A diffractive study for art-based learning with_material-data

Abstract

Responding to growing concern within New Materialist cultural theory, this thesis addresses human-centric methodological issues regarding how qualitative research within UK academia is often approached, conducted, and disseminated. The project applies a non-binary research framework through a trilateral study of New Materialist diffractive methods, ethico-onto-epistemological art practice-based enquiry (Geerts and Carstens, 2019), and Zen meditation practice. The framework does this by methodologically developing an application of New Materialist thinker Karen Barad’s (2008) agential realism theory, diffractively read through an understanding of three contemporary artistic practices that engage spatial enquiry (Barbara Knežević, Dave Loder, and Alastair MacLennan), and Zen meditation practice (both practice-ledand in discussions with Zen teacher Myogan Djinn Gallagher).

Central themes pertain to cultivating an understanding into how research methodologies that purposely welcome play, imagination, chance, and contradiction can provide space for alternative practices of knowing. Though the project, a methodological research tool, which I term play-space, has been established. Play-spaces facilitates space for unknown and collaborative ways of knowledge-making with material-data. They address a necessity for breathing space within epistemologically driven learning approaches for qualitative enquiry and facilitate healthier researcher-positions where material-data can be acknowledged as agential and co-creative. Play-spaces can be enacted to disrupt and rethink conventional approaches to research where analysis, critique and reason are favoured as rigorous expectations in the production of knowledge. In this sense, play-space is important for decolonising and radically relearning approaches to knowledge-making (not to be confused with empirical-led and epistemological-led knowledge production).

Date of Award	Mar 2023
Original language	English
Supervisor	Aisling O'Beirn (Supervisor) & Daniel Shipsides (Supervisor)