Abstract
This article contributes to literature on live methods and specifically to the idea of research as an informed provocation of experience in the context of growing methodological experimentation in social science research. The liveness of our method sits with our close attention to inquiry as encompassing of human/non-human relational encounters that, drawing upon a materialism of lively matter, come together in the form of material thinking. We sought to foster a creative encounter between people with experience of self-harm and published narratives about self-harm in the light of ‘provoked perplexity’. We suggest that deliberately ‘provoking perplexity’ in creative and live methodologies, opens up possibilities for inquiry into the unimaginable and unthinkable. Participating in a series of collaborative, creative (visual art) response workshops, our participants troubled the idea of meaning as neat and coherent, linear and final, showing instead how it dwells precisely in the very process of inquiring by means of creative making that constitutes practice as research.
Keywords
Introduction
This article draws on a growing concern to attend closely to the question of liveliness in social science inquiry (Back and Puwar, 2012; Foster, 2019). We discuss a methodological experiment with ‘live methods’, where we sought to make space for the sensuous, allusive, and strange as ways of knowing and experiencing (Back, 2012; Fraser, 2012) by means of creative – artful, collaborative and interdisciplinary – approaches. Our work builds on Fraser's (2012) ethical considerations of how different methods enable different patterns of relations, including questions about the relations we find ourselves in, suggesting a move from theorising or explaining experience to provoking it.
In this article, we discuss live methodologies and consider making as a form of knowing in the light of material thinking (Bolt, 2009) in the context of research. We introduce a method of ‘doing’ live methods, which we designed in order to inquire into the existing interpretative diversity about self-harm together with people with experience of self-harm. Our creative-response method (partly informed by Tarr et al., 2018), involved collaborative working with participants across a series of workshops which further combined reading or engaging with carefully chosen materials which represented different meanings or understandings of self-harm, and responding to these through discussion and art-making. Our approach made space for multiple forms of meaning making, engaging with deliberately ‘provocative’ and often conflicting or contradictory materials representing different orientations to self-harm, resulting in a lively and vital space, where meanings were not simply ‘made’ or ‘shared’, but actively known in the making. We discuss our encounter with the material – the readings and the art – in the light of Bennett's (2004) materialism of lively matter, a kind of materialism that attempts to move beyond the identification of matter as passive, discerning and further attending instead to the force, the power in the ‘thing’. In our work, this translates into the material's ability to arouse and to evoke; or else, how matter works (Thomson, 2020), how it does, rather than what it means, including how it does meaning. We introduce the idea of provoked perplexity in live methods drawing on our experience of how it is this very making, our material engagement, which encountered us with perplexity in an embodied manner. That is, as we endeavoured to work with the boundaries of our sense-making in reading and in making art, and found ourselves perplexed at one's own self-understanding as well as limits of self-understanding. Speaking to research as a provocation of experience, we propose that consistent with the nuanced, complex and messy social world in its liveliness, such perplexity is a state of being – a meaning in itself – which can be viscerally known in-the-making.
Live methods
In search of ways to ‘account for the social world without assassinating the life contained within it’, Back (2012: 21) proposed a manifesto for live methods to encompass more nuanced realms such as the felt or embodied, as well as that which is co-experienced or in-between. Foster (2019) adds to these an array of other states that, in researching lived experience, are often resisted or escaped on the whole, such as the unseen, the overlooked, the untold, the irrational, the half-forgotten or the hidden-behind-layers-of acceptable behaviour. Advocating for the need to encompass such liveliness, Foster (2019) draws on the surrealist spirit to liberate sociological inquiry from its rationality and allow the bizarre and the irreverent to breathe. Such arguments resonate with Gordon's (2008) parallel work on ‘haunting’ as a sociological resource, which can provoke engagement with the ‘unseen’ and ‘intangible’ affects of social life.
Live methods offer a way of operationalising some of the largely theoretical insights on haunting and affect developed by Gordon (2008). By providing ways to integrate creative methodologies, these approaches allow for attention to perplexities or subtleties that would otherwise remain unregistered. More recently, Quinn (2021) introduced ‘slow methods’ to denote an attention to everyday intimacies by means of the slow – reflexive, affective, dwelling – engagement of the researcher with the tempo(rality) and the rhythm of the social world. Quinn (2021) argues that playing with slowness through the researcher's creative immersion allows for the registering of uneven or mundane ways in which the social world unfolds. Slow research and slow ontology have been discussed as alternative means of doing scholarship resisting rapid production and attending instead to the life – including the pace – of the research (Banks, 2014; Ulmer, 2017). Such work speaks to the question of liveliness by means of its attention to research as an experience, which in creative methods takes the form of practice (Barrett and Bolt, 2009; Fraser, 2012). This resonates with, Tarr et al.'s (2018) view of research as process rather than product; and White et al.'s earlier (2010) suggestion about the positive affordances of ‘real-time – live – methods’ being their ability to engage with meaning as emergent. In our work, we drew on these approaches to make a space to stay longer with the paradoxical and incoherent in meaning, which we had encountered in our earlier empirical and theoretical work on self-harm (Simopoulou and Chandler, 2020). We designed a method that would allow a space of immersion both for ourselves and for our prospective participants (Back, 2012; Tarr et al., 2018). We sought to explore the existence of interpretative diversity and discursive fixity by bringing people with close personal and professional experience of self-harming into contact with a range of materials on self-harming and inviting them into a space where they could work directly with them, thinking how they speak to them or not, what they mean or do to them.
