Family Straight-Jacket

Family Straight-Jacket is an ethnographic study that involved collecting and compiling information about this group’s interactions. It initially took place as an informal family lunch and involved going through a family photo album, selecting photos, and presenting them to the group, while describing/discussing the chosen situations; as well as more structured conversions to allow for theories to be considered. As a process of reification, I have created a straight- jacket to present the findings, including extracts of the conversions that supported the choices.

As a starting point to this project, the members of this community (family) engaged in identifying and debating elements that were identified as obstacles to their ability for personal growth. Each participant identified situations in their lives where ‘significant learning’ (Rogers,1967)  was suppressed in the detriment of an alternative learning experience.

We all have our own beliefs and ways of perceiving the world and our own realities (Wenger, 1999; Rogers 1967), which are acquired by our own personal experience of the world (Rogers, 1967). This project opened up opportunities for participants to present those theories, those perceptions while identifying and reflecting on their individual potential and identity and how it may have been affected by them.

‘Acceptance opens up endless opportunities for growth and constructive change’( Rogers. 1967) , which in this project was facilitated by the sharing of those personal experiences: This acceptance also allowed the group to access each other’s frame of reference and facilitate learning from each other. ‘ Understanding others is enriching in many ways. It allows us to learn from the experiences of others in ways that make us more responsive people. Understanding others and their feelings  enables us to accept  one another’(Rogers, 1967p.18 )

This dynamic can initiate a process of mutuality, a type of participation that accounts for the possibility of mutual recognition thus reinforcing relationships that the group can utilize for growth and initiate a process of negotiating the group’s  identity- learning as a process of becoming (Wenger, 1999).  We identify aspects of each other in ourselves and enter a dialectical process of negotiating meaning through acquiring learning that relies on those interpersonal relationships. (Wenger,  1999; Rogers 1967) 

“Even when it produces theory, practice is practice. Things have to be done, relationships worked out, processes invented, situations interpreted, artifacts produced, conflicts resolved. We may have different enterprises, which give our practices different characters. Nevertheless pursuing them always involves the same kind of embodied, delicate active, social, negotiated process of participation.”(Wenger, 1999 p.49)

The type of creative participation proposed through this artistic model has been informed by a model of cultural production based of the concept that -  culture is ordinary- (Williams 1858) - this approach  proposes culture as being both a whole way of life (common meaning) and also special process of discovery and learning (arts and learning) that involves testing the former against experience.

‘The making of a society is the finding of common meanings and directions, and its growth is an active debate and amendment under the pressures of experience, contact, and discovery, writing themselves into the land’. (McGuigan , 2014 on  Williams R. ‘Culture is Ordinary’ -1958),

 Dawn Manny (2010 ), while exploring the centrality of the researcher in the research work,  debates the advantages and disadvantages of insider and outsider narratives. In her paper Manny uses the expression  ‘indigenous researcher’ to describe her relationship to her research and justifies the use of visuals in her research are of support with anticipating potential gaps caused by her overfamiliarity with her cause. In a community of practice the overfamiliarity -mutuality is an essential component and the indigenous researcher can be perceived as essential in supporting the artist-researcher dichotomy asserting legitimacy to the use of autoethnography (Reed-Danahay, 1997)  as a form of artistic practice.