Aesthetic Inquiry Research Articles

Of Pots and Plato’s Aesthetics

Abstract What role should examples play in aesthetic inquiry? This essay brings a neglected early episode in the history of aesthetics to bear on this question. Asked 'What is beauty?' in Plato's Hippias Major, Hippias first cites a beautiful maiden. Surprisingly, before refuting this answer, Socrates asks about other examples: a beautiful mare, lyre, and pot (chytra). These widely ignored examples, I show, work to contest an association between beauty and aristocratic class. By beginning the inquiry in this way, Plato emphasizes the need to critique and not rely on cultural examples that incline reflection on beauty.

Engaging visual diaries in early childhood nature play as pedagogical arousal

This paper explores one element of a multi-faceted project that sought to investigate nature play in early childhood, namely the creation and co-creation of visual diaries by educators, children and academics. The methodology was participatory cartography, which involved the creation of visual and verbal mappings of nature play pedagogies by early childhood educators and academics, as well as visual mappings of nature play experiences by 4-5-year-old children. The visual diary supported, articulated, portrayed and documented the implementation of nature play pedagogies (by the educators), the experiences of nature play (by the children) and the analysis of data (by the academics). This paper explores this methodological slice of the project. It asserts that the visual diary is a useful, arousing and potentially aesthetic inquiry, documentary and resource apparatus for educators, enabling collaborative artmaking moments with children.

Towards an Ecology of Practices in Academic Filmmaking

This video-essay proposes to depart from the experimental cinema made by Latin American women in order to highlight the tendencies of this minor cinema in which we can find ecological and formal concerns that cross our geopolitical and imaginary territories. Thus, we aim to identify an ecology of practices within the work of three contemporary filmmakers that despite their distinct styles and approaches, share commonalities and divergences that offer insight into the rich diversity in the same ecosystem. This was done through a montage of material from three short films: 13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird (2020) by Ana Vaz, Erial (2021) by Javiera Cisterna and Celaje (2020) by Sofia Gallisá Muriente. Through this video essay, we aim to interweave ideas, images, and methodologies towards a cohesive understanding of an ecology of practices in both film and academia. Our aspiration is to foster reflection on academic film practice as a possibility to reveal other means for political, epistemological and aesthetic inquiry.

Can we do this online? An aesthetic inquiry on virtual studio management education

Studio methods represent one of the more recent forms of arts-based learning interventions for promoting business students' creativeness, fostering socio-material relationships, and generating new insights through its maker-orientation. Different from more individually focused analytical tools, studio practices involve the collective materialization of artifacts to study management and organization topics. The potential for introducing online studio activities remains underexplored because studio-based approaches typically rely on assumptions of physical co-presence and material matters. Contributing to the current dialogue surrounding virtual student engagement and experiential collaborations, this paper focuses on studio activities designed for engaging online MBA Organizational Behavior students in the artistic materialization of artifacts to explore their experiences with virtual groups. Realized artifacts are shared with peer groups through a virtual platform, inviting aesthetic enjoyment and interpretations. Student reflections on artifact-making and virtual sharing are examined through the lens of aesthetics to guide readers through both theoretical nuances and practical insights on co-creative studio dynamics. Participants’ narratives underscore both opportunities and challenges associated with online socio-material studio work. Implications for future research and online studio practices are considered.

Dwelling tenderly with our desires for research and the world: a collaborative and sensory methodology of hope

ABSTRACT How do we dwell tenderly in the ruins of the modern university? This paper engages a hopeful, collaborative, and sensory methodology to imagine possibilities for research and researcher. As academic women navigating the decay of the neoliberal university amid the shadowy spectre of the ‘ideal’ academic, we explore our lived experiences, identities, and questions. For us, managing modernity’s disorientation and dislocation means showing up differently, with new tools, new theoretical frames, and new ways of relating. From our experiential and aesthetic inquiry, tendrils of possibility for what research does, has been, is, and could be, are emerging. Our dwelling together (co-sensing in radical tenderness) helps us see beyond the thicket of institutional requirements towards a more hopeful and collective existence – for if the sense of separation instilled by modernity is a social disease, healing must be a communal endeavour.