Innis (2013: 118) discusses the need to attend to the felt perplexity – what is unsettled or unsettling in the various situations we find ourselves in – where we find it or to provoke it where it is absent. Informed by Fraser's (2012) idea of research as a provocation of experience and Innis’ (2013) notion of felt perplexity we discuss our method in the light of provoked perplexity. We consider how those two activities – the reading and the art-making – led us to encounter perplexity in a twofold way. First, through the very process of encountering different narratives about self-harm, including narratives of perplexity; second, in further processing what those narratives prompted in us by means of art-making, which enabled a felt experience of being perplexed at one's own self-understanding or limits of self-understanding in encountering (and materially engaging with) the boundaries between skin, pain and pleasure.
With our work, we speak to creative research methods contributing an attention to research as an active space of thinking – of live inquiry – that is produced in creative encounters with the material. Our work with the material is situated in a materialism of lively matter that seeks to make manifest the vitality, the force of things or else thing-power as (…) immanent in collectives that include humans, the beings best able to recount the experience of the force of things. Thing-power materialism emphasizes the closeness, the intimacy, of humans and nonhumans. (Bennett, 2004: 365)
In what follows we present the context of self-harming research, with a specific attention to qualitative work in this area and discuss how our work is situated within it. We then proceed to introduce our method and its theoretical underpinning. Drawing on vignettes from the workshops, we discuss our engagement with published narratives and with art making as two constitutive material components around which our method developed. We further attend to and illustrate how making emerged not solely as a means to knowing but as knowing per se, informing the epistemological positioning of our proposed method.
The context of self-harming research
Self-harm is often understood as ‘secret’ and ‘private’ yet is increasingly ‘known’: featured in news reports, films, and books, and has garnered a growing body of scholarly work (Brossard, 2018; Chandler, 2016; Chaney, 2017; Millard, 2015). Self-harm is relatively common, especially among young women, though concerns about a ‘rapid rise’ in the practice have been raised for some twenty years now (Chandler, 2016; Chaney, 2017). The majority of research on self-harm is conducted from psychiatric, and psychological perspectives, which tend to frame the practice as a pathological ‘coping mechanism’ (Chandler, 2016; Hawton et al., 2012; Steggals et al., 2020). There are inter-related problems with many of the assumptions made about self-harm, problems which are compounded by the dominance of certain disciplinary perspectives, and by the marginalisation and compartmentalisation of others. Qualitative and narrative research with those who have self-harmed indicates a far more complex picture, with meanings, intentions, practices and contexts involved in self-harm each shaping what a ‘relationship’ with the practice entails (Brossard, 2018; Chandler, 2016; Steggals, 2015).
Meanings associated with self-harm are rich, multiple, and can be competing or contradictory (Brossard, 2018; Chandler, 2016; Hewitt, 1997; Simopoulou and Chandler, 2020). Such complexity is lost in many contemporary representations of self-harm, and this can have significant – negative – effects. Bareiss (2014), for instance, in analysing representations of self-harm in print media, suggests that individual coping has been emphasised, resulting in a focus on self-harm as an individual choice. This has the effect of diverting attention from a range of social factors which shape the conditions in which young people may make such a ‘choice’.
Qualitative, including creative, approaches to the study of self-harm have burgeoned in recent years. A plurality of meanings is evident in qualitative literature that employs creativity either as a methodological or as an interpretative approach to the practice of self-harming; such literature exposes a tension in more detached, disembodied or binary interpretations that can pathologise and individualise self-harm, isolating it from its social context. Self-harm has been discussed, for instance, as a visceral communication (McLane, 1996); a containing second skin (Milia, 1996); a sign of hope (Motz, 2010); a site of autobiographical or historical memory (Le Breton, 2018); an attempt at self-care (Simopoulou and Chandler, 2020). Further, ritual is a key theme in some analyses, which underlines the creativity inherent in ritualistic practices (Brossard, 2018; Hewitt, 1997; McShane, 2012).
