Writing life narratives through art practice

This article shares some of my doctoral experiences in a practice-based PhD research in arts developed at the Chelsea College of Arts, University of the Arts London. It locates art practice within the academic research realm and contributes to researchers working on autobiographical studies and practice-based research methods. By offering an overview on my research topic focusing on the relationship between language and place in the life of Brazilian women living in London, I reflect on the relevance of “not-knowing” as a fruitful space for researching autobiographical and situated life narratives through art practice. The article concludes that qualitative methods are relevant for building passages from the individual to the collective sphere of an art practice developed within geographical displacement and in the context of academic research.     

Video installation as a creative means of representing temporality in visual data

This paper describes the use of video installation as a creative means of engaging audiences in visual research. A detailed image-based overview of the project, 1247 Days on Whymark Avenue, is also presented. This interactive video installation offered viewers a level of phenomenological immersion in the compressed temporality and asynchronous dialogue captured by this visual research project. This film is part of a larger research project on the longitudinal photo-documentation of urban life (Hansen & Flynn 2015a). The project uses repeat photography to study street art and graffiti as visual dialogue.     

Women speaking through embroidery: using visual methods and poetry to narrate lived experiences

This article aims to highlight the ways in which visual methods can be used to narrate lived experiences. Additionally, I also draw from self-written poetry as a way to speak to the embroideries and using poems as a form of alternative analysis that assist in interpreting the embroideries. I embarked on a research project where I used embroidery as a visual methodological tool wherein participants could narrate their stories visually, as a way to shift from solely relying on text and the spoken language. The aim was to highlight various ways in which stories could be told and, commensurately, an acknowledgment of multiple forms of knowledge production is made manifest. The findings and various interpretations of the embroideries have been published elsewhere (see Segalo 2011, 2014, 2016; Segalo, Manoff & Fine 2015). On the basis of the foregoing, I argue that platforms need to be created wherein the academic space and ways in which information and knowledge are presented become open to multiple forms of representation.     

Feminist Relational Discourse Analysis: putting the personal in the political in feminist research

Discourse analysis is a useful and flexible method for exploring power and identity. While there are many forms of discourse analysis, all agree that discourse is the central site of identity construction. However, recent feminist concerns over power, agency, and resistance have drawn attention to the absence of participants’ first-hand experiences within broad discursive accounts (Lafrance &; McKenzie-Mohr 2014 Boonzaier, F 2014, ‘Talking against dominance: South African women resisting dominant discourse in narratives of violence’, in S McKenzie-Mohr &; MN Lafrance (eds.), Women voicing resistance: discursive and narrative explorations, Routledge, Hove, pp. 102–20.[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]; Saukko 2008 Saukko, P 2008, The anorexic self: a personal, political analysis of a diagnostic discourse, State University of New York Press, Albany. [Google Scholar]). For those with an interest in power relations, such as feminist researchers, this is a problematic silence which renders the personal functions of discourse invisible. In this article, we argue that the “personal” and “political” are inextricable, and we make a case for putting the “personal” into broader discursive frameworks of understanding. Further, we assert that feminist research seeking to account for identity must more explicitly aim to capture this interplay. To this end, we argue that voice is the key site of meaning where this interplay can be captured, but that no clear analytical framework currently exists for producing such an account. In response, we propose Feminist Relational Discourse Analysis (FRDA) as a voice-centered analytical approach for engaging with experience and discourse in talk. We then set out clear guidance on how to do FRDA, as applied in the context of women working in U.K. policing. Finally, we conclude that by prioritizing voice, FRDA invites new and politicized feminist readings of power, agency, and resistance, where the voices of participants remain central to the discursive accounts of researchers.     

