Seventeenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

Using creative research methods in your research and teaching is one avenue where critical sociologists and those in the humanities can merge subaltern conocimientos (knowledges), experiential knowledge, and critical social theory to exercise political commitments for social liberation. For this session, I share insights and present strategies of using arts-based methodologies to create academic disruption when engaging with mainstream knowledge in the socio-behavioral sciences. First, I spend some time talking about the dangers and pleasures of designing assignments and teaching undergraduate university students enrolled in Gender and Sexuality courses arts-based methods to collect data on mental and emotional illness, gendered social worlds, and reproductive health policy. I then focus on my own acts of sociological disruption by my use of creative methods (via layered autoethnography) in “talking back” to sociological works on depression that invisibilize cultural dynamics and the effects of socio-historical legacies on the emotional lives of members of marginalized communities. In sharing these experiences, I hope to show a glimpse of the “backstage” work of the non-White minority researcher attempting to find allies among those that inhabit mainstream academic U.S. worlds.