Difference-attuned witnessing: Risks and potentialities of arts-based research

Abstract

In this paper, we interrogate notions of affect, vulnerability and difference-attuned empathy, and how they relate to bearing witness across difference—specifically, connecting through creativity, experiencing the risks and rewards of vulnerability, and witnessing the expression of difficult emotions and the recounting of affect-imbued events within an arts-based process called digital/multi-media storytelling (DST). Data for this paper consists of 63 process-oriented interviews conducted before and after participants engaged with DST in a research project focused on interrogating negative concepts of disability that create barriers to healthcare. These retrospective reflections on DST coalesce around experiences of vulnerability, relationality, and the risks associated with witnessing one’s own and others’ selective disclosures of difficult emotions and affect-laden aspects of experiences of difference. Through analysing findings from our process-oriented interviews, we offer a framework for understanding witnessing as a necessarily affective, difference-attuned act that carries both risk and transformative potential. Our analysis draws on feminist Indigenous (Maracle), Black (Nash) and affect (Ahmed) theories to frame emerging concepts of affective witnessing across difference, difference-attuned empathy, and asymmetrical vulnerability within the arts-based research process.

Towards Decolonial Choreographies of Co-Resistance

“…Importantly, respecting differences at an epistemic level does not mean we remain untouched and unchanged by each other (Rice et al 2021a); rather, throughout the process of coming together to create ITL projects, we found ourselves opening to being touched and even changed by each other in non-directive and non-prescriptive ways through the movement practices we enacted to affirm Anishinaabe, crip, and other life and (even if fleetingly) (re)configure the world. Referring to our creative coalition or solidarity work together, we use the umbrella concept of "non-assimilation" to signal the ethic of respect for radical difference that emerges across our worldviews.…”

“…Referring to our creative coalition or solidarity work together, we use the umbrella concept of "non-assimilation" to signal the ethic of respect for radical difference that emerges across our worldviews. We access and express that solidarity through the feelings and experiences that emerge from our creating together (Gaztambide-Fernández 2012; Rice et al 2021a;Rice and Mündel 2018). We forefront the ethics that inform our methodological and actual dance together: the conscious, careful, and creative modes of knowledge generation and exchange that center mutual respect and non-assimilation in our decolonizing and accessible creation processes.…”

“…This we worked to accomplish by creating a difference-affirming space that could foster and support a deeply felt-sensed engagement with ITL through responsiveness, connection, and accountability. To explore and theorize the three examples of ITL's "choreographies of co-resistance", we draw on research team discussions, personal correspondences between Stonefish, Rice, and Kelly, and we apply a decolonizing (Jimmy and Andreotti 2019) and Anishinaabe philosophical (Simpson 2011(Simpson , 2017 lens alongside a feminist disability-informed neomaterialist (Barad 2006;Rice et al 2021aRice et al , 2021bRice et al , 2022, and dance and performance studies one that disrupts a focus on conventional western theatrical notions of dance and performance (Foster 2011;Perazzo Domm 2019;Schneider 2015;Larasati 2013;Kelly 2019). Ultimately, our methodology prioritizes lived experience in our moving together as kinetics or doings that generate transformative and decolonizing learning within an ethic of non-assimilation that affirms differences and why they matter.…”

Mobilizing Interference as Methodology and Metaphor in Disability Arts Inquiry

“…Conscious of the connotative weight it carries, we use the word intentionally to jar readers into awareness of the ways that ableist systems, including health care regimes, routinely tamper and interfere with disabled bodies. In this instance, interference functions both as a euphemism (used to disguise or avoid directly naming a charged subject) and as a metaphor (used to make a subject clearer) by turning its vague connotative meaning into a vivid denotative one; in so doing, it draws attention to the violence of social-symbolic-material processes of disablement, including how medical interference (ableist medical technologies designed to eliminate disability, clinical gazes marking/making difference as aberrance) and debilitative interference (the structural impairing and sickening of certain bodies under turbo-capitalism) help to produce disability and to frame it as deficiency (Rice, Cook, et al, 2020;Viscardis et al, 2019). We can also think about interference as signifying the ways that disabled people speak and act back, constructively interfering with harmful and traumatic interference (Shields et al, in press;Rice et al, 2015Rice et al, , 2017Rice & Mündel, 2019).…”

“…This disability-affirmative space embraced difference; however, during the workshops, ableism continued to manifest (e.g., in the university classroom), and when these ended, the community dispersed into normative culture and health care systems where ableist logics continue to circulate and to shape spaces and encounters. Despite this, the project contributed to the development of disability arts in Canada, providing space, tools, and opportunities for disability-identified scholars, artists, and activists to come together to question marginal positioning of disability, Mad, and d/Deaf arts in art history and the contemporary art world (see Chandler et al, 2018;Rice, Cook, et al, 2020).…”