The Poster and the Poster: Critical Arts-Based Research as Dissensual Aesthetics

This essay articulates how arts-based inquiry acts as dissensual activity holding possibilities for the redistribution of the visible, audible, and sensible within knowledge production and dissemination associated with research. Ranciere's conceptions of politics and aesthetics are used to analyze expanded relations among art, inquiry, and democracy within the academic poster session format at the American Educational Research Association Annual Meeting. We share how our reconceptualized poster defied institutionalized structures under the control of neoliberal logics through strategies of disidentification. This subversion of form and structure identifies exclusions in how we operate, so that we might redistribute spaces and processes associated with academic conferences for alternatives to be heard, seen, spoken, and performed. For these reasons, our poster serves as a generative locale from which researchers may articulate ways for representing data, engaging audiences, and undertaking critical arts-based inquiry with others that might further the practices of democracy.