Beyond these studies, some research has drawn on creative approaches to inquire differently into self-harm (e.g., Whynacht, 2018). These studies lean on a philosophical questioning of the privileged place of vocal, coherent, and linear narratives as the most valid form of meaning while wondering about the role of emotion, or ‘felt perplexity’ (Innis, 2013), in knowledge production. A small number of qualitative studies have employed the arts (dance, music-making, creative writing) as methods through which to explore self-harming, looking to challenge the identification of meaning with that which can be put into words. These studies often emphasise the therapeutic or communicative qualities of such practices (Digard et al., 2007; Gilzean, 2011; Kay, 2010; Kominsky, 2006; Trotter, 2000).
Existing works provide tantalising insights into a more complex or plural understanding of self-harm, which can be lost in more traditional qualitative studies of self-harm which rely on talking, usually via one-to-one interviews. An increasing awareness of, and frustration with, such limitations, led us to develop a collaborative project, informed by live methodologies (Back, 2012; Foster, 2019) that would use art-making and group discussion to explicitly attend to the existence of different – published – meanings in self-harming. In doing so we looked to explore how diverse interpretations, as well as the very existence of such diversity, are responded to by people who are in a relationship with self-harm, either through their own personal experience or through their work with self-harm including ourselves as the researchers. Bringing the participants in contact with different published narratives, we looked to ‘provoke’ an encounter with different interpretations about self-harming and to foster a further space of inquiry into these through creative group work.
Creative-response workshops
Our method developed around a series of six creative-response workshops with two groups: a group of practitioners who work with young people who self-harm and a separate group of young people who had self-harmed. The two groups were recruited through a mental health organisation based in Scotland, United Kingdom, which Author 2 had worked with previously on other research projects. The organisation supported access to practitioners who worked with people who had self-harmed, and to young people who had self-harmed, and had used their services. All participants attended an initial information session, where they could meet the researchers and hear more about what the project would involve, before agreeing to take part. Our call was responded by: two female practitioners, aged between 36 and 45, who had each worked for several years supporting people who had self-harmed in both group and one-to one contexts; and three young people, two female and one non-binary person aged between 16 and 25, who had self-harmed. To respect confidentiality and the existing working relationships between practitioners and service users we worked with each group separately.
The study was reviewed and approved by the University's Ethics Committee. All participants provided informed, written consent. We worked individually with participants to design individualised support plans to follow in case involvement in a particular session caused distress – this ensured participants had ownership and involvement, were actively involved in thinking about wellbeing throughout, and that our responses met their needs (rather than the often standard provision of helplines, which not all find useful).
We endeavoured to ensure as much consistency and safety as possible with regard to our workshops; we held them fortnightly at the same time and space – we met with the practitioners’ group in their service during the day, and with the young people's group at the University premises in the evenings. Both groups engaged consistently across the series of the workshops; though we supported participants to skip a week, leave early, and take breaks when needed. We did not define self-harm during research or recruitment, though in most cases the form of self-harm being discussed was self-cutting. That said, during our discussions we addressed other forms of self-harm, in particular self-hitting or bruising. In each workshop, we began by sharing different representations of self-harm in the form of published narratives (located in academic articles, personal accounts, video talks and artworks) which we read together and responded to by means of art-making and group discussion. Each session explored a theme which was identified from our preceding analytic work with literature and accounts of young people (Simopoulou and Chandler, 2020). These were: silence and communication, pain and skin, ritual, gender, and identity with a focus on age and life-stage. A final session was left open for participants to choose a focus or theme.
The groups were run in a fairly structured way, combining audio-recorded group discussions and reflection, and unrecorded, quiet art-making. We shared the materials prior to the groups and began each session by taking in turns to read out a short excerpt of any readings. This approach relied on good levels of literacy in the groups, but it also allowed each group member to contribute their voice from the beginning. After sharing the materials, we discussed initial reflections on the readings or the theme for 30 min. This was followed by 30 min of quiet art-making, where we used a range of art materials – pens, paints, paper, glue and scissors – to respond using art-making to the theme. This period allowed quieter reflection, requiring each of us to use more imaginative and reflective means to consider the theme. In the final 30 min, we switched the voice recorder back on, and spent time reflecting further on the theme. In many cases (but not all, as it was not required or stipulated), we shared the art we had made and spoke to it.
There were similarities between the two groups – in terms of the intimacy that was generated fairly quickly in each case, and maintained across six sessions, and in terms of regular moments of silence (sometimes comfortable, sometimes not). A key difference in how each group felt lay in the relational dynamics between ourselves as researchers and participants. Author 1 is an art therapist, as well as a researcher, while Author 2 – also a researcher – has direct experience of self-harm, and many years’ of experience researching self-harm. Thus, in the group with practitioners, the focus was often on experiences of practitioners, with Author 2 somewhat outside this, as a non-practitioner and someone who had self-harmed. In contrast, the group with young people had rather different dynamics, with Author 2 sharing some elements of the experiences articulated by participants, while Author 1 did not.
