ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the constructs and conditions of a/r/tographical research: as practice-based research, as communities of practice, as relational aesthetics, and through six renderings of engagement. It further complicates the space of doing a/r/tographical research, unfolding a series of questions about the possibilities and challenges of practicing this form of qualitative research. A/r/tography is a research methodology that entangles and performs what Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari refer to as a rhizome. Practitioner-based research is necessarily about self but it is also about communities of practice. Individuals committed to inquiry are situated in communities of practice. The research conditions of a/r/tography reside in several notions of relationality: relational inquiry, relational aesthetics, and relational learning. A/r/tography as living inquiry necessarily opens the way to describing and interpreting the complexity of experience among researchers, artists, and educators, as well as the lives of the individuals within the communities they interact with.
