The More You Know

Arts Creation as Non-Representational Research

Abstract

This poetry manuscript, followed by a letter to my past self, explores the learning, being, and knowing outside traditional academic and research spaces. The piece begins with three series of poems on (i) processes of learning, forgetting, and remembering; (ii) home and ways of being home; and (iii) knowing and being known through relation, gender, and sexuality. In writing about sites of non-traditional education through poetic artful inquiry, I feel the urge to communicate with my past self about how my educational journey led me to draw from the arts to research about the world. I critique the use of the arts in my own research as a way of conducting traditional social scientific research: a story about my learnings as a teacher, a poem describing hierarchies of subjects in schools in India, and a story revealing the language policies in India. My research was not experimental—these methods were tame ways of including the arts in my research, and in turn, resisting arts as research.

Responding to a personal history of navigating the hierarchies of research presentation, I leverage the epistolary form to argue for the arts as research. I use Graham Harman’s (2018)
Object-Oriented Ontology and Philip Vannini’s (2015) Nonrepresentational Theory and Methodologies to suggest that empirical reality can be elusive, indescribable, and unattainable. We need artful inquiry to develop “new academic literacies” (Loveless, 2019) that prefer exploring for the love of wisdom. When we trace the etymology of the word “philosophy”,
“philo” means love, and “sophia” means knowledge/wisdom. If the root word of philosophy could mean the love of/for knowledge/knowing, then how did we end up with a dictionary
definition of “a body of knowledge”? Where did the love go? When did the desire of knowing or the knowing of desire stop being the heart of research, discovery, and innovation?

I discuss the potential of researching for the love of knowing by highlighting the qualities of metaphor to experience, explore, and understand a world that is elusive to the studies of
empirical reality. Arts creation, through metaphorical inquiry, contributes something unique through its abstractions that social scientific and scientific methodology finds missing in their representation of the world. Drawing from Vivek Vellanki’s (2020) idea that methodology is a lifestyle choice, I reflect on the metaphorical qualities of my poems to suggest that artful inquiry is a way of being as much as it is a way of knowing. Artful inquiry might not be generalizable like social scientific methodologies, but it has a roaring resonance with people who live in this world: A way of reverberating; a way of presenting something new and undiscovered; a way of looking in new ways and at new things.