In what follows we discuss our method further in the context of live methods, focusing on a facilitated relational encounter with materiality in the form of creative visual work with published narratives. We do not see the two components of our method (the encounter with published narratives and the creative engagement with them) as serving different purposes. Both seek to challenge the predominance of research narratives that are grounded on the idea of meaning or experience as coherent, vocal and representable. Such approaches can sustain simplistic, neat, detached and pathologising understandings of an inherently nuanced and complex social world.
Provoked perplexity in live methods
The analytic materials generated by our project are multiple and include embodied narratives – stories told through wounds, bruises, scars; material narratives – published accounts of self-harming; and visual narratives created in the creative-response workshops. In working with these materials, we are interested in unpicking some of the ways in which, through the dynamics of the groups they came together; and, in dialogue with each other, made up and troubled each other, troubling also the narrative of meaning as singular, linear, or fixed.
We begin by unpacking the two constitutive parts of our proposed method: engagement with published narratives; and visual art-making. We then discuss how they relate to the notion of provoked perplexity. We draw on moments from our workshops to illustrate these and to emphasise how each of these parts of our method resonated separately with some of our participants, before witnessing the way in which they came together in our final vignette informing our epistemology of making as knowing.
Working with published narratives
Being perplexed ourselves with the existing interpretative diversity that we confronted in our preceding work with self-harming, we wanted to stay longer with it and attend to it by inviting people who have experience with self-harm to ‘know’ it and respond to it by means of a collaborative inquiry. In this space of provoked perplexity, we looked to foster a sense of wondering/wandering among the plurality of meanings with them, that is, to stay together and engage in an inquiry by means of art-making and through each other. The bringing of the reading materials is a distinctive characteristic of our method. Having them as our starting point, we looked to attend to what they evoked in the groups. Our workshops exposed us to different interpretations of something that personally mattered to us, to wander in them and wonder about them, and further converse with them through visual images. That is, to relate to them by ‘playing’ with them: to work with or against them in creative, symbolic as well as concretely tangible ways (some of us used physical parts of the readings in/for our art-making).
The reading materials that we brought and shared together in our groups remained our anchors through our process of inquiry: we started from them and returned to them and they sustained us in our movement. Similar to art in art-based inquiry, in their very materiality they prompted us to get in touch with the felt, the non-visible/-tangible/-spoken whilst also containing us as we did. In that sense they formed a containing framework for each workshop, as well as the series of workshops as a whole, becoming a strong, concrete boundary that marked the exploratory – as opposed to a therapeutic – purpose of these meetings.
In our relationships with the readings, and their tone, authors, stories or characters in them, we used them – allying with or opposing them – to think with, project, question; to attack or lean on the different or the familiar, to meet, make or trouble our personal ‘knowledge’. Jo
1
, one of the young people who participated in our workshops, ‘found’ themselves against the following phrase quoted in one of the articles (Milia, 1996) that we drew upon: ‘The wound may be cared for, nurtured and healed like a baby’; The short sentence kind of makes me think about the importance of having injuries afterwards and that being like quite a big aspect of the experience as well, of knowing they’re there and being able to kind of refer back to them, see them or touch them or interfere with their healing, as like I definitely used to do all the time. So I guess, in contrast to me, this ‘healed like a baby’ is like this nurturing loving kind of thing, whereas for me it was like literally when you have a bruise and you keep poking it. It is like remembering the pain again, remembering that experience again, it is like a second stage of self-harm, it is like the initial act and then that self-harm afterwards, like emotional and physical, kind of tying into that. As the emotionally invested envelope of our being, the skin encloses the body, delimiting the self. But because it is also our point of entry into the world, it is a site of living memory: it serves as a boundary between inside and outside, self and other, bodily self and psychic self that is at once alive and porous. The metaphorical vocabulary of touch privileges perception and the quality of contact with the other. It goes beyond the tactile to give meaning to our interactions. We can have “thick skin” and endure a great deal due to particular strength or resilience. But we can also seek a “change of skin”, for example, through various bodily modifications. Everyday language includes numerous references to touch: “keep in touch; a touching experience; he is touchy; a gripping experience; handle with kid gloves; deeply touched; be tactful or tactless; someone is a soft touch or has a soft touch; a clinging personality; how does that grab you; a pat on the back; to press or push someone; a hands-off policy; get a grip or a hold on” (Thayer, 1982: 264). We escape a dangerous situation by the “skin of our teeth” and speak of “shedding our skin” or of something “getting under our skin”. As the site of interface with the other, the skin is a metaphor for our relation to this other and a barometer of the quality of our contact with him or her. (Le Breton, 2018: 34)
Chloe shared the following memory on that day: I remember the feeling of my clothes touching the wounds, and it was painful and in a way reminded me of what happened. So, it wasn’t pleasurable, but it was kind of feeling okay: that emotion … I dealt with it … is there. So it is … what came to me was actually about touching the wounds and kind of like connecting to the body and through body to the emotion.
