined.A graphic version of this dissertation was also created and can be found at http://m1.cust.educ.ubc.ca/Artography/phd.php. The juxtaposition of the standardized format alongside this graphic version highlights how knowledge and communication are managed and maintained. Form and structure, like dress and the format of this dissertation, are explored within this study as both potentially liberating and potentially oppressive.

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In a world of increasing religious/political tensions and conflicts this study asks, what is the transformative significance of an arts and ritual-based approach to developing and encouraging women’s spiritual and multi-faith leadership? To counter destructive worldviews and practices that have divided people historically, politically, personally and sacredly, the study reinforces the political and spiritual value of women spiritual and multi-faith leaders creating and holding sacred space for truth making and world making. An a/r/tographic and mindful inquiry was engaged to assist self and group reflection within a group of women committed to multi-faith education and leadership in their communities. The objectives of the study were: 1) to explore through collaboration, ritual and art making processes the women’s experience of knowing and not knowing, 2) to articulate a curriculum for multi-faith consciousness raising, and 3) to develop a pedagogy and methodology that can serve as a catalyst for individual and societal change and transformation. The co-participants/co-inquirers (including the lead researcher as a member of the group) are fourteen women, who practice within eleven different religions and/or spiritual backgrounds, and who are part of a volunteer planning team that organizes an annual women’s multi-faith conference (Women’s Spirituality Celebration) in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. The aesthetic/ritual structure of the labyrinth served as a cross-cultural multi-faith symbol in guiding the dissertation, which includes three art installations and four documentary DVDs of the process and art. New understandings found in the study include: 1) the ethical sanctuary that a/r/tography as ritual enables for personal and collective change to take place within, 2) the addition of synecdoche to the renderings of a/r/tography, assisting a multi-dimensional spiral movement towards a whole a/r/tographic practice, 3) a lived and radically relational curriculum of philetics within loving community that drew forth the women’s erotic life force energy and enhanced the women’s ability to remember the power of the feminine aspect of the Divine, and 4) the decolonization of the Divine, art and education, which took place as a pedagogy of wholeness unfolded, requiring a dialectic relationship between restorative and transformative learning.

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