Whispers from the gutter: The gutter, its boundaries, and mis-guided drifts

This a/r/tographical study was the third in a series of youth-driven Comic Book Art Apprenticeships and Visual Studies. Its purpose was that of border poetics, to create a set of inherently geographical and artistic strategies for analyzing and deconstructing hard space, or fixed borders, in transmigrant youth comic book art. Through deconstruction and associated movement methods (i.e., a cosmic treadmill, BorderXing, and the monstrous), hard space or fixed bordered forms of representation were countered, that is, where the gutter was thought a dystopic, unaccounted-for void where nothing happened. Instead, the gutter was redrawn and reconstituted as an uncanny, lively, alien territory, where the cultural enunciation of entangled or hybrid, small-scale resistances against the status quo flourished. By installing invention and experimenting with subject suspension, relationality was the focus rather than fixed dualisms such as empty or full, human and not. Panel borders were broken, thus liberating the gutter, the space between and around panels, as a/r/tographers crossed borders and spaces through artifacts. By dwelling in the space of the imagination and playing with normalized conditions at the margin of the panel, the redrawn gutter opened possibilities to what a border work could be rather than what it was, or had been. Thus, imaginaries were co-created to refuse closure, or the either/or logic, which had been imaginatively and co-productively deconstructed. The findings have enlarged conversations about spatial agency and other ways of doing bordering by characterizing and visualizing a theory of borders in motion in transmigrant youth comic book art. It emphasizes the importance of art forms like comic book art in constructing and tracing borders, in actively rebordering space, and regulating embodied border crossing narratives in migratory culture. This study has both theoretical and practical implications for the field of border poetics, migratory aesthetics, creative geographies, comics studies, and geophilosophy. It has furnished an idea of what comic book art can do in the world, when the thing-side of affect or the situated suspension of the subject is a topic and all the producers of space are; enmeshed and intertwined hybrid transition zones where edges mix.

WHISPERS FROM THE GUTTER: THE GUTTER, ITS BOUNDARIES, AND MIS-GUIDED DRIFTS by Áine Clotilde Houchon A dissertation submitted to the faculty of The University of Utah in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Educational Psychology The University of Utah August 2017 LES MURMURES DE LA GOUTTIÈRE: LA GOUTTIÈRE, SES LIMITES ET SES DÉRIVES "DYS-GUIDÉES" by Áine Clotilde Houchon A dissertation submitted to the faculty of The University of Utah in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Educational Psychology The University of Utah August 2017 Copyright © Áine Clotilde Houchon 2017 All Rights Reserved The University of Utah Graduate School STATEMENT OF DISSERTATION APPROVAL Áine Clotilde Houchon The dissertation of has been approved by the following supervisory committee members: , Co-Chair Michael Hardman 06/15/2017 Date Approved , Co-Chair Beth Krensky 06/15/2017 Date Approved Stephen Goldsmith , Member 06/15/2017 Date Approved , Member John Baldacchino 06/16/2017 Date Approved , Member Peter Kraftl and by the Department/College/School of 06/15/2017 , Chair/Dean of Anne Cook Educational Psychology and by David B. Kieda, Dean of The Graduate School. ABSTRACT This a/r/tographical study was the third in a series of youth-driven Comic Book Art Apprenticeships and Visual Studies. Its purpose was that of border poetics, to create a set of inherently geographical and artistic strategies for analyzing and deconstructing hard space, or fixed borders, in transmigrant youth comic book art. Through deconstruction and associated movement methods (i.e., a cosmic treadmill, BorderXing, and the monstrous), hard space or fixed bordered forms of representation were countered, that is, where the gutter was thought a dystopic, unaccounted-for void where nothing happened. Instead, the gutter was redrawn and reconstituted as an uncanny, lively, alien territory, where the cultural enunciation of entangled or hybrid, small-scale resistances against the status quo flourished. By installing invention and experimenting with subject suspension, relationality was the focus rather than fixed dualisms such as empty or full, human and not. Panel borders were broken, thus liberating the gutter, the space between and around panels, as a/r/tographers crossed borders and spaces through artifacts. By dwelling in the space of the imagination and playing with normalized conditions at the margin of the panel, the redrawn gutter opened possibilities to what a border work could be rather than what it was, or had been. Thus, imaginaries were co-created to refuse closure, or the either/or logic, which had been imaginatively and co-productively deconstructed. The findings have enlarged conversations about spatial agency and other ways of doing bordering by characterizing and visualizing a theory of borders in motion in transmigrant youth comic book art. It emphasizes the importance of art forms like comic book art in constructing and tracing borders, in actively rebordering space, and regulating embodied border crossing narratives in migratory culture. This study has both theoretical and practical implications for the field of border poetics, migratory aesthetics, creative geographies, comics studies, and geophilosophy. It has furnished an idea of what comic book art can do in the world, when the thing-side of affect or the situated suspension of the subject is a topic and all the producers of space are enmeshed and intertwined hybrid transition zones where edges mix. iv RÉSUMÉ Cette étude a/r/tographique était la troisième d'une série sur l'Étude Visuelle et l'Apprentissage de l'Art de la Bande Dessinée pour la jeunesse. La bordure poetics avait pour objectif de créer un ensemble de stratégies intrinsèquement artistiques et géographiques afin d'analyser et de déconstruire le hard space ou bordures fixes, dans l'art de la BD jeunesse transmigrante. L'idée selon laquelle le hard space ou espace fixe de représentation est délimité sera contrecarrer grâce à l'utilisation de la déconstruction et ses méthodes de mouvements associées (i.e., Cosmic Treadmill, BorderXing et la théorie de la monstruosité), c'est-à-dire qu'auparavant la gouttière était considérée comme étant un espace-mort, un vide non prisen-compte où rien ne se passait. Au contraire, elle a été redessinée et reconstituée comme un territoire mystérieux, étranger et animé ou l'énonciation culturelle des résistances à petite échelle - hybrides, emmêlées - contre le statu quo se sont développées. En imposant l'invention et en expérimentant avec le sujet en suspension, la relationalité était devenue primordiale et non plus les dualités fixes telles que le vide et le plein ou l'humain et le non-humain. Les bordures des vignettes avaient été cassées, libérant ainsi la gouttière, l'espace entre et autour des vignettes, au moment où les a/r/tographes traversaient les frontières et les espaces à l'aide d'artéfacts. En faisant appel à un espace imaginaire et en jouant avec une conception standardisée en marge de la vignette, la gouttière obtenait de nouvelles possibilités vis-à-vis de ce que le border work pourrait être, au lieu de ce qu'il était ou avait été. Par conséquent, les imaginaries étaient créés pour refuser à la fois la fermeture et la logique de l'un ou l'autre, laquelle avait été déconstruite par l'imaginaire et la co-productivité. Les conclusions soutiennent des conversations étendues quant à l'organisation de l'espace et les différentes façons de créer des limites en définissant et imaginant une theory of borders en mouvement dans l'art de la BD jeunesse transmigrante. Cela souligne l'importance des formes d'arts telles que la BD dans la construction et le repérage des frontières, participant activement à la création de nouveaux espaces frontaliers, régulant ainsi les frontières que l'on retrouve dans les récits de traversée au sein des cultures migratoires. Cette étude a des répercussions sur le plan théorique et pratique dans le domaine des border aesthetics, migratory aesthetics, creative geographies, comics studies, and geophilosophy. Elle donne une idée de ce que la Bande Dessinée peut offrir au monde alors que dans la gouttière, la matière vibrante, celle qui a la capacité de modifier, ou la suspension du sujet située dans la gouttière, est un sujet réel et que tous les producteurs d'espaces sont des zones de transition hybrides, enchevêtrées et entrelacées, où les bordures se rencontrent. vi To all things that go bump in the night, to all who believe, most especially Shelly, Mr. Bodine, Sir Lloyd Rutherford Georges, Étienne, and the man in my life, Hugh, who speaks Entish and Klingon with remarkable fluency. TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT....................................................................................................................... iii PREFACE ........................................................................................................................... x Chapters 1. BACKGROUND AND INTRODUCTION: NAVIGATING MOVEMENT RETHINKING THE LINES THAT BIND US .................................................................. 1 Background ..................................................................................................................... 6 The Underpinning Challenge to the Gutter as a Site of Spatial Agency: Breaking Panels, Jumping Scale, Towards a Theory of Borders in Motion ................................ 26 Summary ....................................................................................................................... 31 2. LITERATURE REVIEW: BOUNDED SPACE HARD SPACE: BEYOND PANELS AND GUTTERS ............................................................................................................... 34 Art's Way Out: Breaking Panels' Borders .................................................................... 37 Summary ....................................................................................................................... 62 3. METHODOLOGY: BECOMING MOVEMENT: BETWEEN BODIES AND SPACES, "OPTIONAL RULES" ..................................................................................... 66 Flatness, Fixity, Dualisms ............................................................................................. 67 A/r/tography as Rhizomic Image of Thought................................................................ 68 Monsters as a Deconstructive Metaphor ....................................................................... 76 Movement Methods....................................................................................................... 85 Additional Methodical Tools ........................................................................................ 89 Summary ....................................................................................................................... 92 4. FINDINGS: WHISPERS FROM THE GUTTER: WHEN EDGES MIX ................. 95 Showing Seeing ............................................................................................................. 95 Monstrous Hybrids Who Lift the Veil ........................................................................ 111 Monstrous Hybrids: Entanglement .............................................................................. 111 Visible Shifts: When the Edges Meet Series ............................................................... 117 Edge Spaces for Mixing: Openings ............................................................................. 123 Summary ..................................................................................................................... 134 5. DISCUSSION AND RECOMMENDATIONS: THIS IS POETRY AND NOT THE GUTTER: CONNECTIONS ACROSS A DISCREDITED BREECH ......................... 137 Co-production in More-Than-Human Arts-Based ...................................................... 149 Participatory Action Research ..................................................................................... 149 Art's Way Out Study Challenges: ............................................................................... 149 Summary ..................................................................................................................... 153 REFERENCES ............................................................................................................... 157 ix PREFACE Mis-guides A dissertation often takes the form of a guide book or a specific scholarly map. It suggests a series of points of observation and contemplation within particular academic contexts or landscapes. This dissertation, however, is like no guide book academics have used before. Rather than telling directly and precisely where to go and what to see, with this mis-guide (with neither and end nor destination) a/r/tographers invite its readers to become part of their drifting group. Significantly, this avant garde mis-guided drift or open-ended journey is created from the vantage of mytho-geography, which places the fictional, fanciful, fragile, experimental, and personal on equal terms with "factual." Following persons like Guy Debord, a/r/tographers define their relational dissertative drift as a mode of experimental behavior linked to the conditions of borders in comic book art. To develop their deconstructive strategies, a/r/tographers draw opportunistically from different theories as they are required (e.g., bell hooks and Jane Bennett), contesting the dominance of hard spaces and the fixity of borders one moment, drawing on allusions to monsters and speedsters the next. To counter hard space and to preempt reproduction of what came before, this misguide is a situation-creating technique for a speculative remodeling where the gutter is made to be simultaneously central and marginal. In comic books, after all, it is the panel that carries the narrative weight, the panel that directs physical attention across panel boundaries and borders (the gutter), and the panel that organizes social hierarchies, ways of (not) seeing, social visibility and invisibility, if you will. The gutter, they claim, is masked, from normativity, occupying a lesser physical body (as compared to the panel) and a lesser body of knowledge (Haywood Rolling, 2009). The gutter, then, is unaccounted for, almost overlooked, "fringe part of the comics book page." It is here on this risky exploratory place on the edge, at the margin of the panel, that a/r/tographers deconstruct hard space, break panel boundaries, and liberate the gutter, a traditionally fixed, unaccounted for void where supposedly nothing happens. This mis-guide suggests some ways to drift through points of observation and contemplation which a/r/tographical work really depends on: on people and things, time, politics, mess-the real world. The real world or everyday reality is marginalized by dominant discourses and ideologies. This mis-guide is the a/r/tographers' attempt to render life plastic, capable of being actively shaped or made into something different from how it might habitually be. Through comic book art a/r/tographers inhabited a horizon that was simultaneously central and marginal where tired dualisms are not trapped by linguistic procedure. Beware there be monsters here. They will push the reader out of their comfort zones, they will destabilize, for a time, what Western rationality has systematically excluded and thus bounded, both in academia and in comic book art. In this mis-guide everything marginal is made central and is traced. Even the footnotes are foregrounded and Gallery Notes are sites for analysis, used to unmask an unaccounted for, fixed, subaltern terrain in the gutter, a terrain which had yet to be found. xi Doctoral work and this dissertation would not have happened if not for a MacArthur fellow whom I chanced to meet 27 years ago. She was the first to notice that I was brilliant and constrained, twice-exceptional, a gifted/dyslexic who exhibited asynchronous intellectual development. Truthfully, my time of it in our education system has been punishing-my giftedness has masked my special needs and my special needs have masked my giftedness. The slowing that dyslexia causes a high-creative, rapid processor is frustrating and painful. This said, I am grateful to my son, Séamus, who has been so very generous. He has supported me throughout this process when I regressed to those prefellow days- when I was made to feel and was convinced I was stupid. To Trista, for seeing beyond the mechanics. To Keltin, for convincing me that only a uniquely gifted person could imagine these madcap ideas in the first place. To Greg, for believing that comics can be an intellectual masterpiece. A special thanks to my committee for seeing me through. Peter, for your sense of uncanny, queer utopias; John, for causing me to believe in art's ability to negotiate tired dualisms when there is no other way; Stephen, for your insistence that I better understand; Mike, for your patience, and your support; Beth, for helping me to dance inbetween space, you are my true super hero. Finally, to Daryl, this is your song. xii "Here there be monsters" - Image a/r/tographer El-Rey, Comic Book Art Apprenticeship and Visual Study III. Source, a/r/tographer's sketch book. xiii CHAPTER 1 BACKGROUND AND INTRODUCTION: NAVIGATING MOVEMENT RETHINKING THE LINES THAT BIND US "Drawing [comics] is a way to get out of this world…."  El-Rey "A/r/tography becomes a passage to somewhere else…"  Springgay, Irwin, and Kind Figure 1 "Watts" The Border of Destruction Series 2 Gallery Notes Figure 1 "Watts" "The Border of Destruction Series: This image is a single panel comic in which a young [forced] 1 immigrant woman is holding a shotgun. She had just witnessed the murder of her brother on Grape Street, in Watts. She can't tell her mother, she had been detained [ICE] the week before." - Image a/r/tographer El-Rey (personal communication, May 6, 2012). Image: El-Rey, Transmigrant 2 Youth Artist & Researcher, Comic Book Art Apprenticeship and Visual Study III. Image inked on Manga Art Board. Because a/r/tographers experimented with visual means to negotiate constraints in the context of migration (e.g., borderzones of 1 The International Association for the Study of Forced Migration (IASFM) defines forced migration as "a general term that refers to the movements of refugees and internally displaced people (those displaced by conflicts, coercion) as well as people displaced by natural or environmental disasters, chemical or nuclear disasters, famine, or development projects." This definition had been expanded by our research team to include queer and other travelling youth who had been pushed out of their homes. See: http://reporting.unhcr.org/population. 