Here Chloe seems to engage with the intellectual idea of boundary through the offering of an image of something layered, deepening, growingly accessible or available to be reached. Further, we wonder about the relational encounter between Le Breton and Chloe, and their narratives; that is, the reciprocated arousing of an aliveness in the form of a sensorial memory in Chloe's narrative. An untitled poem that was published in an online newsletter about self-harm (The Cutting Edge, 2005a: 3), conveys the provocation of a profound sense of aliveness in the pain of the marked body: I see My body marred By the indentations made by my own teeth I bite down viciously longing for pain to tell me I am still alive. (The Biter)
Amber shared a similarly profound sense of continuity – a going-on-being in the presence of pain – experienced viscerally and reciprocated, both in the changed texture of her skin (via scars from self-harming) and in the very act of breathing with bruises caused by self-harm: Sometimes I kind of, I miss the feeling of smooth skin in certain places but sometimes it's kind of nice to feel like a texture …. And also, I guess, as well, as you were saying … a reminder of the emotional pain that you’ve been going through. I’ve sometimes, I’ve bruised my ribcages and then it's, you can feel it when you breathe, and it ends up being a constant reminder of: I am getting through this, this pain, if that makes sense.
What we want to notice here is the relational – inter-sensory – encounter between authors and participants in the reciprocated qualities of aliveness and profoundness in their sense of self. In addition, we see the capacity of the readings to animate, and complicate, Chloe's and Amber's accounts of self-boundaries (Bennett, 2004).
Given that the readings were representative of a qualitative plurality when it comes to the meaning in self-harming, we sought to explore in the safe space of the group our relationship not only to each of these but also to the very diversity that we encountered. Our relationship to this diversity showed through more implicitly in the way in which our exposure to it gave validity to some of our own individual stories giving in turn permission to share. An individuality of an intimate kind that was found to reside more deeply in encounters with self-harming that remained unspoken or unspeakable. These individual stories, conveyed verbally by means of personal recollections or visually through art making, were provoked by the narratives (verbal, written or visual) shared by authors and participants alike. In our final workshop, we invited participants to bring or revisit themes or readings that lingered in them. Chloe, responded to this invitation with her authorial voice, a poem that she had written when she was 14 years old. I looked at my wrists today –
Felt violent pulse underneath my skin.
Wanted to get out.
I had a thought.
How would it be
If blood
Lots of blood
And I could even do it
In the name of something greater than me.
In the name of
Something I can’t understand.
But I’m not given.
There is less pleasure in cutting the veins,
When you know it won’t change a thing.
Too bad I have no trust in my blood.
It drips and drips, and flows
Beautiful trickles on a thin, clean skin.
I can go on.
It makes you scared
And that is all.
Attending to Chloe's act of bringing this poem and the very creative format, rather than the content, we think of how Chloe's poem in the very last workshop might also be read as a response to all the published voices that preceded. Thinking about her choice to respond by means of her own authorial voice, we imagine Chloe's poem as another one of our materials. We wonder whether the existence of interpretive diversity that we sought to represent in our reading materials and our further creative inquiries into these, invited a space for Chloe to contribute her own voice. This contribution offered both an additional ‘meaning’ of self-harm, and in its poetic form, another ‘form of meaning’. Within the creative-response workshops, Chloe was able to take up space, drawing on the authority of her experience (McNiff, 1993). This is hopeful in considering the use of published narratives in collaborative research with people who are being ‘spoken about’ in them, as a potentially generative method that facilitates relational engagement with literature and/or theory. As well as a means to speak to the tense distance between research about people and people themselves, or else between research about specific populations and the persons that comprise these populations in the fullness of their individuality, complexity and history.
The exposure to public narratives – including academic articles – of self-harming comes with ethical challenges. It ran the risk of opening up interpretations that could be experienced as threatening to an existing, situated sense and positioning towards personal experience and/or professional competence. We were conscious that this could be further enhanced by the exercise of power in the choice (and exclusion) of narratives by us as researchers. In our effort to address these, we communicated to our participants our deliberate interest in the existence of diversity. Thus, a key aim of the workshops, which we discussed at length with participants prior to and during our activities together, was to explore diversity and meaning, with participants engaging in part because of an explicit interest in joining us in this exploration.
