Abstract

This document, itself, embodies my research project. It engages the reader in my work, as an example of my work. My intent is to create knowledge through creating culture, to contribute to a culture of creation. ;This art-based inquiry into reconciliating is multi-genre, heuristic-and-theoretical, and emphasizes the performativity of text. It is inspired by and addresses Chormmunity, a collaborative, embodied text-making-and-enacting process I developed. It explores "translating" this process "into" a written medium. This is research into evolving methods of contemporary qualitative research, recognizing the importance of textual presentation. I extend art-based research by incorporating autoethnography and writing as a method of inquiry into it. I add to the art-based research discourse by laying out what an art-based inquiry entails, including elaborating the ground for its validity. ;My personal story is a direct inroad to/outcome of culture and history. My "otherness" as a gay male, professional dancer-choreographer for over 20 years, and person with AIDS grounded me as I interacted with "larger" reconciliations: life/death, form/content, microcosm/macrocosm, presence/absence, sign/symbol/meaning, leading/following, generosity/selfishness, compliance/transgression, past/present/future, creating/product, the feminine/the masculine, control/freedom, hope/despair, experiencing/understanding, self/culture, body/extensions, concept/sensuality, sequence/pattern, stability/mobility, the affective/the imaginal/the theoretical, visuality/kinesthesia, rationality/suprarationality/irrationality. These facets of the human project are laced through the creation of the dissertation text, redolent of a hologram. ;Literature discussion themes include this historical moment, epistemology, systems, power and collaboration, and extensions and text. ;My spaciousness-disrupting-Western-mind-grooves work is in dialog with Transformative Learning. I critique---and acknowledge---by evoking, generating, and provoking the structures and assumptions of modernity and post-modernity. I attempt to make a contribution to how systems transform and the mode of writing that expresses this transformation. ;Living into reconciling primary binaries, disproportionate schisms of modernity, I, as a product of this culture---for myself/for the reader/for the socio-epistemic-institutional norms in which I act and which by me are at least minimally co-reinvented---, delve into the re-experiencing, destabilizing, mutually vitalizing of my own/your own?/the socio-epistemic-institutional norms' own differentiatings, lacing qualitative research into artistic endeavor---or vice versa---inviting a destabilizing, re-experiencing, mutually vitalizing dance of culture creation