2 Transmigrant: Please note that the terms comic book artists, transnational, and transmigrant youth are used interchangeably until Chapter 3. Thereafter the term a/r/tographers is generally used to refer to all researchers, youth and adults. "A/r/tography is a research methodology, a creative practice, and a performative pedagogy that lives in the rhizomatic practices of the liminal in-between. These inbetween spaces of becoming prompt disruption of dueling binaries, conception of identities, and the rush to certainty (Irwin, 2013, p. 199; Van den Braembussche, 2009). Once the methodology was discussed a collective decision was made to suspend the use of dueling binaries like youth and adult. The idea was to be clear that these youth comic books artists and researchers had the cultural capital to engage a/r/tographical projects as artists, researchers, and teachers. The roles in an a/r/tographical process are discussed in Chapter 3. Transnationalism is understood to be "the condition of cultural interconnectedness and mobility across space" (Ong, 1999, p. 202) as well as the processes by which immigrants forge and sustain multistranded social relations that link together their societies or origin and settlement" (Basch, Glick Shiller, & Szanton Blane, 1994, p. 7). Transmigrants are described as those immigrants and refugees that "take action, make decisions, and develop subjectivities and identities embedded in networks of relationships that connect them simultaneously to two or more nation states" (Basch et al., 1994, p. 7) To this we added mobile or traveling youth, especially youth experiencing homelessness who are living on the street full-time (e.g., Freegans), or who are couch surfers living on the streets part-time. The key here is that these terms point to mobile, networked relations. 3 contestation, or fixed borders in their comic book art), they drew from Derrida (2002), using deconstructive movement methods (see Chapter 3). These movement methods, which were inherently geographical and artistic (e.g., BorderXing) were used to subvert hard spaces where inflexible physical associations, in this case where fixed spaces between the panel and gutter, are retained. The name of "The Border of Destruction Series" points to the necessity for the deconstruction process throughout the third Comic Book Art Apprenticeship and Visual Study, noting that sharpest attention must be paid to the incessant movement of recontextualization (Derrida, 2002), and thus borderzones of contestation where borders are always made and remade (edge mixing) according to a host of shifting variables. Deconstruction, and particularly early deconstruction, functions by engaging in sustained analyses of particular texts. It is committed to the rigorous analysis of the literal meaning of a text, and yet also to finding within that meaning, perhaps in the neglected corners of the text (including the footnotes [gallery notes and the gutter]), internal problems that actually point towards alternative meanings… (Reynolds, n.d.) By this time, readers, you may be visually lost. If you are, that is the point. The deconstructive process depends on people, politics, ethics, mess: the real word. It is not neat and orderly. It is often a mis-guide-the drift mentioned in the preface. For a time you will feel tense and disoriented, especially if, like so many, you are haunted by excesses of language and flatness. Let go. This is a temporary stabilization (per Derrida, Deleuze, and Sousanis) of an avant-garde articulation between art and politics subsequently followed. Please note: • • The Gallery Notes are all italicized. The body of the text is not. 4 In the spirit of this deconstructive, inventive, and playful processual, entangled arts-based study, readers are asked to live the life of the a/r/tographer, sensitive to relationships and ideas that exist simultaneously, alongside, and in-between the other (Irwin, 2013; Irwin & Springgay, 2008), being attentive to the "neglected corners" (Derrida, 2002). For now, the gallery notes and footnotes have been foregrounded while the "main" body of the text has been backgrounded to create a feeling for the unmasking required herein. Irwin (2008, 2013) makes it clear that the purpose of a/r/tography, like deconstruction, is to open conversations and relationships through dynamic movement and experimentation, instead of informing others about what has already been learned (Irwin, 2013). A/r/tography is concerned with creative invention of concepts and moving into and through spaces of possibility. In this study, these spaces of possibility were the unaccounted for spaces at the margin of the panel in comic book art, where the "thingside" of affect (Bennett, 2010) of the gutter 3 opened our imaginations toward the unimagined and the uncertain (See Figure 2; Greene, 1995). The merit of this 3 In comic book art, the panel generally carries the narrative weight, directs physical attention across panel boundaries and borders (the gutter), and organizes social hierarchies, ways of (not) seeing, social visibility and invisibility (Cohn, 2009; Haywood Rolling, 2009), if you will. The panel generally does not invade the negative space or the gutter. Again, the gutter is the panel's boundary or border. It is rarely a part of the diegetic level or the level of the characters, their thoughts, and their actions (Lefèvre, 2009). The gutter is, in general, an unaccounted-for space, an overlooked part of the comic book page. The gutter imaged below appears to be empty space.  Image a/r/tographer Vaché, Comic Book Art Apprenticeship and Visual Study III. 5 Figure 2 "Art's way out of symmetrical dualisms" Gallery Notes Figure 2 "Art's way out of symmetrical dualisms": The panel is subverted through a process of deconstruction ("Border of destruction"). A monster is always in excess of constraining parameters. In a/r/tography excess is created when control and regulation disappear (Irwin & Springgay, 2008). Be playful, get comfortable with being discomfited (Baldacchino, 2012; Cocker, 2010, 2012, 2016; Deleuze & Guattari 1987; Irwin, 2013; Massumi, 2002). "A/r/tography is a research methodology, a creative practice, and a performative pedagogy that lives in the rhizomatic practices of the liminal in-between. These in-between spaces of becoming prompt disruption of dueling binaries, conception of identities, and the rush to certainty (Irwin, 2013, p. 199; Van den Braembussche, 2009). Image a/r/tographer El-Rey, Comic Book Art Apprenticeship and Visual Study III. Image source a/r/tographer's sketch book. 6 deconstructive performance grew from the capacity of comic book art to interject anOther set of choices, at the margins of the panel, a "Thirdspace" where the original binary choice (for example, the gutter is empty/the panel is not) is not entirely dismissed but subjected to a creative process of recombination in spaces where edges meet and mix (Baldacchino, 2012; Derrida, 2002; Soja, 1996; Wood, 2011). Background This retrospective a/r/tographical research is linked to my doctoral qualitative research classes, including a Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) class, and one arts-based methodology research class together with three critical youth cultural field studies. Each Comic Book Art Apprenticeship and Visual study was tied to the other through a common thread, that is, the fixity of territorial traps. A static notion of a border as hard space 4 or an edge that draws up and tightens the limit of things (Casey, 2007) was associated with geography as the only modality for spatial organization; focal points differed. For example, in the first Comic Book Art Apprenticeship and Visual Study, 4 Hard Space: Following Till (2012), the form of space made in architecture to retain physical associations. Image: "House plans for space in the home" (Till, 2012). See Chapters 2 and 4. 7 visual politics (Dewey, 2005; hook, 1995) drove the study. In the second Comic Book Art Apprenticeship and Visual Study, youth artists foregrounded their testimonios, 5 or emergency narratives, as they sorted out their fixity, their ideas about migratory aesthetics, and/or what their art did in the world. (Hawkins, 2012, 2013, 2014). It also comes of collaborative international work together with transnational youth and a diverse body of scholars that will be described later. During those years, I developed, supported, and participated in a series of two other Comic Book Art Apprenticeships and Visual Studies with transmigrant youth who were struggling with everyday ways of being, doing, and acting in space, as they attuned their migration to new contexts. In these art apprenticeships and visual inquiries, we attempted to create spaces-in conditions where there weren't any established spaces-where transmigrant comics artists could negotiate and perform shifting cross-border experiences. Again, by transmigrant youth, I mean those immigrant and refugee youth who take action and make decisions about their identities in networks of relations that connect simultaneously across two or more nation-states (Basch et al., 1994; Lam & Warriner, 2012). 6 Both apprenticeships became a site where youth artists escaped from the "usual official way of life" (Bakhtin, 2002; Bitz, 2009; Houchon & Youth Researchers, 2011) or the feelings of being stuck or fixed. It was there, in their comic books, that youth built a "second world" 5 Testimonios: A method and tool used in the second Comic Book Art Apprenticeship and Visual Study. An emergency narrative involving a problem of marginality, repression, poverty, exploitation, etc., or survival considering these. In the case of the research team, it was fixity in the context of migration and bordering that warranted our collective attention. 6 Transmigrant: During the second apprenticeship, I extended those notions of transmigrancy to include migrating youth who lived exclusively on the street, along with other youth who "couch surf" or stay with friends and live on the streets on the weekend (O'Sullivan, 2009). 8 and "second life" (Bakhtin, 2002) as they faced obstacles, while leveraging opportunities in the context of migration. Brief Review: Comic Book Apprenticeship and Visual Study I, II, III Table 1 summarizes the three Comic Book Apprenticeships and Visual Studies. Comic Book Apprenticeship and Visual Study I The initial idea was straightforward. Transmigrant youth artists planned, designed, and produced their comic books (a collaborative compendium and autobiographical mini-comics) over a 6-month period with published comics artist mentors. 7 During the first apprenticeship, youth artists tried on varying roles (Dewey, Table 1. Comic Book Apprenticeship and Visual Studies I, II, III Comic Book Apprenticeship and Visual Study I Art as Experience Visual Politics Comic Book Apprenticeship and Visual Study II Art as Experience, Emergency Narratives, or Transmigrant Youth Testimonios in Transnational Contexts Comic Book Apprenticeship and Visual Study III The Artistic Articulation of Affect. Professional comic book artists provided technical mentoring. Theoretical discussions initiated in Forum Discussions about visual politics: Who gets to create, install, and sell art (hooks, 1995) Focused on the ways transmigrant youth hammered out points of voice for themselves through comic book art testimonios while facing new obstacles in the context of migration. Focused on the ways comic book gutter, the "negative" space at the border of the "formal" edge of the panel, or the panel's boundary/border trace and negotiate borders. 7 Clotilde Houchon was the cofounder the youth-driven Comic Book Art Apprenticeship and Visual Studies Series, acted as coeditor, the arts-in-community liaison, and the academic ally for what became the youth research team. 9 1934, 2005; Krensky, 2002) specific to the production of comics: penciller, inker, colorist, editor, scripter, even art dealer. Youth artists installed their art and presented their collective and individual works at two local art galleries, along with the main gallery housed in the New City Library. All youth artists worked with professional comic book art mentors and were paid for their participation and work. Moreover, due to their expressed interests, their academic ally arranged for the comic art apprentices to take university campus and gallery tours. They met with a college counselor at the local community college, as well as with other artists, professors, and enrolled college students. We had youth-driven, theoretical forum 8 discussions, which happened in advance of classes and research sessions, or throughout the apprenticeships as wanted or needed. For example, we thought about and discussed what counts as art and who gets to define and to sell it (hooks, 1995), or visual politics. We also discussed notions associated with thinking through bodies, bodied encounters, and migratory aesthetics (Bal & Navarro, 2011; Irwin, 2011, 2013; Springgay, 2005, 2008, 2011). Embodied thinking or multisensory experiences are registered, often without language (Springgay, 2008), with implications that point to the potential for comics or image to reshape migratory 8 Forum: A method of focused discussions, where all a/r/tographers engaged in ongoing analysis in a conscious fashion (Cahill, 2007). Forum discussions were used throughout all three Comic Book Art Apprenticeships and Visual Studies. They came of the idea that the public square of an ancient Roman city was a center of judicial and business affairs and a place of assembly for the people (Retrieved from: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/forum). Following that notion, the forum in the studies context was also place of assembly for "acts of political greeting" (Couldry, 2010) or a means of welcoming voices, which have been silent-creating a meeting place where youth/people recognize others as included in discussions, a process necessary to democratic exchange. Forums were ongoing regular meetings and on-the-spot minidiscussions, where ideas and views on particular art-related and theoretical issues were recognized and exchanged in what Bohman (2007) calls a co-reciprocal coconstitutive public. Clotilde Houchon facilitated all forums in her role as academic ally. 10 cultures, while expanding the definition of entangled, lively texts (Bennett, 2010; Haraway 2004). In the end, the significant results were the most practical. We also touched on ethics of embodiment, civic engagement, and arts-based methodologies. During the last weeks of the apprenticeship the youth research team moved from their collective published work, Scrapyard Detectives (see Figure 3), to autobiographical comics. Emmanuel Makonga (Emmany), an African political cartoonist and mentor, modeled the way he used his cartoon journalism, autobiographical comics, and political cartooning to deal with strong emotions and difficult decision-making in the context of his own mobilities. Makonga's artwork and cartoons (see Figure 4) came of the powerful cultural, political, and economic factors that had shaped his experience as a political refugee across various settings in Africa, France, and the United States. Emmany could engage with migrant youth artists, who also struggled with the material consequence of their shifting relations. He helped the youth research team to envision and to draw their own emergency narratives or Testimonios. When the youth artists had seen Emmany, who had survived terror to challenge repression and engage in emancipatory and democratic risktaking through art, they were inspired to find their own take on exit pedagogies or art's way out of symmetrical dualisms (e.g., empty/full) as they began to unravel and perform the new divisions of space in the context of their comic book art (Bal & Navarro, 2011; Baldacchino, 2012; Irwin, 2013; Nail, 2016; Sullivan, 2011). 11 Figure 3 "Scrap Yard Detectives Makonga Mentor" Gallery Notes Figure 3 "Scrapyard Detectives Makonga Mentor": Scrapyard Detectives is a free comic book series created by artist Bill Galvan (a Comic Book Art 12 Apprenticeship/Visual Study I & II art mentor) and writer Chad Denton (Comic Book Art Apprenticeship II/Visual Study guest mentor) and the research team who were committed to transcultural relational aesthetics. The theme for Scrapyard Detectives: The Multiverse is Real. 9 Boundary crossing (time/place) happened to save worlds. Note medieval dragons and 19th century vampires entering the scene through a transdimensional vortex transmitter. Again, the research team not only payed close attention to artistic production within networks of power, they enrolled art to intervene within political and socioeconomic considerations (Hawkins, 2013). The youth research team continued to push Geography-Art Relations to activate and transmute singular meanings. As pointed out by such thinkers as Yi-Fu Tuan, Michael Curry, and Patricia Seed (2011 in Geography Speaks: Performative Aspects of Geography), places are created by a stunning array of performative acts, acts transforming unbounded space(s) into demarcated place(s) or vice versa. See also Derridean Geographies (Dixon & Jones, 2005). -El-Rey, Vaché, and Emmany, ABR YPAR 10 Research Team. 9 The notion of multiverse is drawn from Grant Morrison's work Supergods, What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous Mutants, and a Sun God from Smallville Can Teach Us About Being Human (2011). It is also a sentiment echoed by DC Comics. A multiverse is a hypothetical set of possible universes, including the universe in which we live. Together, these universes comprise everything that exists: the entirety of space, time, matter, energy, and the physical laws and constants that describe them. See David Elieser Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform the World (2011). As Morrison puts it (2011), our universe is one of many, grown inside some unimaginable amniotic hypertime. It may even be a hologram, projected onto a flat megamembrane, which is embedded, along with many others like it, within the higher dimensional space some scientists have called the "bulk" (p. 13). 10 Arts-Based Research (ABR). Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR). 