Engaging with visual art-making
Far from revealing an image of a single truth, our work with visual arts sought to stimulate conversations and to produce questions about conventional ways of perceiving and interpreting the social world (Barone and Eisner, 2012). Arts-based research is argued to have the power to elicit affective narrations that escape words (Bagnoli, 2009; Kearney and Hyle, 2004). Drawing on a view (Quinn, 2021; White et al., 2010) of creative data as a process – an affective dwelling – rather than a product, our method did not look to replace existing forms of research through the eliciting of more information, but to evoke a different kind of information. McNiff (1998) speaks about a different kind of knowing, an artistic knowing by means of experiencing. We do not assume a pre-existing self-knowledge or meaning that seeks to be met, found or expressed through the art-making. Neither do we anticipate the product of art-making as something akin to ‘data’. Instead, we think of knowing as the very encounter with perplexity. A distinctive strength of the arts in research lies in their capacity to enable thinking by doing, that is, by involving ourselves more fully: bringing our senses, physical bodies and creative imagination more daringly into the act of thinking that enables attention to the multiple registers of life (Back, 2012). Thomson (2020) invites a view of artistic images as a kind of thinking-though-affect. Met in the sensory capacity of the body and the visceral impact that precedes an emotive meaning, such thinking can interfere with more entrenched ways of thinking or making meaning (Hickey-Moody and Malins, 2007; Thomson, 2020). For McNiff (1998) vitality flows from the image, and the engagement consists not in what we project in our view of the image but in what it does to us. We invited and fostered an associative attentiveness to what happened to us in our engagement with the art-work/making, both our participants’ and ours: the visceral impact, what came to mind, where we were taken in our memories or imaginings.
In our workshop on ritual, Chloe spoke of having a sense of something ‘nice’, ‘safe’, and ‘warm’ – something ‘like home’. In her art-making she made a picture with crayons presented in Figure 1 on which she associated: there is a room and, you know, everything looks nice, and on the table you have coffee, but also you have knife and you have some blades […] somebody is in the background, and the person is relaxed with the legs on, and it's really relaxed, with cigarette. I have this thought, you know, we don’t know if self-harm is already done or not but the ritual is there and is like saying, you know there is a cat, there is really calm, nice atmosphere but at the same time it's something there that is not perceived as such but … yeah, it's tricky for me as well, I can’t explain it to myself fully, like, how it works so “calm”? I don’t mean to glorify that or to … but at the same time, it relates to these positive feelings as well […] there's the bottle, that's tissues, I have blades and cup and cafetiere so, it's really comfortable you know, comfortable setting, when I think about it, and nothing really dark about it.
Chloe's artwork.
Heterotopias are disturbing, probably because they secretly undermine language, because they make it impossible to name this and that, because they shatter or tangle common names, because they destroy syntax in advance, and not only the syntax with which we construct sentences but also that less apparent syntax which causes words and things (next to but also opposite one another) to “hang together”. (Foucault, 1966/2005: xix)
Barone and Eisner (2012: 167) speak of how arts-based research enables us to ‘rethink aspects of the social world by re-experiencing them’. Relying on non-discursive forms it becomes an emotional experience – rather than solely a cognitive act – that invites us into a felt perplexity (2013) about previously unexamined narratives towards what has been regarded as ‘alien’ or ‘other’ – the ordinary that escapes us, the intimate that we would rather not see (Barone and Eisner, 2012). Art-making can be seen as a form of critical inquiry into otherness by means of the act of creating, that is, envisioning and experiencing difference and thinking anew (Mould, 2019). In Chloe's association on her visual ritual space: ‘when I started (drawing) I had this in mind, that it's nice setting, so is nice but it [self-harm] still may happen even if in a very nice life’. As Mitchell (2002: 166) puts it, the aim is ‘to overcome the veil of familiarity and self-evidence that surrounds the experience of seeing, and to turn it into a problem for analysis, a mystery to be unravelled’.
Our method is collaborative, rather than participatory, in that it does not seek to ‘give voice’ but to make a space where existing positionings can be challenged and brought to uncertainty. In that sense, it allows meaning or knowing to be made – rather than to be found – while inquiring into it through art-making. With our participants, we engage in a kind of material thinking (Bolt, 2009) about the topic in question developing or producing a relationship with the question in itself. In this relational form of researching, we risk ourselves in a live process of inquiry. Rather than reaching a pre-existing or final verbal or visual thought, meaning lies in the engagement – the very experience – that takes place as we bring ourselves into the room and make ourselves available to become exposed with, as well as to, our art-making. In the following section, we reflect on material thinking in the light of provoked perplexity. We illustrate this through Jessica's perplexed encounter with the pleasure in and the desire to continue self-harming prompted by the workshop readings and embodied in the process of art-making. Informed by this encounter, we speak to the idea of practice as research (Barrett and Bolt, 2009) considering knowing as the process of making, including the making of perplexity.