Ways of enhancing joyful teaching and learning in a graduate class of Nepal

Adapting a Living Educational Theory Research methodology, I discuss how my teaching, my learning, and my research contributed to the enhancement of joyful teaching and learning in a university classroom. I share my own living-educationaltheory that influenced me, my colleagues, students, and the university culture. Inspired by Bhagavad Gita and using a participatory action research design and dialogue method, I collected and analyzed data from reflective journals, presentations, assignments, and blog writing. In this paper, I present a cluster of five context-responsive approaches (voluntary participation, valuing a sense of wonderment, respecting interdependence, enhancing the Culture of Inquiry, and adapting aesthetic inquiry) as I answer the question: How can I enhance joyful teaching and learning in my graduate classes? Finally, I share three prerequisites and a challenge of promoting joyful teaching and learning in higher educational contexts.

Displacement vs. Mobility; or, Who Owns the World: An Aesthetic Inquiry into Infrastructure, Common Possession, and Violence in Karim Aïnouz’s Documentary Film Central Airport THF (2017)

Displacement vs. Mobility; or, Who Owns the World: An Aesthetic Inquiry into Infrastructure, Common Possession, and Violence in Karim Aïnouz’s Documentary Film Central Airport THF (2017)

Channels Through the Humane The Exiled Body in Crystal Pite’s Flight Pattern

Abstract: This article examines contemporary choreographer Crystal Pite’s celebrated work Flight Pattern (2017), created for the Royal Ballet, which depicts an unspecified group of refugees as allegory for the “human” condition. In striving to choreograph exile outside of place and time, Pite rewrites the refugee as a purely bodied condition of transience, and thus corporealizes what Alexander Weheliye calls a “travelling theory.” The work thus strategically obfuscates the political in the image of the refugee, serving a State-run stage; moreover, it downplays the significance of race to the refugee crisis in complement to a predominantly white company. Reading this dance against key texts of biopolitical discourse, I show how the refugee figures as a symbol of the magnitude of biopower and as such is ontologically tied to the notion of the population—yet the refugee is never engaged at the level of embodiment. Flight Pattern thus offers a critical intervention: how does the West envision the refugee as an individual body? On the dancerly body, this entails citations of Western concert dance’s conventions of aestheticized alterity, raising the specter of the “relatable abject”: a figure that is Other to its audience and yet invites their empathic projection. Flight Pattern thus raises important questions for researchers about the implications of aesthetic inquiry into biopolitical crises: what dance can capture—and what it erases—of the experience of refugitude and the struggle for recognition and legibility on the stage of international politics.

Müzikal Minimalizm: Bir Yanıltıcı Ad Mı?

Whether the term ‘minimal’ is appropriate for the music to which it refers to has been a subject of debate among scholars and composers. Many alternative terms were suggested as substitutions or complements. Consequently, the extent to which minimalist music is minimal has been discussed. Most of the previous studies on the distinctive qualities of minimal music and whether the term is misleading provided either a discussion of the alternative terminology or a comparison of minimal art and music; on the other hand, this essay aims to investigate the ways in which minimal music is ‘minimal’ with a broader view from the perspectives of different disciplines, which is necessary. First, previous studies on understanding why such music and art are considered ‘minimal’ are reviewed and compared. To establish a broader perspective for accuracy, the focus is not limited to the period between the 1960s and 1980s, when minimalist music appeared, developed, and flourished. Sociocultural dynamics surrounding this art and music are also considered since they reflect in the surface qualities of the works; hence a two-way relationship. However, the related sociocultural aspects are only briefly mentioned since they are not in the main scope of this study. Second, the first known publication in which the term is used in a distinctive musical context is presented and discussed in addition to the other starting points suggested by scholars; moreover, the spectrum is broadened with the first publication in which the term was used in the arts due to the reason that there is a direct relationship between the two. Third, a comparison and discussion of minimal art and minimal music is provided regarding the main question of whether minimal music is a misnomer by choosing two representative works from each discipline. Fourth, alternative terminology is discussed in an attempt to provide an answer to the fundamental question, the objective of the paper. At the end of the historical, theoretical and aesthetic enquiry, it is proposed that the term ‘minimal’ is not completely inaccurate to denote this music; however, regarding minimalist music as the ‘emancipation of repetition’ provides more insight into evaluating its importance in Western art music.

