Abstract:
What then can the body of Arts – Research – Education do? What can arts based educational research produce (hereafter ABER)? As emerging researchers in this field, we begin this chapter in the middle of a reflective conversation about many assemblages and about our journey into arts based education research, and what life was emergent in a recent project we were involved with known as Move-Act-Play-Sing hereafter as MAPS (Lines, Naughton, Roder, Matapo, Whyte & Liao, 2014). In our conversation we reflect on questions in respect to what ABER might do, how might ABER live within a teacher practitioner early childhood research project. We plug MAPS into the Deleuzean concept of affect to palpate ABER, reveal life and the tensions which express themselves as affects, as capacities to affect and to be affected. We discuss ways to honour more equal power relations across this emerging researcher community in which much is assembles, co-mixing, both affecting and open to being affected. This includes university researcher, research assistant, community artist, along with teacher ‘as’ researcher, and also child as researcher. We extend this mix to relations involving spiritual wairua, with embodied life force, he ‘mauri’ and with unique Māori knowledge local to sense of place, environment and land, with ‘whenua’. We consider our struggle with all the constraints that our labels produce, and how difficult escaping these has been at times … and how these continue to exercise capacities to affect us as we attempt to write this chapter.