Making as knowing
We draw here on Foster's (2015) notion of knowledge as a social affair, something that is co-created, co-experienced or else, lived; as well as Britton's (1998) idea of vulnerable knowledge, that is, not reaching after certainty but trying to remain tentative and reflexive when it comes to interpretation or theoretical standpoints. We think of meaning or knowing as the act of our inquiring, inclusive of the art-making. In our first workshop with the practitioners, we worked with different accounts of silence (Acheson, 2008; Dargan, 2015; McLane, 1996; Motz, 2010; The Cutting Edge, 2005b). Our work gave voice to a more subtle kind of silencing that may be present in the support room among clients and the people who support them, quietly exposing – and interrupting – a more given way of being with self-harming. In the excerpt below Jessica, one of the practitioners, reflects further on the common assumption that people who self-harm want to stop: I think I stumbled early on working with people [who self-harm] when I was assuming that they did want to stop without having fully checked that out, and so, and then part way through, with sort of having conversations (laughs), beginning to realise that actually, no, they didn’t necessarily and I think often they felt that they couldn’t say that, so kind of often working on the assumption that they were working towards stopping, with a big part of themselves having no desire to … and I thought addressing that part of them that doesn’t want to be supported. I’m guessing that there's something quite attractive about it for a variety of reasons for a lot of people otherwise it wouldn’t be so important … I wonder if, how a lot of times we don’t really address that pleasurable aspect of it so much, we kind of focus on what the negatives are and how people would stop and reduce it and don’t really look at so much about what keeps people doing it or the pleasure of it, maybe out of fear that we might somehow end up making it seem like (laughs) yeah, you know, a great thing, you know … but if you, like, without addressing that you cannot really address the whole thing, and it's not so effective, because you have this strong thing pulled towards it but if you just shut your eyes to it then…
Arriving at the moment of embracing pleasure, Jessica arrives at something that she has no words for. Such possibility emerges as a strange juxtaposition, something bizarre, almost unthinkable; a call to, or imagining of, a surreal image (Foster, 2019). Attending to it unsettles and complicates previously held conventional perceptions that foreclose a view of the relationship with one's body in the light of the (un)imagined possibility of pleasure in self-harming. Pondering on the interplay between skin and pain Jessica made the drawing presented in Figure 2. Our approach to art, both in the context of the workshops and as we stayed longer with our materials, seeing the traces and hearing the echoes that lingered, is relational. We invited our participants and ourselves to attend to what is evocatively important and to associate on it (Foster, 2019; Froggett et al., 2015; Savin-Baden and Wimpenny, 2014). Our sense-making process explicitly invokes imagination, not as an escape from the artwork but as an active practice of acute awareness on it, that makes the real more real, more alive (Froggett et al., 2015). Foster (2019: 161) speaks of the need to bring imagination into the investigation of the social world so as to enable a process of ‘defamiliarisation with the ordinary, the habitual or the norm that can be found residing there’. Associating on her artwork, Jessica said: I was kind of into the boundaries … of where boundaries lie and where they don’t, playing around with whether something is a boundary or not a boundary, and, transgressing it … playing around with whether something is filled up or empty, and what is emptiness, and I feel like also these are … discrete entities that also interlink and blend into each other.
Her associations imply a kind of meditation on the blurry space between pain and skin: where they meet, where they bear to meet. She was moved – ‘provoked’ – by Le Breton (2018) in one of the readings who spoke of (in Jessica's words) ‘not being comfortable in your own skin’ and how one is trying to change that through self-harm. She said: But I wonder if people do feel like the way of making meaning is to change something physically, to make a wound or something and the rest of the body doesn’t speak of anything.
Jessica hints at how self-harming might not only be a visual language but a very means by which one makes some kind of meaning through one's own body. In the creative space she occupied, Jessica – in her words – wanted ‘to have a mess to complicate boundaries’. Embodying a moment of provoked perplexity, her art-making becomes a self-reflexive practice, a kind of material thinking (Bolt, 2009: 29) which brings her in contact with a tacit knowledge and felt understanding of the world she wants to examine. Taken to research, such practice, conducted with curiosity and agency, resists closing the imagination down, a closure that seeks to sustain fixity in the way we think about the social world, act into it and produce knowledge; The act of keeping methodology open, alive, loose, of acknowledging a variety of perspectives, requires an acceptance of difference and even the embracing of paradox … This might act as a form of resistance to power and inequality through its reliance on a kind of “double vision” – the ability to see the absurdity, irony or double meanings in social situations and roles. (Foster, 2019: 150)
As an affective experience, art-making – free from relying on the discursive order or the familiarity of pre-conceived notions – invites the creation of new imaginings that trouble the hegemonic (Foster, 2019). Through her associative art-making, Jessica challenges the narrative, perhaps the habit, of calling self-harm a habit or addiction, reflecting on its agentic qualities – how it can be seen as an act, an attempt at meaning even if it is through paining one's own skin. To make sense of the relationship between skin, pain and pleasure and, through that, her clients’ relationship with these, Jessica brought herself more fully into her inquiry, that is, thinking by trying out, imagining and making; and pondering on the meaning of her making. In doing so, she looked to inhabit the liminal space where pain meets skin, and to get closer to what she could not think in words, or what was somehow known and yet to be named (Savin-Baden and Wimpenny, 2014: 64).
