Difference-Attuned Witnessing: Risks and Potentialities of Arts-Based Research
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This paper frames the workshop spaces created through the arts-based methodology of digital/multi-media storytelling (DST) as ephemeral, affective communities with acts of difference-attuned witnessing and empathy at their core. We present a rich conceptualization of difference-attuned witnessing in the DST space as an affective and a potentially transformative process that recognizes power and difference while providing opportunities for meaningful connection. This methodology was developed by the Re•Vision Centre for Art and Social Justice, a research creation centre that investigates the power of the arts to influence decision-makers and imagine more just futures (Rice et al., 2017, 2018, 2020a). Across research projects, we work to create spaces in which interchange about difference, power, and oppression becomes possible, by bringing together minoritized and majoritized storytellers, including those located in systems (education, healthcare) implicated in minoritized groups’ alienation and oppression (Rice & Mündel, 2018; Douglas et al., 2020). This approach responds to the urgent need for new kinds of social science methods to address persistent, deepening social inequities; we hold that in our neoliberal, hyper-individual, and highly polarized world, arts and storytelling methods hold potential for making dialogue across social problems and uneven power relations possible, but do this in ways that do not erase power, collapse difference or ignore the psychic and material effects of systemic harms (Douglas et al., 2019; Rice et al., 2020b; Rice & Mündel, 2019).