29 - Speculative a/r/tography

Summary

Introduction

We are a/r/tographers who work in pre- and in- service teacher education in Australian universities. We write this chapter for researchers interested in encountering and conducting speculative creative inquiry. Data analysis in speculative a/r/tography is an active doing coupled with quiet reflection in the space of ‘not yet’. It is ‘less about discovering something pre- existing and more about constructing knowledge through the process itself ‘ (Reason, 2018, p 49). Doing data this way advances our understanding of small data via closeto- practice, aesthetically oriented, process- driven, human- scale analyses. This approach to data resists data imperialism and is decolonial, post- human, and activist in its politics – making way for a multiplicity of ontologies, knowledge systems, and methodologies. Our creative methods are informed by an interplay of methodology and pedagogy that contiguously respond to relational understandings of being an artist/ researcher/ theorist and the many creative (in- )betweens that being a practitioner affords. In this sense, we dance between theory and practice, whereby theory becomes data as much as the artefacts created in and through the a/ r/ tistic practice. As collaborators, we explore complex problems with similarly curious colleagues and students, bringing together multiple perspectives, sites, and spaces to assemble meaning (MacDonald et al, 2022). This is an important place to begin this chapter on creative data work because it positions where and how we do speculative a/ r/ tography and what the opportunities might be as you begin to play within creative possibilities.

A/ r/ tography has its roots in education (see LeBlanc and Irwin, 2019). However, our particular iteration of a/ r/ tography transcends the disciplinary boundaries of education, living and breathing across speculative inquiry, creative methods, and creative data analysis. 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, 2017). Our rendering of a/ r/ tography as speculative emphasises inquiry as being complex, imaginative, playful, and risky. Speculative a/ r/ tography enacts possibility thinking, ‘designerly’ ways of knowing and thinking, prototyping and failure in novel ways that other forms of a/ r/ tography might not.