Being Against Disappearance : a photographic inquiry through an a/r/tographic lens
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this dissertation, I seek to understand how creative engagement with photo-based memory work might evoke meaningful experiences of teaching, learning, and making and provoke critical, contemporary conversations on ethics in photography and art education. Drawing on my experiences as a photo educator, art teacher educator, curator, and photographer, I situate this study as a photographic inquiry through an a/r/tographic lens, considering the ways photo-based memory work might be generative as an artistic, emotive practice and a pedagogical possibility with ethical implications. I explore my research question alongside a creative community of practice, a group of artists and educators who came together after a course I taught at UBC in 2015, EDCP 405 Visual Arts for Classroom Practice: New Media and Digital Processes. To consider the potential of photo-based memory work and visual lifewriting, we participated in a group exhibition entitled Against Disappearance: A Photographic Search for Memory, an exhibit from May 20th – August 25th, 2016 at UBC’s Liu Institute Lobby Gallery. This exhibition offered thirty-six photographs and one sculpture, highlighting a series of juxtaposed viewpoints on the concept of disappearance from eight unique visual perspectives. As a/r/tographic artifacts, I studied closely the artwork and writing from the show and a series of generative conversations from focus groups and individual interviews for their nuance and narrative. Threading together my poetic observations, our artwork, artist statements, and conversational excerpts, I present the data in the creative form of a lexicon: a fragmented, alphabetical whole that gestures towards an emergent a/r/tographic language for photography. In an extended act of tracing pedagogy beyond classrooms, my research suggests the vibrant potential of a/r/tography for bringing artists and educators together beyond coursework to engage in collaborative art making projects that materialize as significant experiential learning events. New a/r/tographic understandings emerge from this study in a series of artful propositions based on offerings around the notion of trace, expanding vocabularies of possibility for photo-based memory work. This study illuminates the lexicon and exhibition as promising artistic forms for photographic theory, practice, and creation and highlights the potency of a/r/tography as a creative research methodology of potential.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".