‘Experiment, don't signify and interpret! Find your own places, territorialities, deterritorializations, regime, lines of flight! Semiotize yourself instead of rooting around in your prefab childhood and Western semiology’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1980/1987, p. 139).
2018-19 was the third academic year in which we gave a master's seminar on arts-based research (ABR) at the University of Barcelona. For us every year is different and we take it as a new challenge. This is for several reasons: firstly, because we like to introduce new ideas about ABR; secondly, because in one year we have changed, we are not the same as the previous year. So many things have happened to us. In one year we have made new readings and writings, shared advances on the subject with colleagues and presented them in conferences (De Aberasturi et al., 2018). All this has moved us to other territories. And thirdly, because we understand these seminars as a space for experimentation, a space to continue learning about ABR with the students, challenging one to each other.
In addition to this, in the approach we follow at the University of Barcelona, both in undergraduate and postgraduate programmes, we pay attention mainly to the ontological, epistemological and methodological meanings given by the Arts Based Research (ABR) process, as well as to the use of artistic media in the sciences, health, social, educational and artistic research. This means, on one hand “making new worlds; enabling others to re-experience vicariously the world” (Barone and Eisner, 2012: 20). And, on the other hand, inviting students to explore ABR from a postqualitative approach, connected with Deleuzian ontology of becoming (Carlin and Wallin, 2014; Coleman and Ringrose, 2013) and with a way of thinking of research as rhizome (Deleuze and Guattari, 1980/1987). For us, postqualitative research enables us to go beyond the first conceptualization of Living Inquiry. This concept is an effective framework for opening-up research, by acknowledging that everyone is an expert of her/his own lived experience (Springgay, Irwin and Wilson, 2005). In addition to democratizing the notion of who can carry out research, it also recognizes that the research process cannot be fully controlled or contained. It is a term that places value on the journey of a research process and on the transition inquirers (and the inquiry itself) go through. However, in some way it still refers to a humanistic world instead of a posthumanist one. The introduction of the ontology of becoming opens up an ongoing world, where the human and the non-human affect each other and enable to create new realities. Furthermore, it also invites to think of the subject as an I-multiple-in-relationship and in constant change, moving also in a multiple reality in constant change. Thus, this ontology presents an unfinished, indeterminate and open reality (Coleman and Ringrose, 2013), which takes into account for research not just facts, but processes, forces and movements that affect and force ways of thinking other.
With this in mind, we decided to understand the seminar as a rhizome, a network in which ‘any point . . . can be connected to anything other, and must be’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1980/1987, p., 7), offering some plateaus/challenges and invite students to learn to become-arts-based researchers by doing an arts-based research.
