Tumbling from Embodiment to Enfleshment: Art as Intervention in Collective Autoethnography

Abstract

We, the four authors, found ourselves swept into the tenure process, tumbling as we inquired into what this transition meant to each of us and to all of us. Through a methodological grounding in collective autoethnography – and expanded by art intervention, we came together in our inquiry to explore key experiences as new professors, asking how we individually, collectively, and aesthetically move(d) through our transitions into tenure track assistant professorship. We found it was through the embodied acts of listening, attuning, and responding with/in our flesh as women and as researchers that we felt the friction of Tenure as another body in our collective. Tenure provoked our poems, tears, arguments, victories, aches, paintings, tenderness, stitches through fabric, movements, and identities. This article serves as a methodological unpacking of our arts-based research process that used Tumblr, individual and collective artmaking, and visits to each other’s homes. While our collective work seeks new potentialities of understanding our tumbling selves as women, artists, and researchers new to the academy, we also see this work as opening our stories to the world in order to create new possibilities beyond our project.

Keywords

• arts-based research
• autoethnography
• methodology
• collaborative research
• art intervention
• embodiment