13 Figure 4 "Makonga Testimonios" Gallery Notes Figure 4 "Makonga Testimonios": This image from Africa's Poachers: Tanuro and Environmental Protection alludes to the environmental problems in what was the former Zaire: poaching and pollution of all sorts, at the hands of colonizers and natives alike. At the time referenced, Emmanuel's home was a Belgian Colony. Thus, Emmany created artwork that intentionally mimicked the Franco-Belgian style of comics 14 that has achieved international fame (e.g., The Adventures of Tintin). Makonga used this style to point to colonialism and his people's fixity in that context in Africa. He also suggested that mapmaking is itself a performance, indeed a kind of magical performance where a colonizing force created a map-which was in his opinion essentially fiction. With that magic came an emphasis on the "colonial trinity" (trinité coloniale) or an emphasis on state, missionary, and private company interests that he then discussed with transmigrant comic book artists. Comic Book Art Apprenticeship and Visual Study II The second Comic Book Art Apprenticeship and Visual Study evolved immediately from the first. Two transmigrant youth comic book artists and researchers continued to collectively refine their comics techniques, penciling, inking, and scripting, as a means to provoke alternative ways and spaces for negotiating maneuverability in the face of territorial constraints (Massumi, 2002), that is, notions of borders as fixed. For example, in one comic book intervention during the second Comic Book Art Apprenticeship, transnational youth artists and researchers collaborated for seven weeks across three continents (Australia, America, and Europe) to develop collective comics or transmedia narratives that represented who they were as a local/global networked collective. Transnational youth reconceptualized boundaries and borders and created new public worlds as they positioned their digital bodies within three new geographical spaces: • The physical digital spaces in which they met: Skype, Adobe Live, and Ning. • The shared geographical spaces within their comic books, where they 15 translated boundaries and borders using cross-over between fictional spaces and characters. • The Second Life (see Figure 5) virtual gallery, where they installed their comic book art. 11 At the same time, transmigrant youth comic book art was still being used to not only claim a point of view, but to transform personal trajectories as well as the institutions and cultural narratives that structure their lives (Figure 6; Soep, 2010). Towards the end of the second Comic Book Art Apprenticeship and Visual Study, transmigrant youth actively sought ways to destabilize and wear down cultural narratives, which had made them "feel stuck." This is what I see-the [comics] gutter is like our lives. The way it's drawn, it's invisible, on the fringe. It's fixed really stuck in the shadow of the panel, the gutter is stuck in place like we are. (El-Rey Forum Discussion, personal communication, May 6, 2012) El-Rey had claimed that the gutter, like their own pedagogies, ontologies, and art practices, were masked from normativity, occupying a lesser physical body [as compared with the panel] and a lesser body of knowledge (Haywood Rolling, 2009). The project of the gutter had begun to signal the intercontextual character of the relationship between the comic book panel and gutter. That intercontextual character or the relations among constructs, or intertext (i.e., the gutter is empty/the panel is full) not only specified the ways space was traditionally made in comic book art (Figure 7) but also the ways that space might be transformed (Figure 8; Dixon & Jones, 2005). 11 See: https://vimeo.com/49894110, to view one Comics Go Global Project. I worked with these scholars in several projects. If interested, this video will give the reader a feel for one associated effort. 16 Figure 5 "Second Life" Gallery Notes Figure 5 "Second Life": This Manga image was installed and shown in Second Life Virtual Gallery at the Royal Geographical Society meeting in 2012, where the transnational youth comic book artists skyped in from three continents. This sample image, a black and white pencil drawing inked with a range of black and gray tones, was installed in a virtual Second Life Gallery at that meeting. The image is a sensate trace of movements of migration in the context of Second Life, contemporary culture (Bal & Navarro, 2011; Irwin, 2013; Massumi, 2002) and youth mobilities. - Image courtesy Michael Bitz, Comics Go Global. 17 Figure 6 "Cultural Stories Multiple Worlds" Gallery Notes Figure 6 "Cultural Stories Multiple Worlds": Testimonios, or emergency narratives, gave form to points of and a/r/tographer's voice while leveraging opportunity at moments of possibility.  Image a/r/tographer Vaché, Comic Book Art Apprenticeship and Visual Study III. Inked on Manga Art Board. 18 Figure 7 "Transgressed I" Gallery Notes Figure 7 "Transgressed I": One of the first recorded panel breaks was presented by a youth comic book artist in Forum. Mike's Amazing World of Marvel Comics puts the release dates for this early panel break as 10/25/1940 (See Marvel Mystery Comics #14). Here the Angel breaks the panel, transgressing the frame, shifting worlds, only to shift over again (Andrews et al., 2012; Bishop, 2011). Until that presentation panel breaking, like deconstruction (Derrida, 2002) was unfamiliar to participating comic book artists as it was not often done. Still it's the panel that carries the narrative weight in this image and the panel that directs physical attention across panel boundaries and borders (the gutter), and the panel that organizes social/material hierarchies. The Angel is merely scale jumping or shifting into another panel. 19 Figure 8 "Transgressed II" Gallery Notes Figure 8 "Transgressed II": Transnational Youth Comic Book Artists breaking panel borders in 2013. Notice the intentional instantiation of the hand is placed inside the lower panel, thus challenging the idea that the panel had to be a hard space with fixed edges that drew up and tightened the limits of a thing (Merleau-Ponty, 2007; Till, 2012).  Image a/r/tographer Vaché Comic Book Art and Apprenticeship III. Inked on Manga Art Board. 20 In the most basic terms, the visual parts of the comic book page had made something happen (Figure 9; Hawkins, 2013; Sullivan, 2011) that intervened in the experience had of space as it might habitually be (Baldacchino, 2012; Cocker 2010; Derrida, 2002; Woodward, Jones, & Marston, 2005). The forcefulness of art, then, was now understood as something that produces difference, calling researchers in the second Comic Book Arts Apprenticeship and Visual Study to transformation and to ask in what way, then, can border works, 12 or entangled bodies like the visual parts of the comic book page, trace and negotiate borders (Bennett, 2010, 2011; Border Poetics Border Culture Research Group, Artic University of Norway [UiT], 2016; Deleuze, 2005; Hawkins, 2014; Hodder, 2011)? Comic Book Art Apprenticeship and Visual Study III This introduction merely glimpses the first two Comic Book Art Apprenticeships and Visual Studies. It is not the purpose here to detail those studies further. That said, this third terminus Comic Book Arts Apprenticeship and Visual Study is an already-knotted text collectively authored through multiple webs of relationships and young people's intellectual debt (Haraway, 1991). The idea then, in this introduction was to provide a cursory feel for or lens, if you will, through which to view the entangled geographies where researchers ongoing reflexive dialectical art practices were previously situated. These connected dynamic comic book arts practices became the evocation and provocation that called researchers to transformation (Irwin, 2013; Irwin & Springgay, 12 Border Works: Art forms, in our case the visual parts of the comic book page that negotiate and trace borders (UiT, 2016). Used in the context of or interchangeably with border aesthetics. 21 Figure 9 "Infinite worlds, incessant recontextualization" Gallery Notes Figure 9 "Infinite worlds, incessant recontextualization": Image All-Star Superman Vol 1, September 2, 2008, in which Superman saves the first manned mission to the sun. This image was the focal point of a Forum at the time shift between the second and third Comic Book Art Apprenticeship and Visual Study. It demonstrated that unaccounted for, empty, even masked contexts (Derrida, 2002), like the comic book gutter, can and do carry narrative weight. 22 2008) as they critically analyzed the emerging contradictions in their everyday lives, that is, fixity, bordering through the lens of comic book art. The third Comic Book Art Apprenticeship and Visual Study drew from the first two visual studies, yet honed in on the autonomy of site, through the gutter analytic, which was established at the end of the second Comic Book Art Apprenticeship and Visual Study. Here there is a move away from the purview of the subject as the grounds for the political act and tethered art practices. Instead, the affectivity not of people, but of matter, the gutter, does the heavy lifting. Throughout this deconstructive a/r/tographical process the research team, including two transmigrant youth from the first and second Comic Book Art Apprenticeship and Visual Studies, 13 played with the ways the gutter, a border work or art form could negotiate borders and with it the inter-contextual character of the relationships among constructs (i.e., the panel and gutter). In other words, in this 13 The third Comic Book Art Apprenticeship and Visual Study tackled youthdriven concerns such as what their art can do in the world (Baldacchino, 2012: Hawkins, 2013, 2014; Irwin, 2013). El-Rey and Vaché, two transmigrant youth researchers and comic book artists, both participated in the first and second study. At the end of the second study El-Rey had contributed to The Ethics of Research with Children and Young People: A Practical Handbook. Both participated in professional conferencing, both installed and had shown their comic book art. Vaché was and remains heavily involved in Fluxus Art. See Chapter 2 for more on Fluxus. The first and second study and related field work ran for over 2 years. The third study was the shortest, running for just under 6 months. El-Rey and Vaché have continued to create comic book art with other mentors on and off for over 4 years. Please note that the third relational visual study inquiry took a Derridean turn in which dueling binaries like youth/adult were under erasure (sous rature). Sous rature is a strategic philosophical device originally developed by Heidegger, adopted by Derrida, usually translated as under erasure. Identifiers, like the fixed category of youth, which often reinscribe familiar debates (e.g., youth as becoming rather than citizens in the present) are found inadequate albeit necessary. In the third study the category youth was under erasure and in the spirit of a/r/tography and with it relational aesthetics, deconstruction was deemed not only inadequate but counter to a/r/tographical work (Irwin, 2013; Irwin & Springgay, 2008; Van den Braembussche, 2009). See Chapter 3 for further discussion. 23 connected visual study, a/r/tographers attended to the ways entangled bodies, people and things, provoked affects or made things happen in rebordered Derridean space. Hard, fixed, or bounded space was countered and came to be understood as only one type of spatiality of power (Paasi, 2009b). Moreover, since a/r/tographers used a deconstructive focus throughout this study, they were reluctant to use divisive, hierarchical language that had already reinscribed familiar debates about who can be expert in scholarly contexts. 14 For example, even the word apprentice was resisted because of the ways that word has been traditionally defined. "Someone who works for an expert to learn a particular skill" (retrieved from http://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/apprentice). The research conditions of a/r/tography reside in relationality: relational inquiry, relational aesthetics, and relational learning (Irwin & Springgay 2008), where expertise is not framed as age. Extra-subjective and extra-territorial or inherently geographical and artistic means (e.g. BorderXing) movement methods (discussed in Chapter 3) were crucial to this a/r/tographical experiment or the unmaking and remaking of space in the gutter to intervene in the epistemologies and methodologies of Border Aesthetics and theories of border in motion (Houchon & Youth Researchers, 2011, 2012; Konrad, 2015; Nail, 2016; Paasi, 2009a). For our purpose, then, a border emerged as an entangled slack 15 space 14 By the time the third study began all youth a/r/tographers had either been published or presented in international conferences. The whole notion of visual politics and academic expertise, who gets to sell art (hooks, 1990), and who gets to publish (Bradley, 2007) was an ongoing concern. 15 Slack space (Till, 2012) is detailed in Chapter 2 and Chapter 4. The unraveling of hard space or a space which is not overdetermined (Till, 2012) or overcoded (Woodward, Jones, & Marston, 2012) by regulation and order. Slack space is ambiguous, does not fit perfectly into anyone way of life; it is Irwin's rhizomic in-between 24 (Till, 2012)-art's way out of symmetrical dualisms (Baldacchino, 2012)-that was always detachable, connectable, reversible, and modifiable (Konrad, 2015; Lima, 2011; Nail, 2016; Paasi, 2009b). This a/r/tographical study was informed by that collective work done in Comic Book Art Apprenticeship and Visual Studies I and II. Yet, this study deviated from the first two as it honed in on Border Aesthetics (UiT, 2016), or the role of comic book art in constructing and tracing borders (Houchon & Youth Researchers, 2011, 2012), creative and entangled or co-productive geographies (Barad, 2007; Bennett, 2010, 2011; Haraway, 2004; Hawkins, 2014; Latour, 1993; Or, 20102; Sjöholm, 2013) where people and things open up possibilities as to what objects and borders could be rather than what they are or have been as a way to refuse closures of the present. Restated, a/r/tographers explored ways the comic book gutter, the border of the "formal" edge of the panel, had the power to create and redistribute their sensible world (Bissell, 2010, 2014; Houchon & Youth Researchers, 2011, 2012; Rancière, 2011; Wood, 2011). (Baldacchino, 2012; Derrida, 2002; Irwin, 2013; Till, 2012).  Image: Quint Buchholz "Giacomond," 2011. 25 Analytical Concept • The artistic articulation of affect in border spaces or the idea that art can enact small-scale resistances against the status quo in the context of migration (Baldacchino, 2012; Bal & Navarro, 2011; Cocker, 2010; Irwin, 2013). Research Aims • To picture ways Border Works (e.g., literary films, literature, artwork, or in our case the visual parts of the comic book page) trace and negotiates borders and disrupt systems of knowledge by cultivating co-productive, subject-suspended orientations. • To critically analyze the ways a/r/tographical practices can disrupt dualisms, resist and refuse the pressure of a single or stable position by remaining willfully unresolved, thus creating a space for undecidability or edge mixing where the gutter is active and the panel is no longer intractable. • To explore and experiment with a range of practices and concepts that are inherently geographical, artistic, and mobile, such as dérive and BorderXing (Cocker, 2016), edge mixing (Wood, 2011), and "monsters and the monstrous" (Ferris, 2016; Mittman & Dendle, 2013, 2016), which can support a/r/tographers countering or deconstructing hard space in comic book art. • To bring attention to the ways a/r/tographers have contributed to the relatively new field of migratory aesthetics 16 and border aesthetics through their theory of 16 Cultural practices between migration and art-making (Bal et al., 2008). The crucial connection between aesthetics, politics, and human survival (Bal, 2011) or the 26 bordering in comic book art, seen as social motion and circulation (Cocker, 2012; Irwin, 2013; Konrad, 2015; Nail, 2016). Research Questions • How does the comic book gutter, the so called negative space at the border of the formal edge of the panel, or the panel's boundary/border, trace and negotiate borders? • How do a/r/tographical renderings like reverberation, and movement methods like BorderXing, disrupt dualisms and counter hard space in comic book art? • Can ecological and architectural notions (ecotone, edge spaces for mixing, and slack) help a/r/tographers to redraw the gutter ecology so that the gutter becomes active and the panel is no longer intractable? The Underpinning Challenge to the Gutter as a Site of Spatial Agency: Breaking Panels, Jumping Scale, Towards a Theory of Borders in Motion 17 In 2006, Tim Ingold, a British Anthropologist, a key thinker on space and place, declared himself a "flat-earther"; he was then no advocate of space. "I just cannot get out ways art can enact small-scale resistances to status quo in the context of migration (Bal & Navarro, 2011) 17 Scale jumping involves a political strategy to circumvent and challenge the present entrenched structure of scales (Irwin, 2013; Lima, 2011; Marston, Jones, & Woodward, 2005, 2007, 2011; Smith, 1993), for example in geography-global, local, everything in between-across, or across borders on various scales (local, translocal, national, transnational, and states of minds; Houchon 2012). See also shifters, Chapter 2, Literature Review. 27 of my head the idea of space as a void, as a nonworld, as absence rather than a copresence" (Lorimer, 2011, p. 892). For a/r/tographers, rhizomatic relationality affects how theory and practice, product, and process is understood (Irwin, 2013) rather like networked crabgrass growing in all directions (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). Through the image of crabgrass, the importance of the middle is stressed by disrupting the linearity of beginnings, ends, edges that draw up and tighten the limits of a thing or where space is made to retain physical associations as with the panel and gutter. In this visual study, a/r/tographers have drawn against Ingold's notions, where the gutter, traditionally represented as an empty space between and around panels, is a void, peripheral to, unaccounted for, subaltern, or even an "inferior" border space in order to visualize borders in motion (Irwin, 2013; Konrad, 2015; Lima, 2011; Nail, 2016; Paasi, 2009b; Roy, 2011; Sousanis, 2015). Again, in comic book art, it is the panel that traditionally carries the narrative weight, the panel that directs physical attention across panel boundaries and borders (the gutter), and the panel that organizes social/material hierarchies, or if you will, ways of (not) seeing, visibility and invisibility (Cohn, 2009; Haywood Rolling, 2009, Houchon & Youth Researchers, 2011, 2012). Simply, these hierarchies were territorial traps that not only positioned borders as static but also made the significance of spatial interactions difficult for a/r/tographers to image without first deconstructing that flatness that Ingold described. The comic book gutter, seen then as that empty space between and around panels, is Ingram's spatial void, his nonworld, an absence rather than a co-presence, or as we are now claiming, a productive, fluid, autonomous political space for edge mixing where 28 "things begin" (Cronin, 2014; Ingram, 2006, 2010; Irwin, 2013; Or, 2012; Sjöholm, 2013, Springgay & Irwin, 2008; Wood, 2011). Edge spaces for mixing (Wood, 2011) were the fundamental expression of what Baldacchino calls weak realities in which space is fundamentally unfixed (Baldacchino, 2012; Cocker, 2010; Derrida,1995; Kraftl, 2013; Hawkins, 2013; Irwin 2013; Lima, 2011; Massumi, 2002) that came of this a/r/tograhical experiment. However, before elaborating any further on what "mixing edges" meant in that context, it is important to understand that this visual study, an a/r/tographic exemplar, was an entry point to an understanding of border aesthetics and the politics of autonomous space. Any sense of a stable, preexisting site was replaced with what Hawkins (2013) now calls a politics of location and memory in the making, or what Cocker describes as "Not there Yet" (2016) where an immanent material connection is perceived between bodies 18 and unfolding situated practices that actively perform a living inquiry, as experimentation in thought rather than representing knowledge in a thing already made (Bennett, 2012, 2011; Haraway, 1991, 2004; Hawkins, 2013, p. 59; Irwin, 2013, p. 207; Latour, 1993; Woodward et al., 2012). Throughout this a/r/tographical process, artists/researchers/educators contiguously disrupted arbitrary boundaries or borders, and/or fixed disciplinary knowledge. A/r/tographers wove together diverse disciplinary insights into a related geography-art practice to express and expand how mobilizing affects might be understood to matter (Hawkins, 2014; Massumi, 2002, 2015; Woodward et al., 2012). A/r/tographers also 18 Peoples, places, and things, and so forth. Haraway uses the term companion species, where in Bennett's (2010) words natural materialities are themselves actors alongside and within us (vital materialities). 