Abstract
Abstract:
Absence and loss are part of what it means to be alive. While common, grief is a difficult and complex aspect of the human psyche, often producing affects that mask themselves in different forms such as anxiety, anger, despair, and isolation. Able to bring into form the unnamable affects of our psychic lives (Irwin & Springgay, 2008), arts-based research methods can be viable means to transform the grief into something generative. In this paper, each author describes a project that uses a different arts-based research approach to explore a personal experience with grief. Drawing from wordless narrative research (Author A) diffractive ethnography (Gullion, 2018 , and walking currere (Irwin, 2006), these projects seek to make sense of ubiquitous expressions of grief, such as complicated grief, political grief, and ecological grief, to show how they not only can generate new understandings but make empathic connections with others suffering from similar allusive psychic afflictions. The paper highlights the implicit generosity that arts-based research engenders in its ability to make tangible the distressing and ambiguous psychic conditions we experience.