Abstract
Using the linked motifs of colour and place, the author traces her last 15 years of artistic research through theory and practice, a pivotal moment being her completion of the first ‘research-creation’ doctoral dissertation at York University (Toronto, Canada) which was awarded the ABER SIG Dissertation Award (2008). The chapter tracks the beginnings of the author’s methods in the studio-based approaches of her MFA; and describes how during and since her doctoral work, her methods were deepened and enriched by social sciences inflected arts-based educational research and the UK’s understandings of practice-based research. The researcher positions her approach as ‘research-creation,’ the Canadian term for “an approach to research that combines creative and academic research practices, and supports the development of knowledge and innovation through artistic expression, scholarly investigation, and experimentation” (SSHRC, 2021), while she also draws on allied methods of oral history and ethnography. In 2008 taking up her tenure track (tenured 2013) position at Concordia University, and while supervising graduate artist-researchers, the author has continued to develop her transdisciplinary artistic practice addressing place and belonging via textiles, audio, video, installation, photography, and writing, and using the devices of colour to engage, explore and reflect her love of the natural world.
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Notes
- 1.
My work is extensively documented and described on my two websites, http://www.akaredhanded.com and http://www.re-imagine.ca, the latter specifically for projects developed through my two Concordia University research chairs.
- 2.
In including slightly tweaked versions of the land acknowledgements developed by Concordia and York Universities, I signal that it is through my affiliation with each institution that I have come to understand the importance of including land acknowledgements in an individualized form that goes beyond rote recitation. I also understand the problematics of the recitations, which can become formulaic rather than identifying the speaker’s responsibility to the peoples and lands acknowledged. For more on the latter see York University’s 2019 YFile article about the university’s territorial acknowledgement, Chelsea Vowel’s (2016) blog post and Theresa Stewart-Ambo and K. Wayne Yang’s 2021 article, all in the reference list. This chapter aims to suggest how I am increasingly orienting my own practices towards de-colonization and other forms of healing.
- 3.
The workings of and background to Walk in the Water is portrayed in a short film, see Vaughan and Flores Torre (2020).
- 4.
The then-program director of the Humanities PhD stated that it is impossible to know whether earlier models of such doctoral research-creation exist, due to incomplete archiving (Bina Friewald, personal communications, December 15, 2016).
- 5.
A full list of the graduated MA and PhD students whom I have supervised, with a link to their theses on SPECTRUM, Concordia’s open-access scholarly repository, can be found on my faculty page at https://www.concordia.ca/faculty/kathleen-vaughan.html Those oriented to research-creation are identified as a ‘studio-based thesis’—the Art Education category—or ‘research-creation thesis’—the Humanities/Individualized Program’s preferred term.
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Dissertation Award Information
Outstanding ABER Dissertation Award Year: 2008
Dissertation Title: Finding home: Knowledge, collage and the local environments (not available online)
Supervisor: Dr. Rishma Dunlop
Committee Members: Dr. Warren Crichlow, Faculty of Education (Advisory member); Dr. Carol Ann Wien, Faculty of Education (Advisory member); Dr. Belarie Zatzman, Faculty of Fine Arts (External to the program); Dr. Lorrie Nielsen Gould (External to the university).Degree Granting University: York University, Toronto, Canada
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Vaughan, K. (2023). Colour and Place, for the Love of the World: Observations Along a Research-Creation Trajectory. In: Bickel, B., Irwin, R.L., Siegesmund, R. (eds) Arts-Based Educational Research Trajectories. Studies in Arts-Based Educational Research, vol 6. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-8547-8_9
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