The experience of being in the university in turbulent times: learning and
doing ABR

Authors:

(communicatng authors)
Rachel Fendler, rachel.fendler@ub.edu,
Fernando Hernández-Hernández, fdohernandez@ub.edu

Fernando Dorrego Carreira, Aïda Fortuny Lobato, Julia Gaitan Villasclaras, Andrea Garcia
Bretones, Andrea Garcia Gomez, Paula González Llopis, Laia Gracia Carbó, Agita Gritane,
Antonio Guterrez Rodriguez, Fernando Herraiz Garcia, Marina Riera Retamero, Laia Riol Roura,
Alessia Robert, Gemma Romero Dols, Marina Vaquero Latorre

* All from: University of Barcelona

Abstract:

We are a group of 18 partcipants involved in studying arts-based research (ABR) in the Fine
Arts Faculty at the University of Barcelona. Our experience, which started at in the Fall
semester of this school year (2014), is marked by an interest in learning to about ABR by doing
ABR. This challenge we set out for ourselves provoked uncertainty within the group, as we
initally didn’t know what this would entail.
So, we began by introducing ourselves. Borrowing from the project Humans of New York, on
the frst day we broke into pairs and interviewed each other, and later shared a quote from the
interview and a portrait later in the Virtual Campus. This experience was an atempt at creatng
a diferent dynamic from the outset, using conversaton and photography as a way to begin to
form an understanding of who we were and why we were here, together.
The next step involved confrontng what ABR is, or could be. We began to review diferent
notons of research, discussing how it is understood in the arts, in the social sciences and in
other paradigms. We also studied four examples of projects that used artstc methods or artsbased
strategies to explore social issues. These projects allowed us to draw a connecton
between method and research queston, and between the research experience and the results
that are developed to give an account of this process.
As this conversaton developed, we discussed the diference between doing research and
narratng an experience, and defned the presence of a research queston as the distnguishing
factor between the two. To this end we determined to defne our research queston for our
own project. However, the type of queston we could ask ourselves would not necessarily be
What do we want to produce? but, What do we want to know? This later queston responds to
notons of inquiry, as opposed to the more conventonal use of a hypothesis in traditonal
research.
Defning what we wanted to know as a group was a difcult task: it meant engaging in a
collaboratve dynamic that is atypical in this Faculty, and therefore we didn’t have experience
with it. However, from our conversatons, infuenced by the fact that most of the partcipants
are in their last year of undergraduate studies, a main concern emerged concerning our
experience in university context, at this partcular moment of social and economic insecurity.
Thus, at this point in our research process, we have identfed three questons directng our
work:
- How conditons afect our current status as students, in this moment?
- In what ways are we privileged or underprivileged?
- How do we navigate our relatonship to the university and to outside contexts?
The presentaton will elaborate on the development of the arts-based research project that will
take place this semester. It will share the methodologies, theoretcal framework and research
results.