#blogtakeover I Filippa Kier Droob I Stitching Together Practice and Theory: Tracing My First Encounter with A/r/tography

What is an a/r/tographer? Had you asked me this question a couple of weeks ago, my answer would have been a pretty solid, “I couldn’t tell you.” Though now, almost four weeks into my three-month stay as a visiting scholar at the Faculty of Education at the University of Melbourne,my answer might be, “Me?”. Becoming increasingly more acquainted with the concept with each passing day, I find myself in an ambivalent relationship with the matter, constantly shifting between modes of ‘oh yeah, I’m already doing this” to ‘oh wait, maybe I don’t belong in this category after all.

This blog post is my attempt to weave together an introduction to my research with an invitation to retrace my first steps into the world of a/r/tography. Hopefully, along the way, you’ll get a sense of both my existing thoughts, theoretical standpoints, and research objectives, and what I – in continuation of my newly commenced relationship with a/r/tography and the inspirational team and work here at SWISP Lab – hope to ascribe to these points of view through my research stay at UoM.

Introducing My Research

First things first: my name is Filippa Kier Droob, and I am a PhD fellow in Scandinavian Studies and Experience Economy at the School of Communication and Culture, Aarhus University, Denmark. My ongoing PhD-project aims to explore the growing resurgence of knitting as a communal activity and its potential to shape the practitioner’s understanding of everyday life. I perceive knitting as a social, embodied, and material practice and ask if the practice has the potential to make us reconsider our relationships with time, consumption, and production, offering a counter-narrative to the fast-paced, commodified nature of contemporary life. As such, I examine how practices of material and embodied collaboration evoke forms of care and response-ability, and how knitting as a kind of micropolitics might respond to the challenges of the Anthropocene. Such conceptions stem from an understanding of materiality as a vital, interdependent matter and the notion of non-human agency as equally active in shaping social, political, and ecological realities as humans. My research is therefore deeply rooted in the belief that the embodied, material, and affective terms of making play a vital role in our ways of knowing and experiencing the world. Such perspectives are of course informed especially by feminist theories, new materialisms, and post-humanistic ontology, which I apply and situate alongside perspectives from cultural studies.

As it tends to be, when trying to compress your research agenda into one, somewhat concise cluster, it can end up sounding as if you’re doing everything and nothing at the same time. So, in an attempt to specify it a bit more for you, the reader – and because research questions in some way force this type of ‘cutting-to-the-chase’-ness which I sometimes lack (I admit) – I thought I might end this section with some of the thematic questions through which I approach my research:

Knitting in/as Experience Economy:
Why do people gather in public to knit?
What forms of value does communal knitting create for its participants?
Which subjects are formed through the process of experience?
What is the potential of contemporary knitting events?

The Politics of Knitting:
To what extent do knitting communities integrate or perform sustainability and/or political principles and orientations in(to) their practice?
How does or can knitting enact itself as a (slow) revolution?
How can knitting contribute to setting new agendas?

Considering Knitting through Material and the Body:
What kind of caring and response-ability can the material and embodied collaboration of knitting evoke?
What difference does it make to consider the practice of knitting as an assemblage of human-nonhuman interactions?
How might an understanding of knitting as ‘micropolitics’ respond to Anthropocene challenges?

Image 1: Front page of my master’s thesis

Encountering A/r/tography

Okay, research objectives = reasonably covered (at least to some extent, I hope). Now, let me take you along for the ride of my initial exploration of a/r/tography, which began with me – guided very kindly by Kate and the other PhDs at the faculty – trying to get a sense of this new academic terrain by reading essential texts on the topic and gathering quotations that resonated with me and my research, some of which I’ll share with you here:

“As an arts-based methodology grounded in the physicality of making and creating, a/r/tography is situated outside traditional research structures. It is framed by a continual process of questioning where understandings are not predetermined and where artistic contexts, materials, and processes create transformative events, interactive spaces in which the reader/viewer/audience can co-create in meaning-making. In short, a/r/tography is an arts-based form of inquirythat disrupts standardized criteria of research while evoking and provoking alternate possibilities for understanding.” (LeBlanc & Irwin, 2019)

“A/r/tography as such is a methodology of embodiment, never isolated in its activity but always engaged with the world.” (Springgay et al., [2005] 2024, p. 40)

“As a practice of meaning-making, a/r/tography relies on a multiplicity of perceptions held between and within sensual and textual ways of knowing […] As such, a/r/tography is active and responsive: It requires attentiveness to what is seen and known and to what lies beneath the surface” (Springgay et al., [2005] 2024, p. 46)

“A/ r/ tography renders its practices in ways that enable thinking with and doing through iterative and looping actions: contiguity, living inquiry, openings, metaphor/ metonymy, reverberation and resonance, excess and absence, and gaze.” (Coleman et al., 2024, p. 422)

“Through imagination, a/r/tography seeks to bring forward emergent possibilities and potentialities, so as to refuse ‘treating the world as predefined and given, as simply there´ (Greene, 2000, p.23).” (Mosavarzadeh, 2024, p. 483)

