CCRI Seminar: Provoked Perplexity in Live Methods

In this seminar we invite a space to think together about the question of liveliness in research. Drawing on our methodological experimentation with live methods we move beyond the idea of (re)presenting or explaining experience to provoking it, and we discuss research encounters as encounters of provoked perplexity. We draw from our arts-based inquiry with people with personal and professional experiences with self-harm to discuss how the material engagement with readings about self-harm and with art-making encountered us with perplexity in an embodied manner.

Resisting the idea of a pre-existing, sole or final meaning, we think about arts-based research as a kind of knowledge-in-the-making. We find that this relational, hands-on space of material thinking by means of art-making allows for the possibility of a deeply personal, bodily and affective, involvement that constitutes making as a way of knowing and practice as research. This can in turn allow for an embodied experience of de-familiarisation with what has been known as given, fixed and/or coherent.