How Does a Collective Body Arrive, Move, and Learn? Becoming through Practice-Based Research as a Stringing-(Em)bodying Process

Abstract

This practice-based paper explores the methods of answering the question: what is our collective body? This article offers a case study of collaborative research and seeks to enact a collective body as a means of transgressing and occupying individuated neoliberal spaces of higher education. Understanding the processes through which knowledge is collectively built highlights the in-becoming nature of practice-based research and the enabling forces of this inquiry. The methods enacted access a particular rendering of how we understand ourselves as a collective; we answer the question through doing together. The ways we encounter the collective enable understanding around the shifting boundaries of the individual–collective connection, made palpable by a string. Through playful forms of dissent, such as embodied, remembered, and writing encounters, enable connections with others and inspire a refocusing of our individual practices.

Keywords

• practice-based research
• collective practices
• collaborative artistic pedagogy
• embodied pedagogies
• feminist new materialism
• posthumanism