Technical skills vs meaning-making: Teacher competencies and strength of inquiry-based learning in aesthetic inquiry

Aesthetic inquiry is a discipline-specific form of Inquiry-Based Learning (IBL) that explores problems on the value, nature and meaning of art in life. It is meant to engage the students in the critical and conceptual aspects of artistic activities as is the nature of inquiry. However, an analysis of 67 Primary 5 (11 year olds) and 71 Secondary 1 (13 year olds) visual art lessons in Singapore found that teachers continue to implement aesthetic inquiry as formal analysis and skills mastery more so than meaning making. The findings using the comprehensive observational indicators of this study will be useful for researchers, curriculum writers, and policy makers to underpin the challenges among in-service teachers in IBL. More importantly, it will enable teachers to learn and reflect on their competencies in delivering an inquiry-based curriculum.

A psychotherapist’s lived experience in-session with an asylum seeker and translator: An autoethnographic case study

ABSTRACT Featured in this article is a psychotherapy case study recounted from the lived experience of the psychotherapist working with an asylum seeker from Afghanistan, with the help of a translator. The method applied is an aesthetic inquiry adapted from Autoethnography which engages the practitioner as the researcher who enters the ‘field’ of the therapy situation. The reflexive writing of the case story, which is integral to the method, sets off a heuristic process, integrating research and practice. Reading this case study, one may grasp the nuances and the atmosphere of an otherwise linguistically challenging therapeutic situation. The story and Gestalt therapy theory are weaved together, which makes palpable, intangible aspects of the therapeutic process.

Aesthetic inquiry for bicultural arts education in Aotearoa New Zealand

This paper uses an arts-based learning encounter at a marae-based wānanga as a starting point for exploring the potential of aesthetic inquiry to support dynamic and always evolving relationality between people and place. The work of two researchers, Māori writer and scholar Cassandra Barnett and Irish inter-cultural researcher Sharon Todd, is discussed as examples of critical aesthetic inquiries that open new possibilities for relationality between people and place through encounters with artworks. Maxine Greene’s definition of aesthetic inquiry, as distinct from an “arts as connoisseurship” approach, is utilised to encourage a greater awareness among arts educators of the limitations and potential risks of liberal multicultural approaches in arts education. With increasing pressures to fast track the decolonising and indigenising of curriculum in New Zealand education, I discuss the importance of mitigating the risks of uncritically transferring indigenous Māori concepts and material into mainstream classrooms. New insights are offered into how aesthetic inquiry in arts based pedagogy and curriculum can support learners to sit with the complexities that come with a settler-indigenous history.

Writing evocative case studies: applying autoethnography as a research methodology for the psychotherapist

This is an introduction to the application of autoethnography, a qualitative research method, an aesthetic inquiry into the psychotherapy process. The method engages the practitioner as researcherautoethnographer who enters a field, which is their client’s therapy process. The aim is to derive insights and deepen the understanding of process, theory and diagnostics from psychotherapy sessions in practice. The therapist creates a reflexive account of their experiences, recording this in their session notes, which are also the field notes and the data. As an autoethnographer, the therapist begins therefrom a process of creative writing. The writing process is reflexive, and aesthetic. Integral to the research method, the act of writing forms a hermeneutic circle where new insights of the phenomenon of therapy happen for the researcher. The writing is created as an art form, usually a story or poetry. The result of this method is a written, evocative, aesthetic representation of the therapy process, based on the phenomenological experience of the practitioner. Demonstrating this method, a single case study of an online Gestalt therapy session of a male client diagnosed with depression and borderline personality disorder is featured in this article. The outcome of this form of aesthetic inquiry is the embodiment of psychotherapy theory through the aesthetic sensibility of the therapist-researcher. Keywords autoethnography, psychotherapy case studies, psychotherapy process research, Gestalt therapy, aesthetic inquiry

