A Place to Meet: Living with Critical Theory as a Mode of Care in Everyday Artistic Practice

This essay is a place where the everyday meets critical artistic practice meets theory. Within a critical artistic researcher’s everyday practice, critical theory is lived and practiced in modes that are material and felt. Building on the of critical theorists who write explicitly about their relationships with theory, three researchers write vignettes detailing small moments in their practice. The vignettes make visible the ways the everyday and critical theory interlock and show how critical artistic research asks us to consider ways of caring, being accountable, attending to, and growing sensibilities for living with critical theories

Wandering Fests: Relational Orientations in Academic Writing

Based on a number of PhD workshops called Wandering Feasts, in collaboration between Monash University and Design School Kolding, this article explores academic writing as both a mode and a method of inquiry. The article both points to and performs five creative-relational orientations to alternative academic writing: Performativity in challenging dominant ways of knowing and representing knowledge in the academy; emergence as mindfully holding open ideas of purpose and destination in favour of not-knowing; reciprocity in collectively creating charged encounters that spark new ways of knowing; improvisation in building social space where we felt comfortable jamming and givenness as a fundamental playfulness in which an academic community nurtures the courage to give–of ourselves. The article is in itself a manifestation of exploration writing in a playful and loosely defined process

On Care-fulness: Critical Creative Expressions of Care in a Feminist Theatre Research Project

In early 2020, as the first of many COVID lockdowns began across Australia, a collective of feminist and queer performance scholars and artists embarked on the research project Staging Australian Women’s Lives: Theatre, Feminism and Socially Engaged Art. Our aim was to document contributions of womxn theatre makers, while conducting a feminist analysis of strategies used to deal with gender inequality and oppression, on stage and off. While pivoting to the digital and the virtual, we recognised a need to support womxn theatre makers whose lives and livelihoods are thrown into further precarity by the pandemic. This paper speaks to our commitment to bringing together critical theory, arts practices and everyday life in ethical forms and encounters that make visible, recognise and express care for one another and for the work

Carolyn Ellis and Art Bochner: Building Connections in Qualitative Research

Carolyn ELLIS und Art BOCHNER berichten über ihre Ausbildung, ihre Interessen und ihr Engagement innerhalb der qualitativen Forschung als Ausdruck ihrer Bemühung, zu Verstehen in persönlichen Beziehungen und durch persönliche Beziehungen beizutragen. Ihr Wunsch ist es, an der Etablierung einer Gemeinschaft narrativer und autoethnographischer Wissenschaftler(innen) mitzuwirken, die sie eher als Ergänzung – denn als Ersatz – für Wissen und Wissensformen verstehen, die aus traditionelleren qualitativen und quantitativen Forschungsansätzen erwachsen.Carolyn ELLIS and Art BOCHNER tell the stories of their education, their interests in and commitment to qualitative research as a way to make meaning in and through personal relation­ships, and their passion for creating a community of narrative and autoethnographic researchers as a complement to—rather than a replacement for—the knowledge generated through more traditional forms of qualitative and quantitative research.Carolyn ELLIS y Art BOCHNER cuentan la historia de su educación, sus intereses y su compromiso con la investigación cualitativa como un medio de construir significado en y a través de las relaciones personales, y su pasión por crear una comunidad de de investigadores narrativos y autoetnográfos como un complemento, y no como un reemplazo, del conocimiento generado a través de formas más tradicionales de investigación cualitativa y cuantitativa

Carolyn Ellis y Art Bochner: Fabricando relaciones en la investigación cualitativa

Carolyn ELLIS und Art BOCHNER berichten über ihre Ausbildung, ihre Interessen und ihr Engagement innerhalb der qualitativen Forschung als Ausdruck ihrer Bemühung, zu Verstehen in persönlichen Beziehungen und durch persönliche Beziehungen beizutragen. Ihr Wunsch ist es, an der Etablierung einer Gemeinschaft narrativer und autoethnographischer Wissenschaftler(innen) mitzuwirken, die sie eher als Ergänzung – denn als Ersatz – für Wissen und Wissensformen verstehen, die aus traditionelleren qualitativen und quantitativen Forschungsansätzen erwachsen. URN: urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs0403284Carolyn ELLIS and Art BOCHNER tell the stories of their education, their interests in and commitment to qualitative research as a way to make meaning in and through personal relation­ships, and their passion for creating a community of narrative and autoethnographic researchers as a complement to—rather than a replacement for—the knowledge generated through more traditional forms of qualitative and quantitative research. URN: urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs0403284Carolyn ELLIS y Art BOCHNER cuentan la historia de su educación, sus intereses y su compromiso con la investigación cualitativa como un medio de construir significado en y a través de las relaciones personales, y su pasión por crear una comunidad de de investigadores narrativos y autoetnográfos como un complemento, y no como un reemplazo, del conocimiento generado a través de formas más tradicionales de investigación cualitativa y cuantitativa. URN: urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs040328

Music for torching

textThis dissertation considers how torch singing—the performance of songs of unrequited love—might constitute a subtle and subversive moment of social critique. Torch singing developed in early 20th century America out of the participatory and confrontational style of cabaret and the formulaic structure of Tin Pan Alley ballads. As sung by performers as diverse as Billie Holiday, Edith Piaf, Lena Horne, Sarah Vaughan, Barbra Streisand, k.d. lang, and numerous others, the torch song becomes a form and site for a resistive interpretation of social structures and ideological discourses. Using an ironic tone, an unseemly note or trill, a swelling bravado, a series of shifting and changing voices, the torch singer says to her audiences, listen carefully, things are not as they seem. My research involved listening to the voices of classic and contemporary torch singers and hearing their stories on stage and record and in autobiographies; music criticism; and political, social, and cultural analyses. My writing hopes to invoke the pleasures of fandom, the complexity of the women who sing torch songs, and the many voices of interpretation and positionality in any performance. My writing also suggests how torch singing might create a critical consciousness, a collaborative responsibility and shared sense of agency, and an opening for change. Torch singing, for me, is a reimagining of the torch song— that sentimental ballad of unrequited love, victimhood, and the pleasure of pain—into a space for the sounding of desire and the performance of possibility. Do you hear it too?American Studie

Massive and microscopic:autoethnographic affects in the time of COVID

This essay uses several of the prompts from the Massive::Microscopic experiment as a jumping off point for considering how affect theory and critical autoethnography offer us a framework for understanding, creating, and acting together in the time of COVID. Through stories of cloud-watching, mindfulness meditation, and other encounters with atmospheres and movements, we connect individual experiences of the pandemic to Buddhist understandings of a universal “we.” As a research practice committed to joining microscopic with macro lived experience, critical autoethnography offers a speculative method for collective reckoning with our infinitesimal selves in relation to the infinite of a pandemic

What Would Nick T. Do?: Lessons from a Mentor

Mentors influence their mentees in ways that not only shape them as professionals but also as people. In this essay, we draw upon our personal experiences with Professor Nick Trujillo, who died unexpectedly in October 2012, to describe the ways we were influenced by our relationships. We include the story of a last visit three weeks before his death, an interlude, and six lessons that chart the trajectory of our journeys as students, friends, and colleagues