The City of Richgate: A/r/tographic Cartography as Public Pedagogy

Abstract

The City of Richgate project worked with eight intergenerational immigrant families and examined immigrant experiences and narratives through a community‐engaged process that employed a/r/tography as a methodology. As such, the research also investigated the extent to which a/r/tographical research could visually and narratively portray the analysis of data collected by the co‐a/r/tographers. After interviewing and collecting images from each family, large artistic gates (banners) were created. This first phase of the project revealed the power of images in situ, and thus the power of a/r/tography in situ. For the community members and co‐a/r/tographers meanings were constructed within ongoing a/r/tographic inquiries described as collective artistic and educational praxis. The second phase involved the identification of important places by each family within the City of Richmond. After analysing all of the data, several works of art were created with each family in mind: bus shelter images juxtaposing close‐up and far away geographical images; side‐by‐side images portraying historical and contemporary images of family ideals and/or issues; banners illustrating families in meaningful poses; and archival collections portraying the importance of identity and memory in the transformation of culture. This phase culminated in a citywide exhibition of the artwork performing public pedagogy. The exhibition questioned the idea of a City of Richmond having a community centre, and instead exhibited many Richgates, or conceptions of Richmond. Rather than having a city centre, there are many centres, a Network of Cities of Richgates, where centres are constantly changing and shifting to reflect the narratives of individuals living in a psycho‐geographical region of a city.

Multicultural Community of Practice in Creative Writing

“…Unlike Basho's travel account, an a/r/tographical essay is not limited to only one or two short paragraphs alternating with haiku or poems. Previous a/r/tographic inquiries have incorporated various art forms, such as self-portrait as a self-evaluation tool in teaching practice (Smitka, 2015), photographs and cartography as public pedagogy (Irwin et al, 2009), paintings and performing arts as a way to re-imagine and re-discover identities (Leake, 2015), poems and body painting (Bickel, 2005), motion pictures (LeBlanc et al, 2015), and poetry in a language class (Leggo et al, 2011).…”

Research and creation: Socially-engaged art in The City of Richgate Project

“…For example, whereas the Canadian Census is an important research tool for gathering and interpreting statistical information regarding ethnicity and culture, and can be used to measure the growth of certain communities, its categories of inclusion are essentializing, reducing complex identities to categories such as Chinese, South Asian, and so on. In this way, a/r/tography can also be thought of as a play on 'cartography': it can be a way of mapping more nuanced and dynamic 'tracings' (Deleuze and Guattari 1987;Irwin et al 2009) of a place by both reflecting its diversity and breaking away from traditional definitions of communities based on exclusion (Giroux 1997;Kwon 2002;Rogoff 2000). But at the same time, too much flexibility makes such projects difficult to classify ontologically and analyse as a whole.…”

“…A/r/tography, the methodology guiding our subjective stance (Irwin et al 2006;Irwin et al 2009;Springgay et al 2007), was designed for such interdisciplinary creative projects. It has been broadly characterized as a practice-based research methodology (Springgay et al 2007) that provides a flexible framework for a process of inquiry encouraging rhizomatic connections (Deleuze and Guattari 1987;Irwin et.…”

Transforming practices and inquiry in-between arts, arts education and research

“…Considering all of these conditions, A/r/tography was our guiding principle. A/r/tography methodology (Irwin et al 2006(Irwin et al , 2009Springgay et al 2007) was designed to study interdisciplinary creative projects. It has been broadly characterized as a practice-based research methodology (Springgay et al 2007) that provides a flexible framework for a process of enquiry encouraging rhizomatic connections (Irwin et al 2006) and encounters between people and ideas.…”