29 applied important insights from architecture and geography, which have long addressed issue of space, to comics studies 19 and the creation of space in the context of embodied discourses. In architecture, and here we are drawing primarily from Lima (2011), Till (2012), and Wood (2011), main edge spaces for mixing are interim, unsettled, lively, interrelated vectoral sites/sights, which link between the material and the conceptual of the core and the material and conceptual of the margins (Wood, p. 90). No lines can mark the outside off from the inside in these dynamic, plural, entangled networks (Barad, 2007), or thrown together spaces (Massey, 2005), where edges mix. Consider the architecture of the contemporary home with designated spaces for withdrawal and becoming, that is, the pergolared patio. Here Wood (2011) suggests that the pergolared patio is an "interrezone" of introduction between the garden and the home, a linkage space. The patio is not a separate entity but a co-presence with the house, a mixing space of potential, which worked because of, and at the same time could change, the bodies it was entangled with and overlapped (Wood, 2001, pp. 90-92). The architectural idea of mixing edges helped a/r/tographers to undo the hard space that was the panel and gutter, where lines are drawn to retain physical associations, and what's left over is the white stuff, the empty space between panels. Wood's notion of main edge spaces of mixing helped a/r/tographers to image that "thrown togetherness" or the event of a lively site that could produce never before occurring situations of different people, objects, and things that simply must get along 19 Relatively new discipline, which occupied a precarious position in media studies. 30 (Massey in Kraftl, 2013, p. 226). In that entangled co-constitutive world were edges mix, agency is a relationship-not something that one has-so subjectivity is only provisional (Simmel, 1978). In these entangled geographies humans and their cultural constructs did not have complete control over everything that happened; their conscious political activity did not have to be the agent or the ground of the political act (Barad, 2007; Woodward et al., 2012). Using the aperture that the above perspectives helped to create, then, a/r/tographers found that the comic book gutter itself did not resemble Ingold's (2011) void after all. It became an acting object, possessing the power to influence, persuade, and seduce (Bennett, 2010; Haraway, 2004). The gutter transformed into something that, rather than a sign asking for your interpretation or analysis or commentary, wanted much more than that (Bryson, 2005). The gutter actively resisted directions that had been planned for it (Morrison, 2011). 20 Like the pergolared patio, this visual part of the comic book page was fluid and vital; it had the power to act-across bodies-so that situated co-productive politics emerged (Bennett 2010, 2011; Sjöholm, 2013) and a theory of borders in motion emerged. Through this embodied, thrown together work, a/r/tographers, working together 20 Again, youth epistemologies here are extended and supplemented by all kinds of material artifacts and technologies, which are hybrids of nature and culture (Kraftl, 2013; e.g., one visual part of the comic book page, the gutter). In his chapter titled "Infinite Earths," Morrison (2011) reinforces this notion when he points to comic book stories as "already self-aware," where characters have their own form of calculation, and actively resist what he had planned in the context of multiverses (p. 1117). 31 with the gutter, constructed a border crossing narrative (UiT, 2016), an exit strategy or aesthetic refusal (Hickey-Moody, 2013) of preformed or fixed notions of what counted as embodiment, bordering, voice, agency, and politics (Kraftl, 2013; Nail, 2016). They created a collective story of the ways things begin, (Bennett, 2010; Sjöholm, 2013), where the political event was legally, morally, or self-consciously grounded, not just in the experience of the subject but also the site, or by the way the gutter reached into and redid its participants, while insistently crossing the boundaries of what was inside and out (Figure 10; Bennett, 2010, 2011; Hawkins, 2013; Houchon & Youth Researchers, 2011, 2012; Irwin, 2013; Massey, 2005; Or, 2012; UiT, 2016). Summary This a/r/tographical study was the third in a related series of youth-driven Comic Book Art Apprenticeships and Visual Studies. In this terminus study, a/r/tographers continued to explore the ways that comic book art reveals the complex experiences of bodies, which are stuck, masked, misrepresented, or hidden from view in the context of migration. A/r/tographers described their efforts to develop ontological alternatives to the gutter's fixity by exploring the extra-subjective political potential of the gutter. Subject suspension allowed for ways to glimpse the effects of the site or the ways the gutter negotiated scalar approaches, where the idea of a border is not reducible to a stable fixed side. The purpose of the study was that of border poetics or to picture the ways the comic book gutter could trace and negotiate borders. Using a set of inherently geographical and artistic strategies (e.g., BorderXing), a/r/tographers analyzed and 32 Figure 10 "Inside out" Gallery Notes Figure 10 "Inside Out": "Our way out of reason also comes from an ability to move outside the limits that reason sets" (Baldacchino, 2012). Here a/r/tographer begins to interrogate the notion of borders as fixed. This image is pointed to again in Chapter 2.  Image a/r/tographer Vaché, Comic Book Art Apprentice and Visual Study III. Inked on Manga Art Boards. 33 deconstructed hard space or the notion that the gutter was a fixed, unaccounted for void where nothing happened. They drew on concepts including the rhizomatic in-between, third space theory, and vital materialism or the participation of nonhuman forces in human events, to break panel boundaries, liberate the gutter, and visualize a theory of borders in motion. Essentially, this a/r/tographical study reflected on art's power to move and to intervene in the epistemologies and methodologies of bordering and migratory aesthetics. CHAPTER 2 LITERATURE REVIEW: BOUNDED SPACE HARD SPACE: BEYOND PANELS AND GUTTERS Figure 11 "bounded space-Hard space" 35 Figure 12 "bounded space -Hard space" Gallery Notes Figures 11 & 12 "bounded space (sous rature)-Hard space": hard space imaged above as discrete comic book panels, surrounded by empty space, the comic book gutter. Panels as independent communicable modules. This is a particular kind of space that retains physical associations (e.g., prescriptive formal layouts in architecture) where for example, furniture of a specific size is assigned to an activity (eating, sleeping, and so on); the furniture is then laid according to key dimensions, circulation space is defined around the furniture, and finally walls are drawn to contain that circulation space. Again, lines are drawn to retain physical associations. What's left over is the white stuff, empty space. There is a disarming simplicity to the whole process-so much so that one does not feel the need to disturb the apparent logic of the system. But scratch beneath the surface, and a less benign characteristic becomes apparent. The user is treated like an abstraction. People are drawn with lines around them, as police chalk around cadavers; drained of their social presence, people and 36 things are there solely for their ability to be moved, measured, controlled or marshalled into standard descriptions. The walls are then drawn to contain that circulation space (Till, 2012, p. 120). The visual parts of the comic book page have been standardized, reduced down to a hard, deterministic sense. In this standardized context, the comic book gutter is the margin, only there to be the panels' boundary and border (see Figure 1), an unentangled empty space where nothing happens (Lorimer, 2011; Mazur, 2013). There is no place for difference, deviation, or for the deconstruction of spatial bias. Enclosures have been internalized. Writing under erasure, French sous rature is a method Derrida borrowed from Heidegger. If a word is necessary for communication yet insufficient for conveying the intended meaning because it carries baggage or can be interpreted in many ways, one can use sous rature. Sous rature, or under erasure, affirms the inadequate, yet necessary nature of words like god, love, being, boundaries, bounded space, and so forth. They would be written as follows: love, bounded space, to denounce baggage associated with accumulated meaning. Image Figure 11: Nick Sousanis, 2015. Image Figure 12: Jeremy Till, 2012. The reader is asked to negotiate the margin, the footnotes, etc. to undue or to temporarily destabilize familiar concepts, in this case, where the body of the text is typically central and the footnotes are not. This willful forgetting has helped a/r/tographers to unlearn what came before, that is hard space or fixed disciplinary borders, and with it fixed borders in comic book art. A/r/tography is concerned with the creative invention of concepts and the mapping of those concepts as rhizomatic events. 37 Art's Way Out: Breaking Panels' Borders Gramsci used to say pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will. What he meant is understand how the bloody system works. What confronts you, the fact that the terrain is not favorable to your project. Understand that even if it disillusions you, even if it makes you awake at night. Understand it, then you are in the position to say what can change, where are the emerging forces, where are the cracks and the contradictions, what are the elements in public consciousness than can be mobilized for a different political program? (Hall, retrieved from, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKm8MW-FdX0, 6 May 2012) Chapter 1 ended with John Baldacchino (2012) shaking a monitory finger, our way out of reason, he said, comes from an ability to move outside the limits that reason sets. In the third Comic Book Art Apprenticeship and Visual Study, a/r/tographers sought to counter hard spaces 21 that "reason" had set at the margin of the comic book panel. By decentering the center (Powell, 2007; Van den Braembussche, 2009), borders were broken in order to subvert the notion of the gutter as a dystopic unaccounted-for void (Lorimer, 2011) where nothing happens (Mazur, 2013). This a/r/tographic deconstructive process undid or subverted hard space by making the text or those images that hard space had fixed or drawn up and tightened (Merleau-Ponty, 2007) mean the opposite of what the gutter originally appeared to mean. In so doing, possibilities were created for what Bennett (2010) called thing-affect, 22 nonhuman vitality, or the force of art (Hawkins, 2014), where the gutter had the power to act, the power to negotiate borders, and to co-produce extra-subjective and extra-territorial experiments (Woodward et al., 2012). In a dwelling space of the imagination on the margin (Van den Braembussche, 2009, 2009; Irwin, 2013) a/r/tographers figured the forcefulness of art 21 Space that retains or fixes physical associations (Till, 2012) See Figures 11 & 12 above. See also Chapter 4 for a detailed review in the context of the findings. 22 Thing affect: forcefulness of things, like the visual parts of the comic book page. 38 (Bennett, 2010; Hawkins, 2014, Hodder, 2012) or its power to create an attentive pause in entangled geographies where art works put into question and destabilized habitual patterns or conventions of public behavior (Baldacchino, 2012, 2013; Cocker, 2010, 2012, 2016). Very briefly, as a practice of meaning making, a/r/tography 23 relies on multiplicity of perceptions held between and within sensual and textual ways of knowing which are open, and porous, and move backward and forward while bursting with overlap (Baldacchino, 2013; Irwin, 2013; Lima, 2011). These a/r/tograhical openings, cracks, contradictions, or renderings 24 refuse the comfort, the predictability, the safety, and the hegemonic 25 conditions that reason sets, again as the fixity in comic book art, by deliberately seeking art's way out into a larger expanse of something or somewhere else, the "impossible," the "wild, the speculative or pure slack" 26 (Baldacchino, 2013; 23 A/r/tography, the art-based methodology or basis for the Third Comic Book Art Apprenticeship and Visual Study is mentioned in Chapter 1 and discussed in detail in Chapter 3. 24 Renderings are concepts that help a/r/tographers to portray the condition of their work to others as, for example, openings mentioned above. Each rendering (contiguity, living inquiry, metaphor & metonymy, openings, reverberations, and excess) is not an isolated event, but rather formed in relation through aesthetic inquiry (Springgay, Irwin, & Kind, 2005). 25 Hegemony is the domination of a culturally diverse society by the ruling class, or persons with power, who manipulate the culture of that society-the beliefs, explanations, perceptions, values, and mores-so that their imposed, ruling-class worldview becomes the accepted cultural norm. As in Figure 12, hard spaces (lines drawn by the architect) are normative, so that one does not feel the need to disturb the apparent logic of the system (Till, 2012). 26 Slack: The term slack is used in three related ways throughout this dissertation. 1) As a means of withdrawing one's consent individually or collectively, a refusal to participate in business as usual or an aesthetic refusal (Buadrillard, 2002; Hickey-Moody, 2013). 2) The embodied sense of engaging or playing with power and optional rules to disrupt habitual behavior (Cocker, 2010; Deleuze, 1987; Derrida, 2005; O'Sullivan, 2006). 3) As slack space (Till, 2012) or indeterminate space, which does not retain or control physical associations as hard space does. 39 Springgay, Irwin, & Kind, 2005). Willful Forgetting: Deconstruction Deconstruction is like a political practice of reshuffling the deck, 27 through which Derrida attempts to "dismantle the logic by which a particular system of thought, and behind that a whole system of political structures and social institutions, maintains its force (Eagleton, 1996, p. 128). The idea of a fixing a definition of deconstruction goes against the whole notion of Derridean thought (Powell, 2007; Reynolds, n.d.; Van den Braembussche, 2009). Deconstruction, however, in general involves a way of reading a text by giving attention to binary oppositions within the text. The idea is to show how binary dualisms are related, for example one is central and privileged the other is not, as with the panel and gutter. The gutter is empty, the panel is not. Thus, the panel is central or privileged. The idea that was significant to this study then was the notion of temporarily undoing or subverting the hierarchy, making the text mean the opposite of 27 Forum Discussion Memo June 2013. Forum is discussed in Chapter 1 and again in Chapter 3 as a method of focused discussions, where a/r/tographers engaged in ongoing analysis in a conscious fashion (Cahill, 2007). Forums were ongoing, regular, lively on-the-spot mini-discussions, where ideas and views that came of PAR analysis (See Chapter 3) were vetted. Keep in mind, Par analysis often drove the PAR cycle process forward, however that cycle of questioning, reflecting, acting, was tethered to the doing of art. Forum was lively, oft times ambiguous, multiple (transdisciplinary) with overlaps. Later in the third study a/r/tographers grew the notion of forum, drawing on Derrida and khôra. Derrida used khôra to name a radical openness that gives place for being. That place a/tographers found was the gutter. The idea of Khôra helped a/r/tographers to defy habitual attempts at naming and fixing, dualisms or either or logic as they deconstructed, e.g., hard space. This said, in the spirit of khôra and deconstruction, weight was continually given to the margin, the unsaid, and masked. In forum, no effort was made to define, only to decenter and distance art practices from guaranteed meaning, to forget for a time the limits, which reason can set (Baldacchino, 2013; Powell, 2007; Van den Braembussche, 2009). 