Silent Voices, Absent Bodies, and Quiet Methods: Revisiting the Processes and Outcomes of Personal Knowledge Production Through Body-Mapping Methodologies Among Indigenous Youth

Abstract

At the interface of Western and Indigenous research methodologies, this paper revisits the place of the “personal” and “autobiographical” self in qualitative visual research. We outline a community and partnership-based evaluation of a theater program for Indigenous youth using arts-based body-mapping approaches in Saskatoon, Canada, and explore the methodological limitations of the narrator or artist’s voice and representations to translate personal visual-narratives and personal knowledges they hold. In so doing, we describe how body-mapping methods were adapted and improvised to respond to the silent voices and absent bodies within personal visual-narratives with an epistemological eclecticism handling the limitations of voice and meaningfully engaging the potentiality of quietness. Extending the conceptual and methodological boundaries of the “personal” and “autobiographical” for both narrator and interlocutor, artist and observer, we contribute to debates on the processes and outcomes of personal knowledge production by articulating a generative, ethical, and culturally-grounded project mobilizing body-mapping as a quiet method that pursues self-work—the passionate and emergent practices of working on one’s self and making self appear in non-representational and ceremonial ways.