Practising Freedom as Embodied Academics: Using Visual Art to Make Connections Across Boundaries and Barriers in Higher Education

The conceptualisation of academics as embodied beings is especially significant now, when our workspaces are consumed by a neoliberal culture of erasure that makes us feel like disembodied knowledge factories. Visual art, as a tangible arts-based educational research (ABER) practice, allows for revealing and crossing normative boundaries in academic settings, which this chapter explores. We co-reflexively engage in the visual art-making experience as an agentic force to make our disconnectedness visible and to reimagine embodiedness. The question driving our work is: “How can the process of doing and sharing visual art amplify boundary-crossing opportunities for being embodied academics?” Drawing on the concept of diffraction (Barad, Parallax 20:168–187, 2014), we work with practising freedom as both a methodological consideration and theoretical approach. Enacted as opportunities to practise freedom, we present individually constructed artworks and shared stories, and reflect collaboratively on the use of art as agentic, affirmative, and open to ambiguity (Eisner, Educational Researcher 26:4–10, 1997). These collaborative boundary-crossing moments serve as openings for our becoming embodied academics. We offer visual art as an ABER practice to rename, resist, and revise boundaries as opportunities for experiencing freedom.