Research Speaker Series – Digital Arts-Based Research in Education

*Note: This session has passed. Please view the resources and recordings below.

About the Series

The BCcampus Winter 2024 Research Speaker Series offers participants and presenters an opportunity to learn and share knowledge and advocacy on research methods, approaches, and pedagogies when it comes to accessibility, access, Indigenous engagement, and equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) in teaching and learning. These livestream webinars, which take place one Tuesday every month from January to March, will allow you to learn and ask questions about new research directly from the researchers involved.

Learning Outcomes

  • Broaden your knowledge and research skills in the B.C. post-secondary context.
  • Learn about Indigenization, EDI, decolonization, and accessibility in research.
  • Be inspired to participate in research communities of practice or explore the themes in your work.
  • Connect with academics and community members who share your interests.

Please note: These sessions will be recorded, captioned, and made available publicly on BCcampus.ca after the event. You do not need to register to view the recordings after the events.

About the Session

Arts-based research methodologies are increasingly used by social science researchers to extend traditional inquiry and representation across the life of a project. Although there is no exhaustive list of media used by arts-based researchers, traditional media such as painting, drawing, dance, and theatre have tended to dominate. In our technology-saturated world, digital tools and technologies are becoming more entangled with human being and knowing and provide an array of creative approaches to research inquiry and representation. Often associated with quantitative approaches to data, digital tools and new media artforms are prevalent in arts-based educational research. Digital arts-based research can help problematize the binary between quantitative and qualitative approaches to data and can be used to take up data itself as an artistic and expressive medium.

You do not need to be a professional artist to take up arts-based methods in research, just as you do not need to be a computer programmer to use digital arts-based methods in your work. In this session facilitator Rachel Horst will share tools and technologies for any researcher interested in how digital media have become part of existence, creative expression, and meaning-making. This presentation will examine how digital arts and aesthetics can be used at all stages of research and representation. You will take up digital arts-based approaches through a post-humanist and new materialist framework to understand creativity, relationality, and our post-digital experience in troubled times. You will be introduced to how digital arts-based tools and new media aesthetics can deepen and extend your research inquiries.

About the Facilitator

Rachel Horst is a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council–funded PhD candidate in the Department of Language and Literacy Education at the University of British Columbia. She is interested in digital, new, and future literacies pedagogy as conceptualized through a post-human ontology of difference. Her work explores the generative confluence of digital technologies, writing-as-becoming, and creative futures for cultivating the imaginary. Rachel’s digital arts-based research practices lean toward the ethico-onto-epistemological and aesthetic nature of educational research. Informed by decolonial discourse and diffraction, her work seeks to map theoretically enriched pathways between literacy scholarship, systems thinking, future literacies research, and sustainability education.

Other Events in This Series

Recordings and Resources