Somatovisceral interactions in visceral perception: Abdominal masking of colonic stimuli

Clinical and experimental evidence on referred pain and spinal-afferent convergence demonstrates a close relationship between visceral and somatosensory perception, which is important for current models of symptom perception and central body representation. The study uses a psychophysical approach to quantify these interactions at the perceptual level, taking into account problems of comparable intermodal scaling and the role of awareness. An experiment on somatosensory masking of distension stimuli in the colon is reported in which a multiple staircase method of forced choice discrimination with concurrent sensation ratings was employed. Results showed perceptual masking of visceral by abdominal stimuli but not vice versa. The masking effect was not enhanced by intratomal placement of the abdominal stimulus in the lower left quadrant. This contradicts the spinal sensory convergence model and points to perceptual interactions at higher brain levels. Loglinear analysis of relations between discrimination and subjective sensation revealed qualitative differences of somatovisceral perception at the preconscious as compared to the conscious level. This argues for a two-process model of integrative body perception.     

In defence of the Defence Mechanism Test (DMT)—a reply.

A paper by I. Zuber and B. Ekehammar in this Journal (38, 1997) is reviewed. The paper advocates that the non-veridical contents in the series of reports in the DMT should preferably be referred, not to psychoanalytic defence mechanisms, but to factors of stimulus order. The methods and the arguments of this investigation are critically examined.     

‘So you did what you wanted then’: Discourse analysis,personal agency,and psychotherapy

This paper explores issues concerning personal agency in discursive psychology and discourse analysis, with a particular emphasis on agency in terms of motivational accounts of the person. Issues are discussed in relation to the efficacy, acceptability, and accessibility of discourse analytic research for the practising psychotherapist. We suggest that such an approach may raise problems in four areas. First, we argue that without explicit theorization of the subject as language user, discourse analysis may be vulnerable to the charge of determinism. Second, theorization of the subject as language user may be required to account successfully for individual consistency and continuity of identity. Third, although claiming to critique commonsense notions of subjectivity, implicit dualist assumptions facilitate a reading of discursive psychology that is compatible with a motivational model of the person. Finally, we argue that discursive psychology itself implies a particular model of the strategically motivated language user. We conclude that, although these issues require clarification, discursive psychology and discourse analysis have much to offer psychotherapy research.     

THE EFFECTIVENESS OF REINFORCEMENT AND PRACTICE FOR ENHANCING THE CREATIVE WRITING OF ELEMENTARY SCHOOL CHILDREN1

Reinforcement (team points) and practice were applied to the written work of 16 fifth graders on three operationally defined components of creative writing, fluency, flexibility, and originality.4 These three components were assessed via five response measures. Fluency was defined as the number of different ideas each student listed in an idea list prepared prior to writing an essay. Flexibility was measured in two ways, idea list flexibility and story flexibility. Idea list flexibility was defined as the number of different kinds of ideas which appeared in each day's list whereas story flexibility was defined as the number of different approaches to the topic that the child used in the story itself. Originality was also measured in two ways, idea list originality and story originality. Idea list originality was defined by the statistical infrequency of ideas in the children's lists of ideas. Story originality was determined by blind, subjective ratings of stories conducted by independent raters. All of the measures of creative responding were demonstrated to be under experimental control. The procedures also raised students' scores on Torrance's Tests of Thinking Creatively With Words on three variables, fluency, flexibility, and originality. Adoption for classroom use seems straightforward.     

Evaluating the conformity of sociometric measurements

The problem of comparing two sociometric matrices, as originally discussed by Katz and Powell in the early 1950's, is reconsidered and generalized using a different inference model. In particular, the proposed indices of conformity are justified by a regression argument similar to the one used by Somers in presenting his well-known measures of asymmetric ordinal association. A permutation distribution and an associated significance test are developed for the specific hypothesis of no conformity reinterpreted as a random matching of the rows and (simultaneously) the columns of one sociometric matrix to the rows and columns of a second. The approximate significance tests that are presented and illustrated with a simple numerical example are based on the first two moments of the permutation distribution, or alternatively, on a random sample from the complete distribution.Partial support for the research of the first author was provided by the National Science Foundation through SOC 75-07860. Equal authorship is implied. The work was done when the first author was at the University of Wisconsin.