Performative Writing as a Method of Inquiry With the Material World: The Art of the Imperative (original) (raw)
Related papers
Encounters With Writing: Becoming-With Posthumanist Ethics
In this article, the authors (re)think writing as an ethical endeavor to explore and to cultivate more inclusive orientations for writing research and teaching. Situated in posthumanist scholarship on intra-activity, trans-corporeality, and translingual assemblages, they provide data–theory encounters that resist the privileging of alphabetic print, standardized written English approaches to writing pedagogies that have detached writers from the contextual doing/being/feeling demanded of composing-with-all-bodies. Data in the article are drawn from three separate research projects. Diffractively reading data through posthumanist theoretical concepts, the authors highlight the tensions and insights produced from their analysis to provoke an ethico-onto-epistemological shift in writing studies and classroom pedagogies, and to enliven the ethical work of exploring and cultivating more inclusive orientations to writing research and teaching. In this article, we engage posthuman philosophies as an ethical endeavor to explore and cultivate more inclusive orientations for literacies, ones that integrate both language and literacy practices we know and are familiar with, as well as those language and literacy practices that might yet be unknown. The philosophical perspectives on knowing (epistemology), be(com)ing (ontology), and doing (axiology) in posthuman-ist scholarship urge us to pursue lines of inquiry that explore the practical/theoretical possibilities of posthumanist thinking for the research and teaching of writing.
How we talk about the work is the work: Performing critical writing
Performance Research, 2018
Performance begins to have its effect long before the encounter with it, beginning with the first thing we read or hear about it, which may even be more memorable than the work itself; and its work continues in the thoughts and conversations that take place afterward: dialogues and exchanges that may be responding to written accounts as much as to experiences of the work themselves. Critical writing is part of this cycle of making and imagining. It can shape the contexts in which work is made and received, playing not just a responsive role but actively shaping how and what it is possible to make, see, do, and say. And critical writing is also shaped by the circumstances in which it is written, as part of systems of production and distribution.This article gives examples of a number of initiatives by individual writers, artist collectives, and festivals that test forms of critical writing that are as experimental as the practices to which they relate. Drawing on the author's experience running workshops in critical writing practice, it takes inspiration from the expanded field of writing as theorized and practiced in performance writing, placing these ideas in relation to a writing practice that conceives itself as ‘criticism’. It is intended as a practical guide that might be used by writers or workshop leaders to cultivate their own critical writing projects, and to inspire imaginative thinking about writing and conversation as creative practices in their own right.
Writing Through the Visual and Performing Arts
2021
While doctoral writing in the broader academy is a site of anxiety and contestation (Paré, 2019), doctoral writing in the visual and performing arts inhabits an even more contested space. For social and institutional reasons, the visual and performing arts are relative newcomers to the practice of doctoral writing (Baker et al., 2009; Elkins, 2014), and with theses that incorporate a creative/performed component, whole new ways of doctoral writing have opened up, including such features as new academic voices; highly innovative forms of typography, layout, and materiality; and varied relations between the written and creative components. Understanding such diverse texts requires a multi-valent approach to recognise the ways in which doctoral writing has been re-imagined in this context and the ways in which the academy can re-imagine a legitimate space for such academic work. In this chapter, we use a broadly social-semiotic framework to demonstrate the value of Legitimation Code Th...
Assembling bodies: A New Materialist Approach to Writing Practice
How might some recent philosophical critiques grouped under the rubric of a 'new materialism' be brought to bear productively on creative writing practice and pedagogy? This article argues that the new materialism's particular – and particularly intensified – awareness of the materiality of the writing process and of its textual products can be useful for writers. I consider how the environment in which one creates might look on a new materialist view, outlining what I propose to be one of its central features: the clinamen. I describe how feminist physicist Karen Barad's concept of intra-activity can be used to view the writing environment as a posthuman assemblage of intra-acting relata, before proposing the figure of the clinamen as able to describe the movement of matter within this assemblage. My argument, ultimately, is that this movement is conducive to the production of novelty in both writing experience and product: it is through the unpredictability of the clinamen's movement that new textual directions can be brought about. I make reference to my own creative process on this score – taking as examples a collaborative writing workshop I led and an exhibited work of conceptual writing – in order to demonstrate some ways in which new materialisms can prove useful for the proliferation of writing.