Aesthetic inquiry in visual arts education of 6th graders within the framework of Maxine Greene’s aesthetic view on education: An action research

This study is an aesthetic inquiry, as part of a visual arts class, from the standpoint of Maxine Greene's aesthetic perspective in education. By adopting Maxine Greene's perspective, affective learning comes to the fore along with cognitive learning, and accentuates multiple realities through the imagination through the research experiences of the artist, in the process of aesthetic inquiry. The purpose of this study is to reveal the improvement in students’ interpretation processes from different perspectives through aesthetic inquiry in visual arts classes. The study uses action research design, one of the qualitative research designs. It covers a 14-week course at a public middle school. Thematic analysis was used to interpret the data and the research findings were presented. According to the findings, It could be argued that the students reached a broader perspective by reflecting what they discerned in the course processes, the connections they established in relation to their knowledge, feelings and experiences, the differences in their ideas and the developments they observed in themselves from their personal perspectives. The students displayed empathy by seeing different ideas together in the course processes and gained new understandings from multiple perspectives. Under the teacher’s guidance, the students develop a clear perspective of what they can do in works of self-expression and artistic practice by asking questions on what they were curious about, and explaining the reasons for their ideas.

Aesthetic Archaeology

The article’s aim is to clear the ground for the idea of aesthetic archaeology as an aesthetic analysis of remote artifacts divorced from aesthetic criticism. On the example of controversies surrounding the early Cycladic figures, it discusses an anxiety motivating the rejection of aesthetic inquiry in archaeology, namely, the anxiety about the heuristic reliability of one’s aesthetic instincts vis-à-vis remote artifacts. It introduces the claim that establishing an aesthetic mandate of a remote artifact should in the first place be part of a quest after the norms of engagement an artifact’s kind signaled to the intended audience by its appearance. Rather than advocating for a new subdiscipline, the concept of aesthetic archaeology serves to bring into theoretical focus an aesthetic engagement with an artifact’s appearance under circumstances that rule out any acquired competence in distinguishing its aesthetic mandate perceptually—and thus rule out any aesthetic expertise.

Sustainability and creativity through mail art: A case study with young artists in universities

Universities around the world are making considerable efforts to contribute to sustainable development through their institutional frameworks, education, research or community awareness. This article discusses how young artists connect with sustainability problems through an analysis of individual artistic creativity (visions, sources of inspiration, messages and communicative strategies) by means of a novel interpretive arts-based research methodology: mail art. A collection of mail art individually created by 29 young artists who also provide self-reports on the meaning of their work, the creation process and its intent are analyzed using a qualitative content analysis methodology complemented by an aesthetic inquiry into the artistic qualities and creative techniques of the collection. The research concludes that the collection reproduces but also produces messages promoting a sustainability culture. It promotes individual actions for sustainability with everyday creativity using expert knowledge and describes visions and attitudes expressed by young people to detect gaps and to develop a more informed education for sustainable development in universities. Although there are individual differences, the participants generally show appropriate values -such as universalism-, and a desire for ethical action within an ecocentric worldview, displaying constructive hope. However, the collection stands out for a collective, global and future-oriented, versus individual, local and present-oriented framing, running the risk of becoming visions that can delay transformative actions. Some of the most conclusive recommendations of the study are the need to work on the issues of equity and equality in universities today, to enhance the critical perspective of students and to change their current role from that of merely observers to agents for change.

