Conference Agenda

“What happened?” Tatiana asks. Out of the door and quickly finding shelter inside her ice-cold vehicle, she breathes out her frustration. “What happened in the classroom?” The question comes out as vapour, material expression of her puzzlement. Condensation: the physical transformation of warm air into vapour when it hits cold air. Exhaling her burning frustration, the arts-based educator has just met what is commonly experienced when facilitating change processes that rely on communication forms that are alternative to verbal-logical ones. Resistance. Resistance to embodied, bodily, sensory, sensuous, materially-mediated learning. What does this resistance do to the educational relationship? How is this discursively and materially negotiated in educational contexts? What does this say about the aesthetics of love?

In my personal narrative, I tell the story of my experience of my Master student Sarah´s resistance to an arts-based educational session and how we collaboratively turned reciprocal resistance to reciprocal care. How can arts-based approaches might be received with resistance and how, despite obstacles, both educator and student might flourish? The purpose of this panel contribution is to formulate new relevant questions for the future of higher education: how do our organisations relate to love and care in education? And what is the role of arts-based methods?

Through letter-writing we found ways of rethinking what is labelled ‘failure’ or ‘resistance’, but instead might be a fundamental practice of criticality and creativity. The educational encounter is sticky with fear. On one side the educators, who fear being rejected (not listened to, losing authority) (Taylor 2010), on the other the students, who fear failing the course (not passing the exam, not fitting in). These anxieties “can only emerge in a system of cultural values about teaching as a relationship based on power dynamics rather than on reciprocal care” (Chemi & Firing 2024: 226).

“I can see how such processes can be productive for situations and experiences at work. But I can also see that they can separate people.”

The quote is from a student who participated in a leadership education course, where I was the teacher. On that day of the course, we were working with art-based methods, and this student only participated partially. She refused to take part in the dancing and drawing exercises, which puzzled me, as she had previously been very positive and had expressed feeling safe and comfortable during earlier classes. That day, however, she would, for example, sit and look at her mobile phone or roll her eyes. I felt a slight irritation, but I was also curious about her reaction.

I ended up interviewing her one year later, as her response continued to resonate with me. The conversation turned out to be about her work context, colleagues, leader and prior experiences with art-based methods in another setting, her learning style, and how she had developed over the past year — all matters that became entangled with the educational room.

This paper is inspired by a post-qualitative (St. Pierre & Jackson, 2014) and posthuman (Barad, 2007) approach, and explores how I, as teacher and researcher, together with the participants, teaching technologies, materialities, affects, and experiences, intra-act and become entangled across time and space. It raises questions such as: What are the balances between learning potentials, students’ comfort zones, and ethical awareness? Art-based performative methods enable alternative ways of generating knowledge and fostering social transformation, as they involve all the senses, the body, and materials as active co-creators of new understandings (Knudsen, 2025; Leavy, 2018). However, this paper argues that such practices require a sensitive affective attunement and a curiosity towards working with darkness as well as potentiality.

What are the dark sides of automatism such as opening for emotions, especially for participants who experience discovery through automatic methods uncomfortable or unintentional?

My interest is dilemmas in arts-based research knowledge, especially when applying intuitive and spontaneous elicitation through “automatic” creative methods. Automatic methods for free association rely on generating writing and drawing without editing, and are commonly used for idea generation (Leavy, 2018). Automatism can aid in formulating affect, memories, sensory impressions and embodied knowledge and is related to art movements, especially Surrealism, to psychoanalytical approaches for exploring the unconscious, and to occult “spiritism” (Opstrup, 2024).

In my arts-based research facilitation practice with automatism I have taken its merits for granted and set aside the close relation to psychological and spiritual elicitory methods which are so readily dismissed as unscientific, private, overnatural, scary, etc. My own comfort with applying automatic methods at university and psychiatric facilities is high, although always cautionary about ethical boundaries and scaffolding. But have I really listened to participants’ questions about purpose, validity, struggles with inner critics and right/wrong, their “resistance”? My eagerness and assurance as authority to trust the process, that all voices and ideas are valuable, may have overruled dissenting voices (Bakhtin, 1981).

I highlight a case from my arts practice to illustrate how automatism can bring surprises. My intentional invitation is key. Upon the recent death of my husband I use automatic methods for writing, drawing and printing small artists' books. The emergence of weird, gruesome flying bird-women in my artwork has inspired me to study mythical, monstrous bird-like flying women as messengers (harbingers) and guardians of living/dying processes, embodying seductive, victorious, destructive, enraged, loving aspects (Young, 2018). Automatic methods summoned bird-women as timeless figures of grief across global traditions rooted in ancient symbols of transcendence.

When I have taught arts-based methods and research to PhD students and young researchers, I have often been asked this question: “Will my research be scientific? Will I find a journal to publish my work in?'

In an era of complexity, where different tensions are prompting research to redefine science and scientific rigour itself (St Pierre, 2011), the concerns of researchers in training appear to have multiple layers.

The most obvious concern is how the scientific community views arts-based research. How much do we know about creating spaces to share this research with young people? Actually, the very existence of this conference seems to answer the first question regarding the will and legitimacy of the scientific community in this regard.

Yet hidden within the question posed by young researchers is a second, implicit and sometimes unconscious level of concern: can I, as a researcher, justify using a channel of knowledge that relies on perception and understanding rather than the explanation and logos of science as commonly understood? Can I engage with my embodied and subjective experience of exploring my subject of study without compromising the value of my research?

This contribution focuses on this second dimension, starting with an epistemological and methodological reflection on the importance of reconnecting with personal knowledge for those involved in educational and training processes, precisely because the object of study itself requires it. Using a phenomenological-hermeneutic perspective (Van Manen, 1999), we will discuss the ethical necessity for personal knowledge with participants in different languages, arguing that one cannot deal with education and training without having experienced the subjectivity intrinsic to one's object of study.