40 what it originally appeared to mean (Powell, 2007). What really helped this project, however, was the significant weight given the margin in the context of intertextuality. Each text according to Derrida is written in the margin of other preexisting texts. Questions come of that point of view. Where does the text begin, where does it end? What can be made of the footnotes? The margin, or the white space on the edge of the page and between the lines and the words, is of the upmost importance. The unsaid, the unthought-of, the forgotten, and excluded make each text what it is (Van den Braembussche, 2009, p. 264). Again, the unthought-of, the forgotten and excludedthe gutterare constitutive of the text even though nothing is there. Nothing happens in the gutter (Mazur, 2013). The key for Derrida and the a/r/tographers is the margin-is the site that a/r/tographers choose both as a site of resistance and the place, which they found (Baldacchino, 2013) for spatial disordering (hooks, 1990). Once binaries are undone or temporarily subverted all that is left is "free play" of nonhierarchal, nonstable meanings (Powell, 2007; Van den Braembussche, 2009) in spaces where edges meet and mix. Deconstruction chases the blind spots, the self-contradiction so that spaces can be made for creative invention of concepts (Figure 13; Irwin, 2013). Thus, fixed understandings of the panel need not be central (Lorimer, 2011; Mazur, 2013) to the ways a/r/tographers characterized and visualized borders in comic book art. The idea then was to counter hard space in comic book art, or the notion of the gutter as a dystopic unaccounted for fixed void (Lorimer, 2011) where nothing happens (Derrida, 2002; Mazur, 2013; Van den Braembussche, 2009) through an a/r/tographical deconstructive process of willful 41 Figure 13 "Unplugged" Gallery Notes Figure 13 "Unplugged": Languages are powerful tools for exploring. But for all their strengths, languages can become traps, subjective, territorial, and so forth, mistaking their boundaries for reality (Sousanis, 2015). A/r/tographers unplugged from the idea of truth with a capital ‘T', in that they lost the idea that texts signify something or have a fixed meaning. Instead a/r/tographers reshuffled the theoretical deck as they experimented with the notion that texts do not refer to one reality, but only to other texts (Van den Braembussche, 2009). They engaged with a/r/tographic deconstructive means 42 that were inherently geographical and artistic. The engaged blind spots (Van den Braembussche. 2009) at the margin of the panel to counter hard space or the notion of the gutter as a dystopic, unaccounted-for void (Lorimer, 2011) where nothing happens (Mazur, 2013). Image, a/r/tographer, El-Rey, Comic Book Art Apprenticeship and Visual Study III. Penciled work, from a/r/tographer's individual sketch book. forgetting what came before (Baldacchino, 2012, 2013). 28 Installing Invention: Multiverses/Infinite Earths 29 Creative Contexts for Deconstruction Brian Massumi (2002) spoke about affect in the broadest sense as what remains of potential, after each thing a body says or does-a perpetual bodily remainder or an excess. Excess is like a reserve of potential or newness of creativity that is experienced alongside every actual production of meaning in language and in any performance. Having more potential intensifies life. Although we never have our freedom, we can experience a degree of freedom, or wiggle room (Massumi, 2002, pp. 4, 6) by playing with contexts (panel and gutter) so that research becomes an evocation and provocation or call to transformation as controls and regulations are removed and a/r/tographers grappled with that which lay outside the acceptable. Derrida installed invention as a vitally important aspect of any deconstructive reading. Invention is essential to finding 28 Aesthetic refusal, stillness, slack, temporary stabilizations. 29 See: http://www.dccomics.com/blog/2014/08/18/the-map-of-the-multiverse for a DC Map of the Multiverse. See also: http://dc.wikia.com/wiki/Multiverse. See also Chapter 1. 43 hidden alternative meanings in the text (Reynolds, n.d.). In one case, the vibrational barrier the Speedster transgressed, between Infinite Earths or Derridean contexts nested within contexts, could be refigured as an a/r/tographical rendering, where reverberations or dramatic movement that came from the Speedster using the Cosmic Treadmill 30 unsettled temporary stabilizations to get at the unsaid, unthought-of, forgotten, or excluded margins, that white space on the edge of the comic book panel, or that void between Infinite Earths, where nothing happened (Connor in conversation, 23 April 23, 2017; Mazur, 2013). "Nothing" was apparently there, yet those blind spots were in the end constitutive of the text. The goal of deconstruction then was to trace everything at the margin of the panel because the intercontextual character of relations amongst constructs, like Infinite Earths, specified how one context relates to the other but also how those contexts might be transformed (Derrida, 2002; Irwin, 2013; Morrison, 2011). Multiverse is a DC Comics "cosmic construct" where a many of the fictional universes in which the published stories take place share a space and fate in common. The concept of parallel or Infinite Earths (Morrison, 2011), as an example, with different earth locations, persons and historical events, is significant to DC Comics' comic books and graphic novels. Multiverses help (among other things) to explain continuity errors, to retell and to retcon 31 stories and incorporate foreign elements or existences "outside the limits that reason sets" (Baldacchino, 2012; Derrida, 2002; Irwin, 2013). Thus, 30 The cosmic treadmill is a fictional time travel device in the DC Comics universe (Retrieved from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_treadmill, April 23, 2017. 31 A situation in, as an example, a soap opera or similar serial fiction, in which a new storyline explains or changes a previous event or attaches a new significance to it (retrieved from: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/retcon, May 6, 2017). 44 a/r/tographers applied notions of excess, 32 gleaned from multiplicitous, "Infinite Earths" to create an opening where control and regulation disappear to their deconstructive process. The Flash (Barry Allen) is a unique example of one means a/r/tographers used to create openings that are vital and porous as they countered hard space (Figure 14). The Flash is a superhero appearing in American DC Comics. Flash's power consisted mainly of superhuman speed and intangibility, 33 which are attributed to his ability to control the speed of molecular vibrations. For The Flash, Universes or Infinite Earths existed within the same space but had a unique vibration that kept them separated. Only by "tuning" to the specific frequency (forgetting all others for a time) of a Universe, a person could leap to another Earth, as Barry Allen discovered as he tried to perform disappearing act by vibrating his molecules at super speed (Flash #123). The "speedster" later developed a machine called the "Cosmic Treadmill," which when used by people who controlled the Speed Force, allowed the users to trespass the "vibrational barriers" (retrieved from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiverse, May 6, 2017). 32 See rendering excess above and in Chapter 3. 33 Cousin to invisibility, intangibility refers to a state where a (usually visible) entity cannot interact physically with other matter. Everything just phases through the affected object (in conversation Hugh Connor, April 1, 2017. 45 Figure 14 "The Flash Infinite Earths" Gallery Notes Figure 14 "The Flash Infinite Earths": A depiction of several alternate Earths within the original DC Multiverse and the variations of the Flash inhabiting each Earth. Image: Dan Jurgens and Art Thibert (retrieved from, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiverse, 5 May 2017). A/r/tographic Deconstruction: Moving Around Hard Space Massumi once said, "There are always be constraints: you move forward by playing with the constraints, not avoiding them" (Massumi, 2002, p.6). A/r/tographers continually sought creative geographical means (e.g., fluxus, Psychogeographical notions like dérive, mis-guided drifts, and BorderXing) or methods of movement, to subvert fixed hierarchies or borders so that both terms of opposition (e.g., panel and gutter) could be seen dancing in the free play of nonhierarchical, nonstable meaning in spaces where 46 edges mix (Derrida, 2002; Powell, 2007; Wood, 2011). Fluxus Fluxus was an international and interdisciplinary group of artists, composers, designers and poets that took shape in the 1960s and 1970s. Fluxus, the word, is Latinate, meaning to flow. Fluxus earned its status as a forum of experimentation. The idea of rhizomic flow and experimentation undergirds both a/r/tography, Fluxus Art (the art represented in this study), and the deconstructive process used herein (Reynolds, n.d.). A/r/tography as a methodology is detailed in Chapter 3. For now, a/r/tographical research entangles and performs what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari called a rhizome. Centralism, finalism, and essentialism are thus eschewed (Irwin, 2013; Lima, 2011). Instead, flow implies the research is an assemblage that moves and flows in a dynamic momentum (Irwin & Springgay, 2008). Rhizomic flow, however, is not necessarily progressive or always forward moving. It is always detachable, connectable, reversible, modifiable, had multiple entryways and exits and its own line of flight. Sometimes the artistic motion is paused, folding its own energies back upon itself, to disrupt everyday life. The idea then of rhizomic flow was fundamental to a/r/tographers who were temporarily undoing, pausing, or forgetting for a time the hierarchical fixity through a/r/tographical means, as in reverberations 34 or dynamic movement, dramatic or subtle, which forces a shift in understanding (Irwin & Springgay, 2008). The idea of rhizomic 34 Reverberation is one a/r/tographical rendering or concept that moves and or helps to portray the condition for a/tographical research. See Irwin and Springgay in ArtsBased Research for Education, a/r/tograhical renderings, pp. 115-121. See also Springgay, Irwin, and Kind (2005) for greater detail. A/r/tographical renderings are discussed further in Chapter 3. 47 flow helped a/r/tographers to contextualize and to further describe an experimental, a/r/tographical attitude towards art and Creative Comics Geographies, that resisted conceptual and disciplinary boundaries (Irwin, 2013; Vaché in conversation, forum discussion, March 2013). Fluxus, like the a/r/tographical concepts or renderings mentioned above, is a plural, elusive, and continuous means to negotiate maneuverability in the face of constraint as borders are deconstructed. Fluxus is, after all, unity of art and life, interbody experimentation, connections, multiplicities of meanings, and playfulness. Again, "There are always be constraints: you move forward by playing with the constraints, not avoiding them" (Massumi, 2002, p.6). Shifter A/r/tographers drew from Bucholtz (2002) in applying the linguistic concept of a shifter (Jakobson [1957] 1971) to themselves or the category or hierarchy of youth/adult. A shifter is a word that is tied directly to the context of speaking, and hence takes much of its meaning from situated use, such as the deictics (spatial location) such as here, now (Bucholtz, 2002. p. 528). Likewise, the referential function of youth/adult, borders, and even the comic book gutter could not be determined in advance of its use in a particular context or temporary stabilization, including the ones we created. Further, its use indexed the nature of the context in which it was invoked. As a shifter, youth, the gutter, person or thing (e.g. a border) is a context-renewing and a context-creating sign whereby social relations and their representations are both (and often simultaneously) reproduced and contested sets of conceptual frames where a range of methodological stances can be "unplugged" from one assemblage (e.g. people and things together) and "plugged" into 48 another without losing its identity (Allen, 2012; Anderson, 2012; Barad, 2007). This helped a/r/tographers to forget stabilizations that came before (Baldacchino, 2013) to become a Speedster, The Flash, in order to recon with hard space and alternative outcomes. 35 Dérive: Mis-guided Drifts Again, a/r/tographers sought to recontextualize the ways they thought about space and their relationship to it. Dérive and what Phil Smith called a mis-guided drift draws from psychogeographical referents. A/r/tographers tapped into a practice of drifting through a landscape (e.g., BorderXing) with their fluxus comic book art. Dérive, a mode of experimental behavior, "where unplanned drifting, usually urban, in which participants drop their everyday relation and ‘let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there'" (Debord, 1956). In other words, control and regulation is backgrounded or paused. While normalizing or controlling rules and conventions, hard spaces are played with in the context of extra-territorial and extra- 35 Please note that monsters and the monstrous (discussed at length in Chapter 3, Movement Methods) were another important experimental means used to install invention per Derrida, into this deconstructive reading of hard space. Monsters moved around in and negotiated hard spaces, at times when a/r/tographers could not. They too were shifters and allies, creatures or not. Below Monstrous Hybrids: "Esperanza"Image a/r/tographer El-Rey 49 subjective experiments (Baldacchino, 2012; Cocker, 2010; Deleuze, 1987; Woodward et al., 2012) as a way to characterize and visualize a theory of borders in motion in comic book art. Paul Smith (2010) adopted and adapted the idea of dérive, placing the fictional, fragile, and personal on equal terms with the "factual" contexts. Dérive-oriented a/r/tographers, increasingly decentered the panel, taking advantage of ambiguous terrain, like a covert group performing an "ideal" drifting group that could move in holey-space, sometimes "burrowing" into the hidden, subterranean corridors of a location (Smith, 2010) or those margins or empty spaces that were hidden from view (Van den Braembussche, 2009). Smith's work called a/r/tographers to experiment with quantumtunneling or mole-like behaviors at the margin of the panel (Smith, 2010; Van den Braembussche, 2009). Through fluxus art, life is rendered plastic, capable of being actively shaped or made into something different from how it might habitually be (Cocker, 2010, p. 88). BorderXing BorderXing, a movement method, is performed within the context of art practices with the idea to subvert, reclaim, co-opt or appropriate bordered spaces with a degree of mischief, invention, and play (see Figures 15 and 16). Simply put, BorderXing entails plotting an escape route from increasingly mapped out landscapes, such as borders both virtual and literal, by breaching authority and crossing that line without legal documents (see Chapter 3 Movement Methods for further details). A/r/tographers used BorderXing to plot an escape or to counter hard space or the historically determined arrangement between the panel and gutter in comic book art. BorderXing was used to breach authority 50 Figure 15 "Playing with powers" Gallery Notes Figure 15 & 16 "Playing with powers (dualisms)": This image was used in forum, as part of a theoretical discussion to introduce BorderXing in the context of the liminality and landscape of comic book art. BorderXing is an actualization of a rite of passage that could be performed to undo the notion of the gutter as a dystopic, subaltern, empty place (describe below). Tel Quel (translated into English as, variously: "as is," "as such," or "unchanged") was a French avant-garde literary magazine published between 1960 and 1982. Derrida was a frequent contributor. Image, (Retrieved from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tel_Quel., March 3, 2014) 51 Figure 16 "Playing with powers" Gallery Notes Figures 15 & 16 "Playing with powers (dualisms)": A/r/tographers initial imaged response to the idea of borders as stasis. A precursor to experimenting with deconstructive artistic movement methods (e.g., BorderXing) where contexts like the gutter are temporarily subverted. 52 that imposed the notion that the gutter was an empty unaccounted-for space and the panel was not. Simply put, BorderXing demonstrated Nail's notion that all borders leak, are in motion. The comic book gutter is perforce more than the panel's fixed boundary and border. Movement methods like BorderXing were adapted by a/r/tographers to counter hard space in comic book art (Nail, 2016). In other words, a/r/tographers used movement methods to counter fixity and the idea that the in-betweeness of a border is lack of a presence. There are several factors at play in the process of rebordering space. First, as mentioned, the border is in-between. It is not entirely contained by the territory, state, law or economy that it divides. Next, borders are in motion. It is defined by a social process of division and not reducible to any stable or fixed side. Borders move themselves, borders are moved by others, borders decay and are forgotten. Borders are a process of circulation. Since it is always in-between and in motion it is a continually changing process. Borders both internal and external have never succeeded in keeping everyone in or out. This is the point of BorderXing. The main effect of borders is the social circulation of labor and customs or their capacity to produce hybrid transitions zones, ecotones. These are edged spaces where a variety of creatures, people, and things come together, mingle, and change. A/r/tographers used this notion of bordering as a process rather than a fixed thing in order to redraw the gutter ecology as a dynamic terrain of habitation, livelihood, selforganization, and politics-a space for edge mixing where the gutter is active and the panel is no longer intractable. A/r/tographers set out to prove that a border is not only sides that touch two states, it is also a third thing-the thing between the two sides that 53 touch the states This is the fuzzy-like phenomenon of inclusive disjunction. For a/r/tographers, border theory was the study of the limit Scale Jumping Saut d'Échelle In geography, the term scale or spatial scale is used for describing or classifying with large approximation the extent or size of a length, distance, or area studied or described. Like borders, scale is often thought to be fixed and given, as in cartographic scales on a map. However, in several publications (e.g., Neocritical Geography) Neil Smith (2005) maintains that scales, like borders, are actively constructed (Nail, 2016). Thus, scales like national and global are not given but contingent on variable outcomes and social processes. What was important to a/r/tographers was that scales contain actions and associated events. Thus, the powerful can further their agenda by limiting the scale of action of those who oppose them. Neil Smith (1984) argued that formations of scale, regional clusters, cities, nations states, and with those the borders that delineate them, needed to be seen as transient scalar fixes. These scalar fixes, however concretized they may seem, like borders, are always vulnerable to transformations, in this case brought about by the new rounds of capitalist investment and disinvestment. We are borrowing the basic Marxist insights for ‘‘JUMPING SCALES'' or scale-jumping (more movement as method) as a political strategy to circumvent and challenge the present entrenched structure of scale, for example local/global and with it borders and bipartite notions like inside/out. It was not our goal here to enlarge those Marxist notions but to reinforce the idea that groups at a disadvantage at one scale could pursue their aims at a different scale, hoping to turn the balance of power to their advantage. A/r/tographers 54 jumped scale at the margin of the panel, to