Socially Engaged Art, Experimental Pedagogies, and Anarchiving as Research-Creation

Abstract

Archives, as repositories of culture and knowledge, are closely linked to colonial power, control, hegemony, and conquest. In recognizing the limitations and problems of conventional archives, scholars and artists offer counter-archiving as a method of interrogating what constitutes an archive and the selective practices that continuously erase particular subjects. Unlike static, stable, and linear colonial archives, counter-archives are grounded in accountability and reciprocity. Similarly, the anarchive is concerned with what it can do in the present-future. As such, anarchiving is less a thing, then a process or an action. This article examines anarchiving as research-creation practices through three provocations: anarchiving as indeterminate transformation, anarchiving as felt, and anarchiving as response-ability. We examine a particular anarchiving project Instant Class Kit dedicated to radical pedagogies and social justice. Anarchiving is fundamentally about practicing an ethics based on response-ability, stewardship, care, and reciprocity that center relationships to land, territory, human, and more-than-human bodies.

(K)not Mattering: Ethical (Re)considerations of Material, Methodological, and Pedagogical Responsibilities

“…Being responsible to relationality, or being in relation with materials, events, and (k) not-humans, dwells within the "lived traces that are embodied in bodies and memories-and that cannot be contained or recorded in a text" (Springgay et al, 2020;p. 899).…”

“…Being responsible to relationality, or being in relation with materials, events, and (k)not-humans, dwells within the “lived traces that are embodied in bodies and memories—and that cannot be contained or recorded in a text” (Springgay et al, 2020; p. 899). Email exchanges and Word documents passed between Brooke, Mindi, and us are material(s) (and sometimes contain materials made with materials, see Figure 7, for example) and so too are the lingering sentiments left behind in those sweet, generous exchanges.…”

Haunted Walks of District Six: Propositions for Counter-Surveying

“…A diffractive reading of the practices of counter-surveying, counter-archiving, and counter-mapping shows resonances and dissonances between them. For Springgay, Truman, and Maclean (2019),…”

Feltness: On How to Practice Intimacy

“…Research-creation demands that the critical histories of particular artistic practices or the larger body of scholarship in the arts and humanities not be erased or ignored. The theoretical precision scholars bring to research (whether that is post qualitative or other methodological frameworks) must equally be brought to bear on the artistic methods they wish to engage with (Springgay et al, 2020;Springgay & Truman, 2017). Loveless (see Truman et al 2019) argues that research-creation requires a mode of rigour that [she] would reframe as respect and accountability to each of the disciplines engaged with and its customs.…”