ABSTRACT
Since antiquity, there has been what we might call an artificial bifurcation of art and science. In this chapter, I intend to develop an argument and explore productive and participatory research methods to further a dialectical interchange between what often appear to be the imperatives of science and the creative impulses of art. Wrestling with dilemmas of methodology has provided me with some of the greatest sources of clarity in this ongoing quest to resist the facile binaries of thought and action that such epistemologies require. I shall take the opportunity, in this chapter, to use my recently completed ethnographic study of four schools in New York City and Toronto to interpret various embodied methodological maneuvers we1 made that resisted a political and educational context that so clearly privileges the ‘scientific’, presumed to be the ‘objective’ and the ‘distanced’. When research in the ‘human’ sciences is conceived as a series of moments, performances, creative encounters, and temporal relationships that can never be repeated, rather than a series of value-free and distanced observations, the research encounter itself cannot help but challenge some of the traditional questions about the nature of truth, the power relations of knowledge, and the politics and ethics of the ‘human sciences’.2 Differences of epistemology and method in qualitative research eerily echo the larger cultural schism between science and art, which might also be characterized by the tension between standing apart and being fully involved.