In this article, the authors (then two doctoral students) describe their methodology of engaging in an interdisciplinary, collaborative doctoral arts-based research (ABR) project. Education and the arts were integrated utilizing dance methods of bodily writing and performative inquiry to strengthen the analysis of dissertation findings in the field of teacher education. We share our theoretical stance based on somatics, embodiment, and rhizomatics, followed by a thick description of our rhizomatic actions of becoming collaborative arts-based researchers. We advocate, argue, and fight for the right to introduce and encourage interdisciplinary and collaborative research with the arts in doctoral students' studies and highlight the implications our
Embodied Writing: Choreographic Composition as Methodology
2015
This paper seeks to examine how embodied methodological approaches might inform dance education practice and research. Through a series of examples, this paper explores how choreographic writing might function as an embodied writing methodology. Here, choreographic writing is envisioned as a form of visual word choreography in which words move, pause, gain emphasis, and flow as if dancing across the open page. To explore writing as choreography, this paper primarily draws from three theoretical perspectives on embodiment: phenomenological, new materialist, and Deleuzian. For each of these perspectives, this paper describes its approach to embodiment, provides choreographic writing examples, and discusses the implications thereof for dance education practice and research. Given the increasing importance of practice-as-research and creative arts inquiry, this paper finds that choreographic writing provides an alternative mode of communication for dance writers and qualitative researchers alike. Significantly, choreographic writing also offers new pedagogies for dance education researchers. In so doing, dance provides a venue for written arts-based research.
"Wait, where am I supposed to be standing?" asks Geena. "On the porch, waiting to enter the house," say some of the students, but Molly, who has been reading ahead for her part, says, "but the report says that now you're leaving the house, so you're in the foyer with me." Geena and Molly are standing facing each other with a chair in between them, in the middle of a group of seated students. The chair represents an imaginary doorway, so Geena steps past the chair so that she is now standing with Molly, and they laugh, holding their copies of the police report. Someone from the circle asks, "But when did she, I mean he, him, the police officer, when did he enter the house?" Someone else suggests, "Geena should be facing away from Molly because it says here he, uhh, Molly, is yelling at, uhh, Geena, I guess." The above interchange happened in a classroom about two years ago, in Fall 2009. The students involved were not my students-I was invited by their professor to facilitate a brief performance exercise that evening, and I hesitate to read much more into the interchange than simply provide it to illustrate a kind of embodied pedagogical performance that I will describe later in this essay as I make a case for more comprehensive composition pedagogies that involve such performances. For now, I write the above as an invitation to experience an occasion where two people, 'Geena' and 'Molly', are endeavoring to reconstruct a sequence of events from a police report (see Appendix) about a particular incident that had been widely covered in the news a few weeks prior to this meeting. They are being aided in this effort by their classmates and by myself as their facilitator. What I remember most vividly about the brief exchange above, and about similar instances when I tried this again in other settings, is the range of movement and questioning that emerged from multiple participants around a key but extremely brief and missing segment of text in the report: was the police officer outside or inside the residence? And what was he doing in the foyer? In the dozens of news reports I had read about the incident, not a single reporter had picked up on these key questions-but these students, within a few minutes of performing the report, had instantly stumbled upon a turning point in the text. What more questions and avenues for investigation/research could the students have picked up on if they had Performing/Writing/Learning Bodies and Texts :: hari stephen kumar :: page 2 decided to write more thoroughly about the incident and their embodied experiences trying to reconstruct it based on an allegedly 'objective' police report? What alternate explanations and arguments might have emerged if students had drawn from such embodied experiences to engage each other in persuasive dialogue around those areas where their reconstructions differed in their interpretations and assumptions? Given that the incident in question involved a situation particularly charged with various dimensions of identity politics, between a veteran white male police officer and a distinguished African-American male professor, what did it mean for the embodied subjectivities and positionalities (my own included as a brown immigrant male teacher) in that room to re-enact such a tensive encounter?
This case study conducted by a writing specialist and a theatre specialist examines the ways in which writing to learn and learning to write took form in a course in which the ultimate goal was a staged production for a live audience. Using naturalistic methodology that deployed both ethnographic and autoethnographic approaches to analyze the teaching and learning that transpired in Theatre 490: Experimental Theatre Studio, analysts reviewed the syllabus, assignments, production journal, responses to learning-to-write assignments, students' written final reflections, anonymous end-of-term course evaluations, a video of the final staged performance, and responses to a questionnaire completed by students nearly two years after the staged performance. Findings that incorporate video clips from the staged performance shed light on elements of teaching and learning that pass undetected when written artifacts alone are used to assess learning, including ways in which students learn fr...