Between Antagonism and Surrender: Using Art to Dwell More Resolutely in Irresolution

For many years, I have turned to the visual arts to help me explore the partially ineffable and intercorporeal dimensions of my own and research participants' gendered and classed subjectivities. I have come to recognise this meaning-making impulse as A/r/tography (Irwin and de Cosson, 2004; Springgay, Irwin and Kind, 2005, 2008); a relational aesthetic approach to inquiring into and re-signifying my own and research participants' experiences with both replicating and resisting patriarchal and classist cultural structures. My use of a/r/tographic method is extended through the incorporation of Maggie MacLure's (2006) provocations for coupling a 'baroque method' of art with qualitative inquiry. Through illustration and reflection, this article seeks to interrupt the comfort and clarity of enduring humanist conceptualizations of interpretive inquiry, inaugurating a 'productively irritating' (MacLure, 2006) arts-informed method that allows the author/artist to dwell more resolutely in irresolute encounters with shifting social-class and gendered grounds of experience in United States schooling and higher education.