Thirteenth International Conference on The Arts in Society

Abstract

C(art)ographic Conjunctions is a digital humanities arts research project that explores student’s connection to and production of place in higher education. This project combines audio clips from student interviews, geo-tagged paths of guided walks, soundscapes of campus, photographs, and 360-degree video in an interactive digital assemblage to produce a more nuanced understanding of how students’ experience the place of higher education. Place offers a unique entry point for complicating narratives of belonging and connection, and to consider place as an assemblage of materialities that create an affective rhizome, moving towards (re)presenting the multiple, rhizomatic, and simultaneous knowings of student experiences. Place as constantly produced and iterative enfolds notions of the rhizome, a multiplicity, connecting points to other points, reducible to neither one nor the multiple (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). The rhizome suggests an ever constructing, variating, and expanding understanding of place/space as made up of lines and a multiplicity of directions. For example, students mark and create collages during focus groups that respond to the prompt: “draw, write, or visually describe the place of campus.” The collage creation becomes an encounter of place, an inquiry of process that encourages juxtaposition, relocation, and connection. Following focus groups, students are invited to participate in a guided walk, exploring the place of campus through their particular encounters and experiences in place. These guided walks and focus groups methodologically move to understand belonging as a rhizome, a collection of relations, intensities, and flows that connect, flatten, and fold back on one another. Belonging becomes differently through the connections and relations within this data. Marked maps made during focus groups layered with paths and photos assembled during guided walks, lines of flight from text and sound from focus group and walking interview conversations layered in between. The lines of the guided walk and text create connections, a rhizome between other pieces of data. C(art)ograhic Conjunctions is the artful combination of this data, an affective digital rhizome combining audio, visual, and cartographic segments in a digital assemblage. For example, segments of audio (e.g. clips of student narratives and soundscapes) become flows along paths that traverse a digital map of campus. These audio paths layer and overlap, interrupting and intersecting, some layering again and again, while others become lines of flight that depart the map. Using digital media, these layered and multiplicitious paths create a rhizome of belonging. This inquiry of belonging rejects closure, themes, and generalities, instead looking to difference and diffraction, articulation of questions producing questions doubling and folding and moving to openness (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). C(art)ographic Conjunctions offers a pedogogical and political turn to place that maps differently how we respond to, support, and make change on college campuses. Through endless (re)combinations and entry points, C(art)ographic Conjunctions offers implications for methodology and practice: a different reading of place and belonging in higher education.