Arts-Based Pathways into Thinking

This book, based on a critical/collective/auto/ethnographic research project, describes an assemblage of theoretically informed, arts-based methods that aim to promote multiplicity and thinking. It explores multiplicities of knowing, sensing, doing and being, generated by analyzing knowing frames, poetry, reading aloud, fableing, playwriting and other inventive, playful and scholarly ways of working with experiences and stories. By offering engaging and inspiring strategies that can disturb standardizations and interrupt cultural normativities, the book sheds light on the conditions that might be present in cultural contexts that enable diversity and creativity. The research project on which this book is based originated from a contradictory set of conditions characterized on the one hand by a marked interest in creative research methods and novel knowledge practices and, on the other hand, by a widespread concern that we live in increasingly standardized times, featuring systems that specify objectives ahead of time, demand compliance and narrow the possibilities for human action. The book takes readers on an arts-based journey designed to enhance the opportunities for imaginative and ethical professional practice in education, human services and the arts.

Introduction pre-beyond.- Interlude 1: Invitation to come along (to ourselves and readers).- The Problem: Standardizations and Normativities.- Interlude 2: How are you/we produced in standardized and normative ways?.- Knowing frames analysis: multiple revealing/s of a work of art – to be read aloud.- Interlude 3: Venturing into in-between spaces.- Poetry as productive of persistent multiplicities.- Interlude 4: Mobile phone ranting.- Reading Aloud to support non-normative identifications and affectivities - a triptych.- Interlude 5: Absence - pleasure.- Immersion into a pleasurable flow that affords combinings and diversities.- Interlude 6: Noticing and naming temporal dimensions.- Fabel-ing / Telling Tales-ing / True Story-ing / Creative Writing: A  critical/collective/auto/ethnographically informed process aiming to deepen analysis of what is and support imagining what might bes.- Interlude 7: Post–return - cultural contexts that are supportive of diversity.- Conclusion.