Keep Candy in the House
Exercising Arts-Informed Research Methodology in Lived Experience of Eulogy Writing
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.18432/ari29578Keywords:
methodology, arts-informed, eulogy, lifelong learning, writing as representationAbstract
My mother’s love of Tootsie Rolls was the only fact I could grasp after her sudden passing. I wanted to share this and other memories of her through a eulogy that was whimsical, far-ranging, and entertaining, but I struggled to write one. My struggles reminded me of other writing challenges, such as my recent dissertation proposal, although there I was partly guided by my arts-informed research methodology framework. Gradually, I found some of those methodological elements could illuminate parts of eulogy writing: formal concerns, audience, presence and engagement, subjectivity, and meaning-making all resonate with arts-informed research’s commitment to form, audience, creative enquiry, researcher presence, and holistic quality. These connections show arts-informed research affords lifelong learning opportunities apart from academic practice; in this case, arts-informed research is a resource tool for navigating lived experiences of grief and grief writing. Moreover, arts-informed research encourages affective narratives and socially-constructed meanings to produce new understandings, which I realize here by including eulogy excerpts to produce an artistic representation of “research” about my mother (including her undying love of chocolate).
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2021 Stephanie Mason
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Authors who publish with Art/Research International agree to the following terms:
a. Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication and the right to sublicense the Contribution, in the form in which it is published by the journal, to others under the terms and conditions of the of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs (CC BY-NC-ND) that allows others to download the work and share the work with others with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal, but they cannot change the work in any way or use any part of the work commercially.
b. Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive public distribution and display of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
c. Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).
d. Authors wishing to include items (such as images or other media, or any creative works of others whether previously published or not) must contact the original copyright holder to obtain explicit permission to publish these items in Art/Research International. Writing permission should include: the title(s) of any copyrighted work, original place of publication if applicable, and an acknowledgement of having read Art/Research International's copyright notice. Authors are responsible for obtaining this permission and keeping it in their own records for later verification.