break panel borders and to decenter the oppressive Other, to purposely detach narrow cultural pedagogies that reinscribed a person's or the gutter's disadvantage. These pedagogies, or scalar fixes, masked the power of hierarches and hegemonic order, thus reinscribing familiar debates generated by notions of hard space, where the gutter is the empty stuff at the edge of the panel. From Noun to Verb: Making Space for Deconstruction The project of the gutter was to declassify, to deconstruct, and to counter hard space in comic book art. The move then, from seeing space as a fixed and controlling frame to understanding space as ambiguous entangled thing, was like the shift from a noun to a verb, from "the plan" (noun) as an authoritative fix on form and function, "to plan" (vb.) as an open rhizomatic description of multiple actions that go into the making of space (Irwin, 2013; Till, 2012, p. 116). Slack space is a "softer" more flexible space, unlike hard space, which is over determined or overcoded by regulation and order that comes directly from subjective thinking, where human life and political reality are central (Bennett, 2010; Hawkins, 2014; Woodward et al., 2012). Slack space, on the other hand, does not presume to control or divide in the same way prescriptive hard spaces do (Figure 17). Slack space is ambiguous or a space for "différance" for deferral of meaning (Powell, 2007). Hard spaces that tighten the limits of things, fixing definitions and contexts, like panel and gutter. The beauty of applying notions of slack to a deconstructive reading at margin of the panel consists in the creative contact that comes of the deconstructive process between the panel and gutter, or what 55 a/r/tographers came to know as edge affect, where very different kinds of creatures, people, and things can come together mingle and change (Figure 18; Conrad, 2014). When edges come together and mix, understanding then oscillates between dual demands (Powell, 2007; Reynolds, n.d.; Van den Braembussche, 2009; Wood, 2011). Edge Effects/Ecotone In ecology, edge effects refer to the influence of the two bordering communities on each other. Edge effects point to the changes in populations or community structures occurring at the boundary between plant formation habitats (Simon, 2009). Edge effects describe the interactions in the vicinities of those border zones where edges meet. Ecological edges can function as active boundaries, unique habitats and transition zones. Transition zones or ecotones are those places where the edge effects happen. In other words, two or more communities meet and integrate or a transition area between two biomes. These zones may be narrow or wide, may be local (the zone between a field and forest) or regional (the transition between forest and grassland ecosystems). Ecotones can appear on the ground as a gradual blending of the two communities across a broad area, or it may manifest itself as a sharp boundary line. The word ecotone was coined from a combination of eco(logy) plus -tone, from the Greek tonos or tension - in other words, a place where ecologies are in tension. When ecological edges meet they form unique habitats or transitions zones. Simply, these edges in ecology, these are places where there is simultaneous access to more than one environmental type (Conrad, 2014). Edges are places where very different kinds of creatures, persons, and things come together to mingle and change. What is important to a/r/tographers work is that edges in 56 Figure 17 "Prescriptive layouts" Gallery Notes Figure 17 "Prescriptive layouts": Hard space again, is that particular kind of space, which retains physical associations, e.g., prescriptive formal layouts in architecture or the prescriptive layouts in comic book art pictured in Figures 11 &1 3. The panel always carries the narrative weight and the gutter is an empty place where nothing happens (Mazur, 2013). Notice in Image 13, the panels are bounded, it is the end of things (Merleau-Ponty, 2007) at the margin of the panel. The gutter, the panel's border is what's left over, the white stuff (Till, 2012). 57 Figure 18 "Edgy Transformations" Gallery Note Figure 18 "Edgy Transformations": Look closely, as the human arm/hand seems to be taking an unplanned detour, drifting into the panel.  Image a/r/tographer Vaché, Comic Book Art Apprenticeship III. Inked on Manga Art Board. 36 36 Please note, at times certain images will be repeated to emphasize different contexts and key theoretical points. 58 this sense were not pregiven hard spaces, the end of things or an abrupt termination where vision is occluded, movement is obstructed as Merleau-Pont claimed (2007). Instead edges are unsettled, lively, interrelated vectoral sites/sights for experimentation. They are places that are simultaneously central and marginal (hooks, 1990), with a myriad of interlinkages and interdependencies. No lines can mark the outside off from the inside in these dynamic, plural, entangled networks (Barad, 2007), or thrown together spaces (Massey, 2005) where edges mix. A/r/tographers applied the notion of interacting edge spaces to the panel and gutter to purposefully detach hard spaces from hegemonic order where the gutter was the empty space at the margin of the panel. When edges met, creating a Thirdspace located on the margin, interacting edge effects adduced to unlearning what came before (Baldacchino, 2013). This notion of edge effects, and with it ecotone, was critical to a/r/tographers deconstructing hard space in comic book art. It was the theoretical means to creating new terrain or Thirdspace for radical openness where that space is simultaneously central and marginal. A/tographers broke panel boundaries and liberated the gutter when they positioned their work in the context of an active boundary, active scale, or an edge space for mixing (Smith, 2000; Wood, 2011). In so doing they countered Merleau-Ponty's notion of an edge as a nongenerative line where things simply drop out of sight and touch. In this way, a/r/tographers understood the gutter as a zone of transition rather than a hard, fixed space. Edge Spaces for Mixing: The Thing-Side of Affect in Thirdspace Soja (1996) wrote about Thirdspace, which he described as a recombination and extension, one that builds on Firstspace perspective that is focused on the "real" material 59 world and a Secondspace perspective, which interprets this realty through imagined representations of spatiality. hooks, Derrida, and others have not been alone in choosing Thirdspace, or something very much like, say Infinite Earths, as a strategic location for seeking political community amongst those who are prone to making spaces for slack. Sack spaces, which are at once marginal and central, enable a broader range of entangled behaviors. These spaces are not overdetermined by regulation and order. Nor are they necessarily over-coded by a subject of whatever sort, for example, including the a/r/tographers. By moving onto and extending the politics of site ontology, where the gutter had the power to act, a/r/tographers developed ontological alternatives to scalar approaches, nations, states, static borders, to characterize and visualize a theory of borders in motion in comic book art. Once a/r/tographers found their place (Baldacchino, 2013) that place where edges mixed and people, creatures, and things came together to mingle and change, they able to co-productively argue for what Zygmunt Bauman calls liquid times, which meant that all producers of space, people and things, are enmeshed in ecological (edge effects), architectural (edges spaces for mixing), and virtual (infinite Earths) networks, which are multiple and often conflicting (Awan, Schneider, & Till, 2011). Two key notions from the second Comic Book Art Apprenticeship and Visual Study influenced the theoretical direction of the third study: artefactual literacies, (Pahl & Rowsell 2010) and vital materialism (Bennet, 2010). Pahl & Rowsell (2010, 2011) have identified a theory of literacy learning through artifacts, which they call artifactual literacy. Artifactual literacy is an approach that contends that objects make people and structure their lives. 60 We bring together an interest in objects and their stories with recognition that literacy is material in itself. Thus, we concur with Miller (2008, 2010) that while many people might see everyday and mundane objects as inconsequential, we want to redress the balance and move toward the material both in recognizing the inherent "thing-like" status of literacy (Brandt & Clinton, 2002) and in the things people bring to their text-making processes. (p. 13) The whole system of things with their internal order makes people what they are (Miller, 2010). Simply, literacy processes are materially constituted. Meaning-making relies on a life-long entanglement with cultural objects or things (Bartlett, 2012; Brandt & Clinton, 2002) thus, literacy learning is artifactual, not only through the material culture used for literacy (e.g., in our case, the comics' gutter), but through the fact that the gutter, the artifact, in turn informs transmigrant youths' literacies. There is an intra-action or entangled agency between people and things (Allen, 2012; Barad, 2007; Pahl & Rowsell, 2010). From the vantage of Pahl and Rowsell (2010, 2011), the gutter is what they call a "boundary object" or an object/thing that can cross domains or borders and forge new connections, even negotiate borders in comic book art. "…when an artifact is taken from one domain-that is, home-to another-that is school-the crossing is significant. When a child takes a special object, such as a favorite teddy bear or a cup, and talks about it at school, a boundary is crossed (p. 16). Pahl and Rowsell asked questions that hinted at the quiz-agency of things (Bennett, 2010), for instance, "What is the potential for artifacts to become connective, outside of classrooms" (Pahl & Rowsell, 2010, p. 16). They had begun to tease out notions of things as co-producers of knowledge that could co-create possibilities for a more-than-human public and politic. They, however, fell short of attending to perspectives of nonhumans because they privileged human labor in literacy practice. Their co-productive argument, where people and things, or artifacts, generate learning 61 encouraged us to expand our analytical lens to investigate, to privilege, and to draw attention to nonhuman co-producers in our own comic book art. Even further, what if there were disobedient objects or things (Morrison, 2011), and the gutter had the power to act? What if the visual parts of the comic book page were animated, like Grant Morrison's comic book characters, living on infinite Earths, with desires and drives of their own? Morrison (2011) wrote that some of his drawn characters become sufficiently complex to begin their own form of calculation, and even became in some way selfaware. "I found several characters actively resisting directions I planned for them. It was a disorienting, fascinating experience, I eventually had to give in…" (Morrison, 2011, p. 119). Bennett (2010), a sociologist, enlarged this notion of artifactual literacy, through the lens of vital materialism, an object-oriented ontology that represents her evolving take on the political ecology of things. Whereas Pahl and Rowsell tended to waver, when it came to the vitality or agency of stuff-Bennett contended that stuff not only has agency (Anderson, 2011), but even a life of its own. Things make us just as much as we make things. In her book, Vibrant Matters: The Political Ecology of Things (2010) Bennett claims that matter is lively. She centers the active participation of nonhuman forces in human events where life is an unpredictable field of events that exceed ways of dividing up the world into society and nature, human and nonhuman. Bennett aspired, then, to articulate a vibrant materiality that runs alongside and inside humans to see how a reality of circularity, connectivity, complexity, and continual emergence can enliven our analysis of political events (Anderson, 2011; Bennett, 2010). At the end of the second Comic Book Art Apprenticeship and Visual Study the gutter was not just a material 62 object linked to cultural stories (Pahl & Rowsell, 2010) but rather (co)actant with its own object-oriented ontology. Things, or the gutter, had thing power, quasiagency, or a vibrant materiality (Bennett, 2010; Houchon & Youth Researchers, 2011; 2012) with the capacity to transcend local and human intention (e.g. border fixity). Towards the end of the second Comic Book Art Apprenticeship and Visual Study the research team came to believe it was the comic book gutter that held researchers and artists together as an emancipated assemblage (Houchon & Youth Researchers, 2011, 2012). Our work then at the end of the second visual study began to decenter humanism's legacy by extending subjectivities beyond the human species to create a posthuman ontology for a nondual world. It was that thread we'd pick up through Derrida, deconstruction and subject suspension that would allow a/r/tographers to glimpse at the effects of the gutter drawing together bodies, human and not, into entangled spaces where edges mix (Figure 18; Conrad, 2014; Hodder, 2012; Woodward et al., 2012) and a/r/tographers could apply a gutter analectic that was co-active, co-creative, mobile, rhizomic, or energetically entangled. This was to be a place where neither the I of the subject, or the it of the object, would take precedence, a place for forgetting the "stable" notions of what came before, that is hard space at the margin of the panel (Figure 19; Baldacchino, 2012; Bennett, 2010; Hodder, 2012; Irwin, 2013; Irwin & Springgay, 2008; Konrad, 2015; Nail, 2016; Powell, 2007; Till, 2012; Van den Braembussche, 2009). Summary A/r/tographers claimed that migration entails the physical displacement of bodies in place(s). Efforts to develop ontological alternatives to the gutter's fixity by exploring 63 Figure 18 "Deconwhite space on the edge" Gallery Notes Figure 18 "Decon white space on the edge": "of utmost importance was the margin, the white space on the edge of the page between the lines and the words." The only goal of deconstruction is to trace everything in the margin. A/r/tographical deconstruction is a process of taking on one-sided arguments (e.g. territorial traps) that argue in favor of a privileged "ideal," out of center, temporarily undoing the privileged term, to make the text mean the opposite, so that both terms of the opposition can be nonhierarchical, nonstable meanings in spaces for edge mixing (Powell, 2007; Van Den Braembussche, 2009). This image is an aesthetic refusal, their means to mobilize a different political program where optional rules apply. Image a/r/tographer Vaché, Comic Book Art Apprentice and Visual Study III. Inked on Manga Art Boards. 64 Figure 19 "Artificial Borders" Gallery Notes Figure 19 "Artificial Borders": The language we use is already said, already present, and in one way or another it determines what can be said afterward (Foucault, 1986). Silences and blind spots are constitutive of the text. What matters to art is the possibilities we seek in doing it (Baldacchino, 2012). ImageNick Sousanis, 2015, as seen in Unflattening 65 the extra-subjective political potential of the gutter were described. This included the idea that a border is not reducible to a stable fixed side. Since hard space and site-based politics in comic book art had not been previously explored, a/r/tographers examined the literature to map possible areas that could be linked and then sorted them out. Different theories were opportunistically explored, while contesting the dominance of hard space and the fixity of borders one moment and drawing on allusions to monsters and speedsters the next. The resulting strategy was to widen the boundaries of the search to include related and framing scholarship, transgressing disciplinary borders and comics interactions within them. A/r/tographers borrowed widely from human geography, geophilosophy, border aesthetics, architecture, and art. bell hooks and Jacque Derrida's notion of the margin as a strategic space for exploring fixity and dualisms was the basis for the visual inquiry. A/r/tographers positioned their research questions in between artist/scholar and theory/practices polarities as they investigated and pictured the ways art forms. CHAPTER 3 METHODOLOGY: BECOMING MOVEMENT: BETWEEN BODIES AND SPACES, "OPTIONAL RULES" Figure 20 "Optional Rules" 67 Gallery Notes Figure 20 "Optional Rules": Text Box 1: Such is the case with our Flatlanders, Trapped Within the Borders of Their Vision. Text Box 2: Unable to Imagine Otherwise Sousanis, 2015. This Sousanis image illustrates the problems of fixity, dualisms, and flatness. Sousanis warns us that this linear thinking flattened the gutter fixing it as an empty space where nothing happened (Mazur, 2013). A/r/tography and with it rhizomic flow (Ingold, 2010), lines of flight or deterritorialization, are a means of escape, a way to "imagine otherwise," the gutter and bordering where there is only perpetually redesigned space (Baldacchino, 2012; Deleuze & Guattari, 1987; Nail, 2016) Flatness, Fixity, Dualisms We're waiting at the loft on Pierpont Avenue, for an architect and comic book art mentor who was running late. For weeks, in between drawing, we've been talking about the ways space/architecture depend on people, politics, time, ethics, and mess-yeah, the real world. It dawns on us that uncertainty and contingency define both the mentors' architectural and our own a/r/tographical practice. We start talking about public and private spaces, whether to continue to wall something off, or to open up spaces and communication. Could we open spaces and communication out by pushing spatial relationships in our comic book art towards an open floor plan where edges, like the dining room and kitchen, meet and mix while inviting participation in the in-between? This openness to uncertainty, to in-between, might allow us to create new models for thinking and research. By choosing marginality (hooks, 1992) and looking from the outside in and the inside out, we could reconceptualize the problematic of subjection of 68 the gutter by deconstructing and disordering both the margin and the center (Derrida, 2002; hooks, 1992). A/r/tography is a creative methodology that transmigrant youth artists and researchers used to visualize the ways bodies, like the gutter, can be assembled and moved, affect and are affected together. The we in a/r/tography If the reader feels like the youth from Comic Book Art Apprenticeships and Visual Studies I & II are missing, at least the term youth is by design. Research conditions in a/r/tography reside in several notions of relationality: relational inquiry, relational aesthetics, and relational learning (Irwin & Springgay, 2008). That said, Vaché and El-Rey, the younger nonacademy a/r/tographers who participated in Comic Book Art Apprenticeship and Visual Study I, II, & III do not want to be discussed or made visible as anything other than a/r/tographers on equal footing. They are now 23 and 26 years old. They have gratefully aged out of and separated themselves from familiar youth debates (e.g., youth as age or as citizens in waiting; Lesko, 2012). Vaché and El-Rey are artists, researchers, teachers, and innovators, in their own right. In a related way, a/r/tographers chose to foreground the comic gutter and the thing-side of affect rather than transmigrant youth, now younger adults or other adult researchers, as was done in the first & second Comic Book Apprenticeship and Visual Study for several critical reasons: 1) the a/r/tographers believed that an extra-subjective snapshot of this long-running ever-evolving relational, living work could better resist normative authority (the IRB and the like). 