Proposal / as writing / as method / as inquiry: A preface

Language is something that we throw ahead of us
in order to gather up what we have left behind.
As we throw it beyond us to bridge the gap, we recuperate
our losses through communication, through texts.
~Madeline Grumet, 1999

This preface is an effort toward disclosure and clarity; throwing language ahead toward creating space for you to join in my reflection on this proposal’s purpose and intent. The purpose: I am proposing research of writing processes and artifacts in art education. The intent: To explain an issue, its context, and to outline a plan for researching the problem. However, I’ve discovered, through the creation of the proposal itself, that a research proposal—for all its organizational appearances and rituals—sections, headers, problem statements, etc—is actually a very unsettled entity. At least in my experience.

In my experience. In a nod toward transparency and reflexivity, I want to state, up front, my ambivalence about experience and its relationship to language. I admit my simultaneous pleasure and discomfort with language and formatting structures that, when combined just so, (appear to) perform amazing feats of clarity, validity, and authority. Such ambivalence about language has created problems (problems that preceded and have remained constant throughout conceptualizing and planning the research), leading me to ask: How will I design research that provides (as well as problematizes) space and time for the disorderly and unruly characteristics I’ve come to associate with my research issue, the process of research itself, and the especially complex process of wording the world? Or, as Patti Lather (1994) puts it, “how do I use disruptive devices in the text to unsettle conventional notions of the real” (p. 51)?

I’m continuing to wrestle with questions and ambivalence about my research’s conceptualizations and representations. In the following sections, I introduce, describe, and contextualize the proposed dissertation research. However, as neatly structured, coherent, and authoritative as the proposal endeavors to be, the plan below is, most truthfully, simply one point of intelligibility within a complex site of contradictions, resonances, and awarenesses jostling and pushing against each other in a bid to be considered “data.” Indeed, this preface could be considered data. Its (literal and metaphorical) positioning within the text—data. The lines of flight (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987), or resonances that are initiated by your readings and subsequent questions of me and this text—data. My point is that unruliness, contingency, simultaneity, and already-ever-becoming are the “realities” that language attempts to constrain and contain, not just in relationship to the case I’m researching, but in this case’s rhizomatic connections with issues of representation and interpretation in general.

I realize I’m jumping out of typical, linear, proposal-template order by revealing so much to you in this preface—but this space-time disruption in/as disclosure is the point, too: Representation and interpretation are entwined with form and context—when, where, and how something is represented or signified can be as meaningful as what is represented. Likewise, where, when, and how something is represented and interpreted will matter a great deal in my endeavor to understand artwriting in the context of visual culture studies in art education.