“Rather than a rigid set of methods or a set of methodology to be adopted or applied, a/r/tography is a lived and emergent practice into which one enters without knowing predetermined end” (Lee et al., 2019, p. 682)

“[A]/r/tographic studies are not content to exist as mere documentation of expended potential. They insist their present aliveness, invigorated through the act of being read. The reader becomes, from a passive observer of once-lived inquiry, into an active participant in the process of reading, weaving the text and images into the context of their own situated, living experience.” (Morimoto, 2024, pp. 492-3)

“[M]ost of all, a/r/tography is about each of us living a life of deepmeaning enhanced through perceptual practices that reveal what was once hidden, create what has never been known, and imagine what we hope to achieve. (Irwin, 2017, p. 36)”

As stated earlier, these are perspectives that make me feel as if I’ve discovered some kind of long-lost conceptual connection. Encountering materials as active participants, and in continuation of this, understanding how creative, embodied practices influence the ways we know and experience the world, are theoretical concepts I already incorporate into my research, yet at the same time, I have struggled to situate methodically. A/r/tography’s insistence on acknowledging that some forms of knowing cannot be conveyed through language, and on the importance of incorporating different types of academic knowledge production in research, resonates strongly with this struggle of mine. As such, a/r/tography seems to open up a kind of movement between the boundaries of theory and practice, one that treats making as thinking – aligning with what I’ve been searching for. Put in the terms of a/r/tographic concepts, it allows me to engage with renderings – the intersections of knowing and being – in a way that feels both exploratory and generative.

So far, so good, right? I can definitely see myself in the methodology of a/r/tography! However,…

Identifying as an artist/researcher/teacher would not be the first hyphenated pronoun I would think of applying to myself. As much as I resonate with the middle part, I hesitate with the categories surrounding it. I don’t really see myself as an artist, and as a teacher my experience so far only stretches to a few guest lectures. Therefore, reading the (at times) highlighted identity-based part of a/r/tographic research, I feel hesitant. Coming across an article, however, wherein Coleman et al. (2024) argue for a particular iteration of a/r/tography, shifting the T:teacher towards T:theorist, I started to approach the concept differently: rather than a fixed identification with certain professional labels, a/r/tography entails different modes of being and doing collectively coming together. Also, reading the afterword in A/r/tography: Essential Readings and Conversations (2024), wherein Leggo’s (2012) reprinted words poetically highlight the generative, lively nature of the oblique in a/r/tography, inspired me as well to think of the concept in other terms. I’ll share some of the passages I was especially drawn to – maybe you’ll spot some of the same possibilities that I did:

5
a/r/tography always winks obliquely […]
6
the oblique in a/r/tography hints at more, what is not said
7
[…] a/r/tography interconnects, interacts, interviews, interweaves
[…]
10
the oblique in a/r/tography connects, relates, joints, unites like a dovetail joint
[…]
17
with the oblique, a/r/tography figures, configures, and transfigures with a wild dancer’s interpretive instinct and intuition
[…]
23
the oblique opens up identity, pluralizes, subjectivity, refuses containment
[…]
25
the oblique invites abbreviations, even deviations, perhaps divinations, always offered with care, in its hailing you and me, c/o the art, the writing, the hope for communication
[…]
29
the oblique renders abundant combinations amidst contiguous borders, porous and permeable, just like a/r/tography
(Leggo, [2012] 2024, pp. 447-9)

I might be going rogue here, venturing into unknown territory, but I have come to appreciate a version of a/r/tography that shifts the A and T toward A:assembler and T:theorist. In these categories, I feel at home. As an interdisciplinary researcher who both apply and blurs the lines be- tween ethnographic cultural studies and posthumanist theory, I think of myself as an assembler – pulling together different elements, tracing the knots and entanglements of lived life. At the same time, as a scholar, I produce and share knowledge – I’d even go so far as to say that my main goal and purpose, as a researcher, is to contribute at least to something or someone in that way. In a looser sense, maybe that does count as teaching (I would actually argue that it does). But thinking of myself as a theorist resonates even more: my work doesn’t just rely on theory; it grows out of it and folds back into it again. So, I guess that’s how I’ve come to wrap my head around the triadic understanding of a/r/tography, which, as I see it, brings together practice-based, creative, and pedagogical processes.

Image 2: Collage made by Kate in the SWISP Lab Residency at Science Gallery

Binding Off and Casting On

So far, being introduced to – and having taken baby steps down the path of – a/r/tography has been intriguing and exciting. Not only has it welcomed me into the vibrant research and team here at SWISP Lab, but it’s also opened up new ways for me to approach my research – exactly what I had hoped to explore during my scholarly stay abroad. Specifically, I’m planning to run three different workshops while I’m here, experimenting in practice with what a/r/tography has already shown me through words: recognizing making as thinking, and doing research through living inquiry.

Image 3: Poster for two of my upcoming workshops

So, am I an a/r/tographer? To be fair, I’m not sure. At least, it’s too soon for me to tell. However, what I do know is how inspired I feel by my first encounters with the field’s theories, methods, and scholars. My research seems to have reached a kind of conceptual breathing space, and I feel both excited and intrigued to – quite literally – knit my methodology further over the next few months. Binding this blog post off, and casting new research on 🙂