2) a/r/tographers hoped that by focusing on the material site, or the gutter, that unfoldings like choosing marginality (hooks, 1990) could be narrowed enough to be presented in a place, the academy, that was near impossible to unflatten. Simply put there were 4 a/r/tographers who collaborated throughout this living visual inquiry: Vaché, El-Rey, Clotilde, and less regularly Emmany. These a/r/tographers are described in Chapter 1. A/r/tography as Rhizomic Image of Thought A/r/tography is one expression of arts-based research, which entangles and performs what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1987) referred to as a rhizome or an 69 "image of thought" based on a botanical rhizome, which apprehends multiplicities or shifts, changes, and can grow simultaneously in all directions. A rhizome is an acentered, nonhierarchical, nonsignifying system without an organizing memory. Irwin and Springgay (2008, p. XX) wrote: A rhizome is an assemblage that moves and flows in a dynamic momentum. The rhizome operates by variation, perverse mutation, and flows of intensities that penetrate meaning, opening it to what Jacque Derrida called "the yet unnamable, which begins to proclaim itself," 37 (p. 293). It is an interstitial space open and vulnerable where meanings and understandings are interrogated and ruptured. Building on the concept of a rhizome, a/r/tography radically transforms the idea of theory as an abstract system, distinct and separate from practice. In its place theory is understood as a critical exchange that is reflective, responsive, and relational, continuously in a state of reconstruction, becoming something else altogether. Such theory as practice becomes an embodied, living space of inquiry. Because a rhizomatic process activates the spaces in-between-or an invitation to explore the interstitial spaces of art-making, reaching, and teaching-the space inbetween, the comic book gutter, naturally became the locus for transformation in our a/r/tographical process. We chose a/r/tography, one expression of an arts-based methodology for several reasons: • First, for its ability to navigate compartmentalization while remapping intensities experienced as relational, rhizomatic events. 37 Derrida points to undecidables-that is, things that cannot conform to seeming oppositions. He also talks of différance or "difference and deferral of meaning." The yet unnamable refers to these notions. All texts, then, are in contexts (Derrida, 2002) that need be unraveled or deconstructed. 70 • Second, for its concern with the creative invention of concepts (Irwin, 2013). Invention was vitally important to our deconstructive reading of the panel and gutter (Derrida, 2002). • Third, a/r/tography as methodology helped the research team to fold back on our participatory stance in a Derridean geographical space where key terms like youth and adult could continually shift. • Fourth, a/r/tography signifies the multiple roles played in our arts-based research (artist-researcher-teacher) within the living inquiry process. This too embodied our commitment to transcending the binarisms of youth and adult in a research environment that was relational, as well as being disruptive to dueling binaries (Derrida, 2002; Irwin, 2013). Youth and adults alike assumed the roles of artist, researcher, and teacher (youth a/r/tographers acted as mentors for other youth). Because the a/r/tographical process operates in between dualisms, divisive identifiers like youth and adult were intentionally dropped. From here forward all artists and researchers, youth and adult, are referred to as a/r/tographers. This is an intentional departure from Chapters 1 and 2, where the terms youth comic book artist and researcher were generally used interchangeably. This shift in naming is meant to transmute singular meanings associated with the terms youth and adult. Continued transformation of concepts reflects both an a/r/tographical and Derridean sensitivity towards undoing dichotomous notions that reinscribed fixed identities and spatialities as in, the gutter is empty, the panel is not. A/r/tography's creative practice and performative pedagogy lives in the inbetween, in what Derrida calls intertextual spaces (Derrida, 2002; Irwin, 2013). Thus, spaces like the gutter need not be compartmentalized. The gutter in an a/r/tographical 71 sense could then be remapped as a rhizomatic event or space which is always detachable, connectable, reversible, modifiable, having multiple entryways and exits, or their own lines of flight (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). 38 Key terms can be interchangeable (panel and gutter) when invention is privileged. Derrida insisted that the deconstructive reading consists of a creative contact with another text (panel/gutter) with oscillation between dual demands (Derrida, 2002; Dixon & Jones, 2005). Because a/r/tography is a performative pedagogy that lives in the rhizomatic practices of the in-between (Irwin, 2013, p. 198), the research team was better able to oscillate between dual definitional demands of the panel and gutter to enact what Derrida called undecidability (2002). We did not have to conform to either side of the dichotomy: one space is empty (the comic book gutter)-one space is not (the comic book panel). Again, because we could shape-shift or oscillate between dual demands, we were able to stay truer to our already established participatory (PAR) process where youth drove the study as they hammered out points of voice for themselves, as they questioned, reflected, dialoged, and made decisions that resisted linearity (Cahill, 2008; Irwin, 2013; McIntyre, 2008) using participatory analysis. A/r/tography offered us clear path to relational research because it signifies the multiple roles played in arts-based research: artist-researcher-teacher within the living inquiry process. This notion folds back not only on our participatory stance, but also notions the research team associated with Derridean spaces, where key terms like youth and adult continually shift and are contested. 38 Lines of flight: term developed by Deleuze & Guattari (1987). It designates an infinitesimal possibility of escape in a geophilosophical system where there is incessant recontextualization and perpetually redesigned space. 72 Finally, an a/r/tographical approach to understanding through touch allowed us to reconfigure the ways we perceived objects or things, through proximity and relationality, which draws attention to sensory experiences and knowledge that are interconnected with our bodies and with others (e.g., the panel and gutter; Irwin, 2013; Merleau-Ponty, 2007). With this a/r/tographical shift away from fixed definitions we could better focus on what our art practice did in the world, what it set in motion (Hawkins, 2013; Irwin, 2013), what the gutter could do as it temporarily destabilized contiguous contexts, and how the panel and gutter related to one another. The gutter was no longer seen as a static membrane or space but as social motion and circulation (Nail, 2016) that gathered together bodies, place, sense, perception, and relationships between people and things (Figure 21; Bennett, 2010). A/r/tographic Renderings The research conditions of a/r/tography reside in several notions of relationality: relational inquiry, relational aesthetics (connective aesthetics), and relational learning. There is an emphasis on process rather than method in relational spaces that are expressed through concepts called renderings, which offer processual possibilities for engagement. Irwin and Springgay (2008) adopted the term "renderings" to describe six ideas to support a/r/tographers in portraying the conditions of their work. Renderings are meant to represent a variety of possibilities, not fixed requirements for a/r/tographical work. A/r/tography is one expression of arts-based research, which resists or refuses the pressure of a single or stable position by remaining willfully unresolved (Cocker, 2014). 73 Figure 21 "Touch" What Art Sets in Motion Gallery Note Figure 21 "What Art Sets in Motion": To insist on the liveliness of art as this study does, is to rework our understanding of art and artist. A/r/tographers in this study moved towards a sense of art as productive. The forcefulness of art or the visual parts of the comic book page allowed us to reconfigure the ways we perceived objects or things and thus theories of bordering spaces where edges mix. See same image discussed below. -Image a/r/tographer El-Rey, Comic Book Art Apprenticeship III 74 Contiguity Contiguity is a rendering that helped a/tographers to understand ideas within a/r/tography that lie adjacent to one another, touch one another, or exist in the presence of one another. This happens in in three ways: • First, contiguity is found with the artists, researchers, and teachers, which are identities that exist alongside one another in an a/r/tographical process. The forward slash or fold portrays this act of contiguity (e.g., a/r/t). • Second, there is contiguity found in the relationship between art and graphy or the art and the writing, as with this dissertation, about the research experiences. • Third, contiguity is found in the process of double imaging between art as doing or forcefulness and a/r/t as the symbolic representation of three activities (Irwin & Springgay, 2007, p. 116). Cocker (2014) refers to contiguous relationality as performing communities. All artists and researchers in the third Comic Book Art Apprenticeship and Visual Study did assume multiple roles as artists, researchers, and educators. A/r/tographers wrestled with the idea if contiguity and the ways it placed the research team in relation to other bodies, artists, teachers, researchers, and things. Living Inquiry A/r/tography, another rendering, refers to the ongoing living practices of being an artist, researcher and educator, or mentor. A living inquiry is an embodied encounter constituted through visual and textual understandings and experiences rather than mere 75 textual and visual representations (Irwin & Springgay, 2008). This then is a way of being in the world, in the context of site and subjectivity (Cocker, 2016), in everyday life, positioned in relation to others through constant reflection, contemplation, and theorizing that is explored through art, research, and teaching. In other words, like PAR, a/r/tography has relational cycles of action and reflection-which resist linearity because connections are ambiguous, complex, and ever-changing-and lived experiences. Thus like Par, a/r/tography supported our deconstructive reading of the visual parts of the comic book page, as we destabilized contexts which were thought to be fixed. Metaphor/Metonymy Irwin and Springgay (2008) explain that humans make sense of the world using metaphors and metonyms. Through metaphors we make comparison of one thing to another and new connections between the new (the gutter carrying the narrative weight) and the known (the panel carrying the narrative weight). Through metonyms, a word, name, or expression is used as a substitute for something else with which it is closely associated. We understand through replacement and intimate associations or even between the creative contacts of texts with the other, panel and gutter, as we oscillate between dual demands (Derrida, 2002). As artists and researchers made connections between their thinking, their ideas, and everyday experiences-again between site and subjectivities, where meaning is deconstructed, as in theories of bordering, reconstruction, or neither through expressive means and or though touch. A/t/tograhical research is an expressive register rather than an instrumentally representational/representative form of knowledge production where literal voicing is 76 accompanied by visual registers, or comic book art, so that more-than-social processes, material artifacts (like the gutter) can extend agency beyond the dualism and politics of the ways bodies can act (Bennett, 2010; Derrida, 2002; Kraftl, 2013). Monsters as a Deconstructive Metaphor Monsters are worth special mention. More will be said about methods of movement after renderings have been further discussed. For now, monsters are special; they are ubiquitous transnationals, often exiled to the margin. They can shift boundaries between monstrosity and humanity; they are always in excess of their constraining parameters. They leak (much like borders), ooze, and they refuse to be contained by what McCormick (2015) calls the demands of state-induced terror. The monsters a/r/tographers created disrupted, corrupted, and contaminated dichotomies (Derrida, 2002). They demanded that we look beyond what we thought, were the limits of the normal, of contemporary thought, and of relationality open to other possibilities and notions of bordering. Our monsters pushed and they shoved, they tore things apart-hidden cultural infrastructures, bounded identities-they gave us pause, or a way out of symmetrical dualisms (Figures 23-25; Baldacchino, 20102). Openings The purpose of a/r/tography is to open up possibilities for a/r/tographers to perform différance (undecidability), which means "difference and or a deferral of meaning" (Derrida, 2002) in spaces of undecidability. Again, they are spaces where key terms (e.g. the panel and gutter) are continually shifting because the point of equivocation (ambiguity) will always be in a different place (Derrida, 2002). For Irwin and Springgay, these fluid in-between 77 Figure 23 "Monstrous" Gallery Notes Figure 23 "Monstrous": Monsters in comic books have always detailed power relations. They shift boundaries, they fall, they die, and they live again (Mittman & Dendle, 2013) to continue to disrupt. A/r/tographers use metaphoric monstrous brouhaha, a method of movement, to dismantle the idea of bordering as a stasis -Image a/r/tographer El-Rey, Comic Book Art Apprenticeship III 78 Figure 24 "They push and they shove" 79 Figure 25 "Rat Trap" Gallery Notes Figures 24 & 25 "They push and they shove" "Rat Trap": Monsters question what philosophers deal with: What is good? What is evil? What is a contradiction of terms? By extension what really is a panel and gutter? The monster disrupts and tears things apart. In this case the stayed notions of the panel and gutter. To quote monster theorist Asa Mittman:"it [monster] does not do it nicely. Monsters, like borders, are everywhere, in our dreams, in our children's readings, in accounts of postcolonial capitalism and exploitation, in films detailing the power relations of men and of women, in subaltern places, like gutters and slums, in our perceptions of other abled people in the streets, in our comic book art, and sometimes, they are even in us" (Friedman, 2013, xxvii). -Image a/r/tographer El-Rey, Comic Book Art Apprenticeship III 80 places are openings, rather like cuts, tears, ruptures, or cracks that resist predictability, comfort, and safety. It is here in a space of creative contact that knowledge is often created as contradictions and resistances are faced, that is, as borders of any kind are permanently fixed (Irwin & Springgay, 2008, p. xxx; Nail, 2016). Meanings were negotiated between closely spaced bodies, the artists, the panel, and the gutter at the margins of the panel, where needs come together and things 39 begin (Figures 26-28; Sjöholm, 2013; Wood, 2013). As bodies met and mixed at the panel's edge new perspectives on human life and political activity were adopted that did put human beings at the center of political reality (Derrida, 2002; Irwin, 2013; Woodward et al., 2012). A/r/tographical processes created openings where researchers were able to perform what Derrida called différance (2002). Reverberations Here the idea of reverberations means dynamic movement or affect, dramatic or subtle, which forces a shift in understanding. It is the force of art or the force of bodies, human and nonhuman, in everyday political reality. Both Irwin and Springgay (2008) associate this dynamic movement, fluxus, or flow with the notion of the rhizome. A rhizome apprehends multiplicities, multilinearities, and/or shift. It can change or grow in any direction (Deleuze & Guattari, 1972, 1980). A/r/tography, then, is not subject to standardized criteria, rather it remains dynamic, fluid, and in constant motion, which allows for extra-textual and extra-territorial experimentation or shape shifting between 39 "Things begin" refers to the gutter having quasiagency or power to act, and/or co-production of events. 81 Figure 26 "Edge Effects" Gallery Note Figure 26 "Edge Effects: Image": "Reconsidering the panel's edge." Borrowing from Leopold's (1933) ideas about game management, edges are places where different kinds of people and things can come together (the panel and gutter) mingle and change (Cronin, 2014). -Image a/r/tographer El-Rey, Comic Book Art Apprenticeship III 82 Figure 27 "Undecidability" Gallery Note Figure 27 "Undecidability": Images are not merely "signs," asking for interpretation or analysis or commentary. What images, what the gutter, wants from us, from the panel, is much more than that (Bennett, 2010; Haraway, 2009; Mitchell, 2005; Morrison, 2011). What if we considered the political event, fixity, not as the subject (the a/r/tographers themselves) but rather the site of the gutter? How then could the visual parts of the comic book page negotiate borders? What would the gutter want (Mitchell, 2005; Morrison, 2011)? It was a turning point when a/r/tographers truly understood that a/r/tographical renderings could to portray the complicated, overlapping conditions of their world to others. Here the a/r/tographical renderings of excess and openings are especially important to helping a/r/tographers move into the relational rhizomatic inbetween (Irwin, 2013). This image is especially significant as it expressed the tension experienced, extra-subjective/subject-thinking, hard/slack space, etc. -Image a/r/tographer El-Rey, Comic Book Art Apprenticeship III 83 Figure 28: Illuminating Boundaries" Gallery Notes Figure 28 "Illuminating Boundaries": Disrupting theses ingrained notions, of bordering and subalternity (Roy, 2011), takes a profound nudge. A/r/tographers found the ways Sousanis used graphic innovations and restless shapeshifting to undo hard space or flatness, dualism, and fixity complimented a//tographical renderings as they shaped their living inquiry. Image, Sousanis, 2015. 