Data’s Entanglements: Artmaking as Corresponding Companion During Diffractive Analysis

Authors

Kelly Clark/Keefe, University of VermontFollow

Author ORCID Identifier

0000-0002-4231-3537

Abstract

This essay invites readers into two creative correspondences that emerged during the author’s involvement in a participatory arts-based research project called Life Lines. The Life Lines project aimed at engaging a small group of young adults alongside researchers in their use of multimodal arts practices to inquire into what makes young adult identity work work the way that it does. In Life Lines the phenomenon of identity and the approaches to inquiry used to explore it were conceptualized through a material feminist framework that proposes the co-constituting nature of meaning and matter (i.e., bodies, atmospheres, and objects of all kinds). Diffractive analysis practices were adopted, creating the conditions for theorizing to become infused with artistic practice, resulting in a series of correspondences that took the form of back-and-forth dialogues between artful images and creative prose. The two correspondences shared illustrate the author’s attempts at staying with what Life Lines data were doing as they became mobile, transitive, and unpredictable in their patterns of entangling meaning and matter during diffractive analysis.

Author Biography

Kelly Clark/Keefe is Associate Professor at the University of Vermont in Burlington, Vermont, USA. Her research brings theories of affect, art and subjectivity to bear on topics including the role of bodies, move- ment, and emotion in shaping educational identity and analyses of epistemic injustices in contemporary schooling and higher education. Kelly is on the Editorial Board for the book series, Springer Studies in Arts- Based Educational Research. She authored the book, Invoking Mnemosyne: Art, Memory, and the Uncertain Emergence of a Feminist Embodied Methodology (2010), and co-authored the book, Humanizing Methodologies in Educational Research: Centering Non-dominant Communities (2021). Contact: kelly.clarkkeefe@uvm.edu

Recommended Citation

Clark/Keefe, Kelly (2022) "Data’s Entanglements: Artmaking as Corresponding Companion During Diffractive Analysis," Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal: Vol. 7: Iss. 1, Article 6.
Available at: https://opensiuc.lib.siu.edu/atj/vol7/iss1/6