Gothic Antiquity: History, Romance, and the Architectural Imagination, 1760–1840

For scholars of the Gothic, thinking about buildings and books together is an ingrained habit. Not only did Gothic fiction emerge alongside the Gothic architectural revival, but the author of the first self-proclaimed “Gothic tale” was also the builder of what he called a “little Gothic castle.” Horace Walpole's Strawberry Hill, the villa he transformed into an ersatz relic of the architectural past, is thus permanently linked in the critical memory with the ghost-ridden medieval structure he conjured up in The Castle of Otranto (1764). The many later romances that followed in the footsteps of Otranto often also wore their architectural features on their sleeves—or, rather, on their title pages, where “castles,” “ruins,” and “abbeys” proliferated for decades after Walpole's pioneering experiment. Among the pleasures of Townshend's formidably erudite book is the thoroughness with which it revitalizes this by now automatic coupling. Townshend shows that Gothic structures and Gothic romances were linked by the same heated arguments over the valence of what he calls “Gothic antiquity”—a “mythical, vague, and somewhat nebulous sense of the national British past” that spanned the Middle Ages and Renaissance. For some, this was a dark epoch of barbarity and benighted Catholicism, while others saw it as the wellspring of British political liberties and the source of a native artistic tradition epitomized by Shakespeare. The crumbling medieval edifices that fill the period's popular romances—Ann Radcliffe's Castle of Udolpho, Matthew Lewis's Convent of St. Clare, even Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey—are thus more than formulaic settings for eerie adventure or (in Austen's case) didactic parody. They are expressions of an uneasy fascination that Townshend tracks across eight decades of controversy. As Townshend shows, the eventual deflation of the debate over the Gothic legacy in the modern age was foreshadowed by a seemingly mundane linguistic innovation: the coinage of the word medieval. Its first recorded usage dated by the Oxford English Dictionary to 1817, this more neutral historical marker pointed ahead to the Victorians’ taming of the “Gothic” past into an unthreatening subject of historical and aesthetic inquiry.

ARTISTIC APPLICATION METHODS IN THE SCIENCE AND ART OF SYNTHESIS

Science and art are generally compared with each other in terms of their similarities and differences. Syntheses of science and art can be expressed with regards to terms art's contributions through imagination and scientific data's reflections on artistic applications. Research processes that begin with the sense of wonder also show similarity within the comparison between science and art. Also, evaluations are made in different perspectives with views concerning the differences between science and art. Nowadays, the applications that include interdisciplinary work with the convergence of fields of science and art have gained acceptance by a wide variety of research methods. Technology also plays a role in these applications through digitalization in obtaining scientific data and methods of visualization. Contribution to art and education fields is envisaged through application examples produced within the context of science-art synthesis and application-research methods guiding interdisciplinary education. The goal of this study is to reveal how the research methods of visual art works that contain scientific data created by scientist-artists become. The study has been carried out with the literature review. In the research, artistic applications that include scientific information were discussed under themes according to their different prominent characteristics. In the research, various viewpoints concerning application methods that artists who make use of scientific information and materials, that artists who are educated in science and art serve in these two areas, that are cooperative ones conducted through community participation and dual group or multiple groups having proficiency in various areas, and that are the multi-dimensional digital ones through the synthesis of science, art, and technology were revealed. In these practices, artists/scientists have demonstrated the holistic perspective of both fields by experiencing both the process of inquiry for scientific knowledge and aesthetic inquiry in their research paths. Keywords: Science, art, visual arts, artistic application methods

Aesthetics of the martial arts

AbstractThe past 15 years have seen an increase in interest in the martial arts by philosophers in the Anglo‐American tradition. Evidence includes two collections of essays and a book‐length study of the Asian martial arts from the perspective of western philosophy. In this article I summarize some of the most significant recent contributions to the philosophical aesthetics of the martial arts and suggest further areas for development. I begin in the first section with some general considerations regarding the martial arts as arts. In the sections that follow, I consider the martial arts in conjunction with three established areas of philosophical aesthetic inquiry: dance, sport, and everyday aesthetics. In the final section I offer some additional areas for development.

"Deus in Animo": Kantian Ugliness and the Narrative Aesthetic of Frankenstein

Where they are based in Immanuel Kant's categories of the sublime or monstrous, recent aesthetically based accounts reflect the conventional view of Victor Frankenstein's creature as a monster. This project instead engages Kant's category of the ugly, which makes possible a dialectical, narrative-based aesthetic, one folding both Victor's and the creature's interiority to within the social form of disinterested play otherwise known as intersubjectivity. Robert Walton's encounter with the creature provides a fleeting example of this phenomenon: employing Mojca Kuplen's "positive aesthetic of disgust," it offers a stimulus to revised forms of ethics or agency, thus invoking Theodor Adorno's end of aesthetic inquiry.