The Visiting as Methodology installation, chapbook, and panel will be an innovative gathering of researchers and collaborators. The project will present a specific segment of my CRC-funded research—an archiving process and life history with the late settler ally Jean Koning—through an interactive multi-media installation and chapbook that reflects the methodology of the research itself. The research will be presented via a range of media, including visual displays, multimedia stations, a chapbook, and a panel discussion. Additionally, the project intends to invite participants into a process that mirrors our reflections from the research process – attendees will be invited to sip tea and converse with one another, experiencing the possibility of visiting as methodology. We especially aim to engage local Indigenous communities and community organizations, and to offer a space – following Jean’s teachings – where we listen meaningfully not only to what research questions are deemed pertinent to community partners, but also to how future research relationships should be fostered and maintained.
A small but growing field of scholarship explores visiting as methodology — a series of decolonial, anti-oppressive, feminist, and Indigenous research processes that centre relationships, recognizing that our processes are central to the knowledge we create, thus resisting capitalist-colonial pressures to limit time and maximize product. Our work with Jean offers a foray into what emerges when we centre the relationship, and all the many ripples and events that transpired in terms of our individual well-being, our collective approach, and our understanding of the land.
The research also flips the usual understanding of data as extracted from aging subjects, as we instead explore the way a respected community elder herself collected data over decades, and then, during the last decade of her life (in her 90s), initiated work with a research team to organize her materials into a collection that would help to inform students, scholars, and activists into the future.
Jean explicitly asked: what data, what information, what stories are needed to make decolonial futures? Her archives include a combination of files from community organizations she worked with, ephemera (buttons, objects, ceremonial pieces), photos, short videos taken during meetings, audio recordings of her talking through the contents of her materials, family letters, TRC proceedings she was involved with, and so on. In our work with Jean and her archives, the processes of being together, sharing stories, and talking through the materials she had collected, became as central to the data produced as the contents of the archives themselves – and it is this methodological reflection we wish to explore further in this event and publication.
For more information on the project and to view the chapbook, please visit: https://www.agingactivisms.org/visitingjean
