Respond and Refocus
Auto/ethnography Methodology: Evocative Provocation Understanding of Others through Self
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Helen CD McCarthy
For over forty years as a teacher albeit apprentice, I have learned from the Warnumamalya, Yolngu, Nyungar and Wongi Australia's First Nations peoples', observing parents/teachers often express frustration with the delivery of mainstream anglo-centric education. This disparity never sat well with me but I understood I did not have a right to speak for Indigenous parents/carers or their communities. Over the path of long-time cultural immersion, I experienced ‘both ways’ learning, meaningful experiences where liminal spaces created new understandings, culturally-sensitive shared ways of knowing. Provoked, I wanted this praxis to be recognised, applied widespread, Aboriginal perspectives given parity of esteem with non-Aboriginal knowledge. When I first began to express the importance of pre-service teachers learning culturally sensitive ways of teaching Indigenous learners, I found myself in a conundrum. I was just another ‘know-it-all’ white researcher writing about black student experiences. The answer came by way of the critical interpretive research design auto/ethnography. Auto/ethnography presented the opportunity to establish one’s unique voicing where the writing process and the writing product are deeply intertwined. This decolonising research methodology provided a pathway to venerate via self-reflection enhanced cultural understanding providing the potential to transform self and others to move towards cross cultural alliance building.
Artistic Knowledge in Inductive Social Research : Considering Community Making in Mixed-methods Studies
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session David Le Rue
In the past twenty years, researchers in the humanities and social sciences have adopted inductive research methods such as oral history to understand how historical moments and events are understood and remembered from the perspective of ordinary people. In emergent practices of arts-based research (ABR), many who employ methods from the humanities and social sciences draw upon fields like oral history as a rich resource for including diverse perspectives and voices in art making. However, this model centers the artmaking of the individual researcher, who usually turns this testimony into artwork. This author asks, what kinds of knowledge could be revealed if we asked the participants of oral history interviews to instead engage directly in artistic creation? This paper discusses the development and implementation of what the author calls community-based research-creation (CBRC), which aims to democratize the creation side of ABR by welcoming ordinary people to participate in classes where they will develop artworks that draw upon personal meanings from collective course themes. Drawing on the author’s doctoral work that studies the city through landscape theory, the paper looks at concrete examples of participant work and consider how this work might contribute to a study. This paper concludes by discussing what the interjection of this visual testimony adds to the knowledge generated in a study in the humanities and social sciences. The author argues that this can both lead to richer results and democratize the visual aspects of arts-based studies.
Featured Evaluating the ‘Spirit’ of Fidelity through Adaptive Systems: Academic and Fan Opinion Explored via Pride and Prejudice Adaptations View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Savannah Willard
In adaptation scholarship, there is a clear disconnect between the espoused measures of fidelity and modern modes of intermedial adaptation. Many scholars have dismissed fidelity as a result, however the demand for fidelity is central in fan spaces. By evolving our definition of fidelity according to Bazin’s ‘spirit’ concept and Murray’s adaptive systems, academia can return to the fidelity conversation. This essay utilizes the adaptive system of Austen’s Pride and Prejudice—namely the 1995 BBC mini-series and the 2012 vlog-style The Lizzie Bennet Diaries—to exhibit the new mode of fidelity evaluation. The integration of fans into modern adaptations creates flexibility in both narrative means and authorship, something that must also be considered in evaluating adaptations. This new potential future for fidelity becomes a means for accommodating the diversifying adaptive modes while maintaining familiar terminology from existing scholarship in the field.
