Collaging awakening and resistance with/in artful inquiry

Maureen Flint
Kiana Willis
Jennie Pless
Joy Green
Ashley Williams
Casper Gemar
Lauren Copelan
Venessa Silveira
Brandon Isome

Paper presented at ICQI (2024) Champaign-Urbana, IL. 

Manuscript under consideration for special issue ‘Inquiring Artfully: Provoking Possibilities with/through/for Qualitative Encounter’

What does an orientation to the visual make possible or provoke?

Collage as inquiry 

as a process.

Shifting and layering, playing, and experimenting.

Composing and juxtaposing.

Ways of seeing and organizing the world,

collage alters what is taken to be the world itself. 

Focusing more on the

process rather than the product.

How we move with/in

exploring and engaging with

the awakenings, reflexivities, 

resistances.

Collaging is a process of cutting, layering, pasting, arranging, exploring, playing, and experimenting. In this paper, we explore the practices of collage to conceptualize artful inquiry as a mode of thinking and to examine how artful practices impact our orientation, encounters, and movement with/in scholarly work. ‘We’ in this paper are nine scholars who first came together in a course taught in spring 2023 on ‘Visual Inquiry’ offered in the Qualitative Research Program at the University of Georgia. We speak from a variety of disciplines (social work, education, and art) and work with/in a range of paradigms and theories (posthumanisms, Black feminisms and critical feminisms, and queer theories). Together, we represent a wide range of professional experiences (teaching, clinical work, ministry, and community activism), and our identities differ across race, gender, class, sexuality, and citizenship. 

In this paper, we think with collage as a conceptual model to conceptualize artful inquiry as a mode of thinking. We think with the practices of collaging: shifting and layering materials and ideas, playing and experimenting, composing and juxtaposing, as a way to explore our shared and distinct experiences of awakening, resistance, and reflexivity that engaging in collage as artful inquiry provoked.