Encounters with Theory as Conceptual Medium and Creative Practice explores the relationships and intersections between verbal and visual ways of researching, challenging the privilege of the written word in academe.
Rooted in a grant-funded artistic research course, the data and experiences shared here illuminate the transformative power of visual thinking and visual literacy as a research data, analysis as well as artifact. The book begins by outlining the author's background as an artist/researcher/teacher, laying a foundation for the positionality and thinking within the book. The later chapters, offered as vignettes, share the explorations and subsequent discoveries of emerging scholars from a variety of backgrounds and disciplines. A/R/Tography takes a front seat serving as a messy and fluid architecture for theory put into practice. Engaging tension as a catalyst for disruption, the book explores how staying present, intra-acting with ideas, concepts, and theory through visual material exploration expands attention and illuminates data in different ways, affording unexpected insight and discovery. In addition, the image-rich pages invite readers into reading the visual in conversation with the verbal, on equal terms. One is not in service of the other, rather a conversation of literacies.
With its emphasis on the visual and materiality as a method of thinking, this book will be of interest to anyone interested in or practicing artistic research. One does not need to have an arts background to engage in visual dialog.