Thomson speaks of a material method that is spontaneous and vibrantly alive—an enchanting composition-in-the moment; a learning, thinking, and feeling through the body and its languages, and through the sentience and languages of the art materials. (Thomson, 2020: 720)
Jessica's artwork.
Discussion
Speaking to existing dialogues on the need for methodological experimentation, there is a growing call to bring imagination and playful experimentation into the exploration of the social world and to inquire by means of a slow affective immersion in it (Banks, 2014; Foster, 2019; Quinn, 2021; Ulmer, 2017). Centring relationships in place of knowledge, we move from explaining experience to provoking it, and discuss research as an informed provocation of experience (Fraser, 2012).
In our collaborative creative work with published narratives, we provoked an encounter and further dwelling in a state of dynamic perplexity by means of art-making. Troubling the idea of a pre-existing, sole or final meaning that the human ‘knows’, we propose knowledge-in-the-making which, informed by a materialism of lively matter (Bennett, 2004), encompasses a web of relational material/non-material entanglements that work together or through each other producing something new. Responding to our invitation to associate on the readings by means of art-making, our participants engaged in – and offered – material associations. In doing so, they engaged in a process of inquiring and of knowing through making, by means of engaging with the ‘thing-power’, the material vitality flowing from the reading, the image, the art-making (Bennett, 2004; McNiff, 1993; Thomson, 2020). The relational, hands-on space of material thinking (Bolt, 2009) in arts-based research allows for the possibility of a deeply personal, bodily and affective, involvement on behalf of participants that constitutes making as knowing. This in turn allows for the experience of de-familiarising with the ‘given’ and opening to what is ‘other’, different to a previously held ‘coherence’. We argue that this process of creative inquiry into published narratives can speak to the space between research and practice, practitioners and clients, theory and experience. Informed by the idea of research as a provoked experience, it can foster an embodied inquiry into the other: into othering and being othered. As such, it could be usefully employed in research on a range of topics with professionals (practitioners or researchers) in the field of health or social science.
In this article, we sought to make space to think how creative work with published narrative accounts on self-harming allowed for the emergence of personal – including visual and visceral – narratives that in their felt perplexity unsettled the rigidity that self-harming is often thought with. Looking to challenge the discursive fixity in self-harming research and to stay longer with interpretative plurality we fostered a collaborative space of inquiry. Our groups’ exposure to the interpretative diversity of the reading materials elicited the offering of their own authorial voices, an individuality that was expressed most vividly through the sharing of personal ordinary, fleeting, ‘everyday’, unseen, encounters with self-harming. Met most vigorously in the quotidian, such perplexity found expression in verbal/visual/material forms that brought to life more tacit or un-thought meanings of pleasure and desire to continue self-harming that in turn troubled more familiar, detached and conventional, ways of thinking about self-harming.
Situated in ‘live methods’ (Back, 2012), our creative-response workshops contribute to a growing body of creative approaches to researching the social world that attend to the life within it in the fullness of its complexity. This incorporates felt or tacit realms; seeking to attend to and describe uncertainty as well as that which is unseen, unspoken or hidden; the paradox, contradictory or liminal. Resonating with the notion of creative subversion (Cisneros-Puebla, 2021) we view creativity as central in critical inquiry, through the power that it holds to disturb – subvert – the social norm or the ‘order of things’ by means of the very act of creating. Materialising new imaginings that trouble the hegemony of the familiar/habitual which can be enforced by the limits of language, and predominating instead the visceral and the sensory. While perhaps especially relevant for researching self-harm, we argue that this approach can inform inquiry into other aspects or experiences of the social world that remain largely out of mind or out of sight (Gordon, 2008).
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: We would like to thank all our participants for their engagement in our workshops. The British Academy and the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland for funding our research project. The Centre for Creative and Relational Inquiry (CCRI) for supporting this project.
Notes
Author biographies
Zoi Simopoulou (PhD) is an art therapist and Lecturer in the School of Health in Social Science, University of Edinburgh.
Amy Chandler (PhD) is a Professor of the Sociology of Health and Illness in the School of Health in Social Science, University of Edinburgh.