Toward Performative Research: Embodied Listening to the Self/Other

Abstract

Negotiating different identities and otherness in myself is an important precondition for understanding transcultural and hybrid art education processes. I discovered my own ethnicity when I moved to Sweden, my Whiteness when living in Gambia. On returning to Finland, I noticed that the space and culture where I had expected to find my roots began to look like a hall of mirrors in an amusement park. The images that I met in such cultural mirrors sometimes turned out to be absurd and even frightening. The routes that I had thought I knew led me into odd situations, occasionally into deadlocks. I discuss the processes that researching and writing mystory with the support of my Gambian-Finnish daughters have opened in me. I view researching as a holistic activity that involves one with her embodied reality and history. I am also asking what performative writing and researching could be.