Transformative Power of Art Journal has kindly published my peer-reviewed article, "Arts-based Practices: Research and Transformation in the Academy" in its Volume 1, Issue 2 Winter 2023: individual transformation through the arts.

The article can be read in the digital journal here or is on academia.edu as well.

Arts-based Practices: Research and Transformation in the Academy

​Abstract:
As we move away from a materialist, objectivist, Cartesian-Kantian worldview to one based on the psycho-physical reality of psyche (human and nonhuman, collective and cosmic), the academic world must engage with the different ways in which we create and integrate knowledge and, indeed, must reconceptualize what it is to know. In this paper, I explore how art can be practiced as research, and its epistemic potential: what can art inquire into and what kind of knowledge might its practice and creation bring to the practitioner? I examine arts-based practices vis-à-vis participatory theories and argue that arts-based inquiries are utile in excess of representational or dualistic/disenchanted political and intellectual utilitarianism, and that they offer methodological resources for scholars to resacralize and transform our relationship to ourselves and the world.

Hello all, I am sharing my talk at From Trauma to Catharsis: Performing the Asian Avant-Garde, a symposium hosted by the MFA Program at the California Institute of Integral Studies in 2014. 

The talk is titled "Trauma of the Avant-Garde and Intercession of the Waters: A Future Possible." (On Academia.edu; on Humanities Commons CORE)

In 2014, my research focused on the poetics of speech stemming from indigenous/earth-based traditions I was studying and engaged with. This talk arose from the tension I experienced while negotiating with the alienation and skepticism embedded in most understandings of the avant-garde. (Many strategies of the avant-garde have, of course, been coopted from indigenous contexts, after conveniently trimming away the complexity of the worldview within which these gestures live.) My burning question then was: Could the western avant-garde come in conversation with non-western, sacralizing ways of seeing?

This was a couple of years before the vision I had of the ancestresses changed the trajectory of my research. But you will find in this talk some of the same borderlands concerns animating the later work, which utilized Anzaldúan frameworks. I believe a couple of sentences from here also make their way into the methodological discussion in my doctoral dissertation, "Claiming Voice, Vitality, and Authority in Post-secular South Asian Borderlands."