(Re)Tracing Our Steps in Arts-Based Educational Research: A Case for Travelling Practices

In this chapter, I am interested in mapping out what a (re)tracing project might look like in relation to arts-based educational research practices and journeys. As a starting point, I demonstrate how use of the “working with a single photograph” method can contribute to the (re)tracing process. In the second section, I consider some of the ways in which travelling yields new opportunities, especially the co-production of new knowledge. And I end with a description of an article with Kathleen Pithouse-Morgan and Daisy Pillay (Mitchell et al., 2020) in which we traced how we got to our book project, Memory Mosaics (Pithouse-Morgan et al., 2019). By reflecting forward in this last section, I lay out a humble proposal for ensuring the processes of tracing and retracing in a pandemic/post-pandemic world. Given that more of us are working through virtual platforms where it is even more possible to journey across continents, the need for a travelling practices discourse community seems yet more likely and we need to incorporate this into academic identities.