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Paper Short Abstract:

Based on the reflections of two practitioners-academics, the paper charts out the political and conceptual challenges in the use of Arts-based methodology as a decolonial strategy, with a focus on the (un)commensurability of knowledge forms.

Paper Abstract:

The articulation of the decolonial impulse in neoliberal academy in Europe and its settler colonies often operates a reduction of the post-colonial project to a process of ensuring that reading lists have a representation of people who are of racially diverse backgrounds. Unreconstructed extensions of coloniality thus pass as radical texts for being produced by brown and black folk in western academia. This strategy of superficial aesthetics (for as we see with Art based methods, aesthetics can be profoundly radical) thus protects academic discourse from any fundamental rearticulation – ontologically, epistemologically, materially or indeed geo-politically. Based on the reflections of two practitioner-academics who use film and theatre as research methods, the paper charts out the political and conceptual challenges in the use of Arts-based methodology as a decolonial strategy in an attempt to make these challenges collective, tangible and actionable.

Primary amongst these is what we call the challenge of the knowledge form - i.e. the form required for something to be legible as knowledge itself. The move, for instance, from a journal article to a forum theatre piece requires a reimagination of knowledge itself. Related to this is the gendered genealogy of the notion of ‘evidence’, marked by the dominance of claims taking the quantifiable form over the qualitative, the ethnographic and the narrative, extending into the exclusion of the artistic itself. A third challenge is that of ontological articulation especially in contexts where arts-based methods begin with an irreverence to ontological assumptions that underlie normativity.