84 the panel and gutter. Again, because a/r/tography entangles and performs a rhizome, there was oscillation between the dual demands of the panel and the gutter in spaces for creative contact (edge spaces). This lack of resolution permitted withdrawal and becoming that changed the spaces in which the panel and gutter knocked up against one another (Wood, 2011) or challenged taken-for-granted definitions of the panel and gutter as fixed. Excess Excess is created when control and regulation disappear and contexts are destabilized. When a/r/tographers grappled with what lies outside the accepted hierarchies (e.g., youth/adult and/or familiar ways of knowing), research became an evocation or provocation, calling for transformation (Irwin & Springgay, 2008). The concept of excess is drawn from Bataille (1985), who maintained organisms have an excess of energy available to them. The research team conjoined notions of excess with Derridean idea of the incessant movement or recontextualization (potentials), rhizomic 40 flow, and with Massumi's (2002) notion of having or "accessing more potentials" (p. 3). Here is the beauty in all of this. If a context is just a temporary stabilization of meanings, it can rightly be refused in order to access more potentials, thus creating "wiggle room" or maneuverability in the face of constraints (Baldacchino, 2012; Bataille, 1985; Buadrillard, 2002; Cocker, 2010; Derrida, 2002). Rules and habits (static contexts) can be negotiated differently, then, as an exit pedagogy, which prefigures what could be called "art's way out" (Baldacchino, 2012). Art refuses to play the game of dualisms. Art's way 40 Pease note rhizome, rhizomic, and rhizomatic are used interchangeably. 85 out, or its power for pausing, is poised at the interstices, those spaces, which do not conform to either side of the dichotomy, to seeming opposition, thereby calling a/r/tographers or the gutter to transformation. Renderings as a conceptual practice of a/r/tography move into the boundaries between theory, practice, and creative activity so that each can impact the other. By attending to renderings, a/r/tographers immersed themselves in the relational, rhizomatic conditions of relational aesthetics, relational inquiry, and relational learning (Irwin & Springgay, 2008) while recontextualizing spatiality in-between (hooks, 1990). Movement Methods A/r/tography entangles and performs a rhizome or an "image of thought" based on a botanical rhizome, which apprehends multiplicities or shifts, changes, and can grow simultaneously in all directions. Again, a rhizome is detachable, connectable, reversible, modifiable, and has multiple entryways and exits and its own lines of flight (Lima, 2011). There is an openness of movement implicit within the a/r/tographical process where a/r/tographers "throw off the equilibrium" (Massumi, 2002) and, as Massumi would say, "let yourself go." In other words, when control and regulation disappear (Irwin & Springgay, 2008) contexts are reconsidered as researchers move forward whilst playing with constraints. The idea of movement as method then is fundamental to this a/r/tographical process. I will very briefly refer to the kinetic ideas we discussed and applied to our work. Monsters were able to meet Massumi's (2002) constraints head on. They are model iconoclasts who disrupt and tear things apart, including the dueling hierarchies that 86 troubled-the gutter is empty, the panel is not. A/r/tographers drew monsters into the gutter to challenge and question-to trouble the notion of stable contexts while they expressed and injected extra-subjective and extra-political potential into their forum discussions, 41 the ongoing regular meetings, and on-the-spot theoretical mini-discussions into their art (see Figure 29). Movement methods were also articulated through movement and sense expressed through the concepts of shifter, scale jumping, BorderXing. Shifter and scale jumping were already mentioned in Chapter 2. BorderXing will be discussed below. First, shifter is a word that is tied directly to the context of speaking, and hence takes much of its meaning from situated use. This idea was conjoined with Derridean notions of contexts as an incessant movement to recontextualization. Monsters and shifters, then, could swallow up our cultural mores and expectations, becoming what they eat as they reflect back to us our own faces, made disgusting or, perhaps, revealed contexts to always have been so (Mittman, 2012). Scale jumping was also discussed in Chapter 2. A/r/tographers used ‘‘JUMPING SCALES,'' or scale-jumping, as a political strategy to circumvent and challenge the present entrenched structure of scale, for example local/global and with it borders and bipartite notions like inside/out. Monsters, like the Hulk, naturally challenged the entrenched structure of scale (Figure 30). BorderXing is an ongoing project initiated by Brandon and Bunting in 2002. Kayle Brandon and Heath Bunting have been working in collaboration since 2001. They both live in Bristol. Many of their projects have explored ideas of borders, status, and 41 See Chapter 1 87 Figure 29 "Slippage" Gallery Notes Figure 29 "Slippage": Look carefully, this an aesthetic refusal (HickeyMoody, 2014) or what Bal & Navarro (2012) call a little resistance. The person's hand, and then forearm is edging into and through the gutter into the next panel. The border is rendered permeable, it literally leaks; traditional notions of the gutter as enclosure have been transgressed. -Image a/r/tographer, Vaché, Apprenticeship III. 88 Figure 30 "She Hulk" Gallery Notes Figure 30 "She Hulk": Oh yeah, one of the a/r/tographer's favorite topics to discuss in a forum. She-Hulk, a skilled pilot, experienced attorney, and formidable in hand-to-hand combat. She had real effect, helped a/r/tographers to draw monsters into their work, to tear apart and to destabilize or subvert familiar hierarchies and fixed spaces like the panel and gutter. According to Mittman (2012), a monster is known through its effect, its impact. From this perspective, all the monsters are real. El-Rey's monsters and the She-Hulk all had palpable, tangible effects on the culture of the study that spawned them.  Marvel Comics, Civil War II Vol 1 She-Hulk Variant, August 2016 89 identity including BorderXing. BorderXing is performed within the context of art practices that subvert, reclaim, co-opt or appropriate space with a degree of mischief, invention, and play. Simply BorderXing entails plotting an escape route from increasingly mapped out landscapes, such as borders both virtual and literal, by breaching authority and crossing that line without legal documents. That is exactly what this project was all about, breaching lines. Whether the navigation of spaces like the gutter is physical or virtual it is tethered to subjectivity and questions of social identity (Cocker, 2012, 2016.) BorderXing helped to push notions of extra-subjectivity as well as extraterritoriality. A/r/tographers conjoined notions of BorderXing with shapeshifting and the monstrous to push and shove spatial divides. Heath and Brandon had a website in the past with maps of journeys already undertaken. 42 Baldacchino (2012) calls artistic performances like these "exit pedagogies," which adduce to art's power to withdraw, to pause, and to subvert automatic dualisms. Additional Methodical Tools The visual parts of the comic book page evinced the messy, anarchic, collaborative, rhizomic art process that shifted attention towards exit strategies (Baldacchino, 2012), or the ways borders can be made into or make themselves into liquid, rhizomatic flows even within a culture determined and organized by insidious forms of monitoring and surveillance (Baldacchino, 2012; Cocker, 2016). 42 See also: http://www2.tate.org.uk/intermediaart/borderxing.shtm 90 Gallery Notes Gallery notes accompany each image. They are meant to suggest possible encounters in a continuous state of movement or emergence. These images are intended to read like a collection of fragmented, deconstructed, and mashed-together ideas (as was our theoretical journey) around subalternity and spatial agency. The artwork itself was intentionally done at the margin of the panel, to create a chaotic space for creativity and possibility where behavioral codes that no longer held things (the gutter) in place were worked until malleable, bent back, and folded to reveal other possibilities within (Cocker, 2010, p. 94; Irwin, 2013; Sousanis, 2015). Thus, spatial configurations were pushed beyond spaces for exclusion and could represent different notions at different times (Baldacchino, 2012; Cocker, 2010, 2015; hooks, 1990; Irwin, 2013; Lima, 2011; Soja, 1996; Sousanis, 2015; Till, 2012). It was never our intention to dissect images and beat them to death. Forum Discussions Again, a/r/tographers engaged in ongoing analysis through focused theoretical discussions, which reflected back on the comic book art. This process implicitly involved jumping scales or moving from personal experience to social theorizing. Paying attention to interdependence of scales in our analysis, by drawing out connections, extended the power of emerging and changing interpretations. 91 Practicing A/r/tography In the third Comic Book Art Apprenticeship and Visual Study we examined the conditions of a/r/tographical research as: practice-based research, co-productive communities of practice, and relational aesthetics through six renderings of engagement. Through this process, a/r/tographers learned that a/r/tography is its own possible measure, often an unheard-of measure (where measurement is not qualifying something against something else, the setting of the criteria, or an absolute norm; Irwin & Springgay, 2008). Rather, the conditions for measurement, if you need to call it that, existed within a fluid recursive process of analysis (Cahill, 2007; Irwin & Springgay, 2008) that took place throughout the research project as part of the critical shifting cycles of action and reflection central to PAR and to a/r/tographical work. In this sense, an a/r/tographical act is its own possible measure. Instead of thinking of our actions, encounters, and thoughts  our living [shifting, shapeshifting, scale jumping, BorderXing] inquiry as substance that can be arranged in discrete moments, counted and subjected to normative evaluations, we need to understand living inquiry as a responsibility…which resides in the inbetween (Irwin & Springgay 2008, p. 120). The notion of being responsible throughout the a/r/tographical process did not mean being accountable to some normative authority but to the processual fluid way of living or being together in this world. Theorizing and practicing, rather than theory and practice, shapeshifted and moved from stable abstract systems to spaces for exchange, reflexivity, and relationality found in the incessant movement, or recontextualization, where undecidables could not or would not conform to either side of the dichotomy, or seeming opposition (e.g., the gutter is empty, the panel is not; Derrida, 2002; Irwin, 2013). From this degree of excess, or potential (wiggle room), a/r/tographers experienced the gutter as detachable, connectable, reversible, modifiable, with multiple entryways and 92 exits and its own line of flight (see Figure 31; Lima, 2011). Summary In Chapters 2 and 3, a/r/tographers described efforts to develop ontological alternatives to the gutter's fixity by exploring its extra-subjective political potential. This included ways the gutter could negotiate scalar approaches where the idea of a border is not reducible to a stable fixed side. A/r/tography allowed researchers to build on the same strategy used to widen the boundaries of the extant literature by continuing to transgress disciplinary borders and comics interactions with them. Following Derrida (2009), hooks (1996) and Irwin (2009, 2013, 2015), a/r/tographers positioned their research questions in-between, artist/scholar and theory/practices polarities. They investigated and pictured the ways art forms, such as the gutter, trace and negotiate borders. A/r/tography stood in parallel with the deconstructive process and movement methods used to create an understanding of borders as being in motion: 1. The research conditions of a/r/tography reside in several notions of relationality: relational inquiry, relational aesthetics, and relational learning, 2. A/r/tography entangles and performs a rhizome, an image of thought based on the botanical rhizome. A rhizome is detachable, connectable, reversible, and modifiable with multiple entryways and exits. A rhizome moves and flows in a dynamic momentum as do borders. 3. A rhizome activates the in-between, creating conditions for creative contact between the panel and gutter, while oscillating between dual demands. 93 Figure 31 Lines of Flight Gallery Notes Figure 31 "Lines of Fight": A perpetually redesigned space with infinitesimal possibilities for escaping static notions of bordering. A traveling queer youth arrives in Utah, is off-put, and leaves. -Image a/r/tographer, Vaché, Early Apprenticeship III. 94 4. Like deconstruction, a/r/tography insists on invention and undecidability as vitally important. The fictional, fanciful, fragile, experimental, and personal are on equal footing with the factual. 5. A/r/tography is expressed through renderings or concepts that helped a/r/tographers to portray the conditions of their work. A deconstructive approach to a/r/tography created the spatial conditions for countering hard space while proposing a new co-productive assemblage between the a/r/tographers and the gutter. By focusing on what art does in the world, conversations about border poetics and the ways arts forms negotiated borders were enlarged. CHAPTER 4 FINDINGS: WHISPERS FROM THE GUTTER: WHEN EDGES MIX Showing Seeing In Chapter 2, the reader was asked to negotiate the intertextuality of this text, an area Derrida called the margin (i.e., this text's footnotes) as a means to experience the deconstructive and a/r/tographical process. In most cases the body of the text is central and the footnotes and empty spaces are marginalized. In this way, the reader can get a feel for the tensions, discomfort, and the messiness a/r/tographers felt when thinking about the negotiating familiar and taken-for-granted ideas, like hard space. The goal of the deconstructive process is to trace everting that is in the margin or the white space of the edge of the page or the panel (Van den Braembussche, 2009). In Chapter 3 it was said that a/r/tography entangles and performs a rhizome that moves and flows in a dynamic momentum that is detachable, connectable, reversible, modifiable, has multiple entryways and exits, with its own lines of flight. Line of flight is a term developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus (1987). It designates an infinitesimal possibility of escape, and elusive moment when change happens, when a threshold between two paradigms is crossed. "Line of flight" is Brian Massumi's English translation of the French "ligne de fuite," where "fuite" means the act 96 of fleeing or eluding but also flowing, leaking (1987: xvii). Although line of flight was discussed in Chapter 3, here the meaning continues to emerge to include not just escape (art's way out) or eluding but also movement as circulation, flowing, and leaking. This is an important addendum that stands in parallel with our emerging understanding of the ways hard space and thus borders could be remade or made differently, once terms are temporality subverted and "are seen dancing in the free play of non-hierarchical, nonstable meanings" (Powell, 1997) or in the context of edge spaces for mixing or within the borderzones of comic book art that then may be made and remade, deconstructed if you will, according to a host of shifting variables because all borders can be made to or spontaneously leak (Figure 32; Nail, 2016). Suspend Disbelief! Contemporary motion, a/r/tographers motion, is everywhere divided. It is corralled by territorial fences around our homes, institutions, countries, and even in our art where the panel and gutter have been presented as quantitatively separate. Motion was fixed by border walls or informational borders that appeared to be fixed, or static break that comes of hard space (Nail, 2016). Although borders in comic book art appeared to be static, a/r/tographers experimented with movement methods (e.g., the monstrous, cosmic treadmills, BorderXing, and the like) to create art-driven bifurcations or even manybranch paths where borders are continuous division and thus in-between or not reducible to any fixed side or dualism (Baldacchino, 2013; Konrad, 2015; Nail, 2016). Following Bennett (2009), Hawkins, (2013), Mitchell (2005), and Morrison (2011), the reader is asked to begin with the assumption that they are capable of 97 Figure 32 "Unease, hard/soft" Gallery Note Figure 32: "Unease, hard/soft": The idea behind this a/r/tographical deconstructive process was to counter hard space or the notion of the gutter as a dystopic, unaccounted for void (Lorimer, 2011), or that space where nothing happened (Mazur, 2013). A/r/tography, like deconstruction, recognizes that meaning making is often disturbing, unexpected, and even hesitant. In this image, an a/r/tographer is being drawn and pulled, on fundamental, even subconscious levels, struggling to play with constraints or fixed notions of site as hard space. The panel's edge wanted always to draw a/r/tographers up, tightening the limit of things (Merleau-Ponty, 2007), or the hard spaces that made the panel central and the gutter marginal. One a/r/tographic rendering focused on here is excess. Excess is a rendering (See Chapter 3) that portrays and contextualizes the tension that came when a/r/tographers drew against convention and control. You can almost feel what it was like, the slippage when regulation began to disappear (Irwin & Springgay, 2008). The unsaid, forgotten, and or unthought-of was centered for a time, the text (panel and gutter) was made to mean the opposite of what it 98 originally appeared to mean, then both oppositions came together to mingle and change in spaces where edges meet at mix-the rhizomatic in-between.  Image a/r/tographer El-Rey, Comic Book Art Apprenticeship III suspending disbelief as you consider what the gutter can do at the margin of the comic book panel, when a redrawn gutter ecology opened up new geographical spaces for nondomination. Like Derrida, a/r/tographers installed invention as a vitally important aspect of the deconstructive reading n this visual study (Reynolds, n.d.). By dwelling in the space of the imagination, or the rhizomatic in-between (Irwin, 2013), a/r/tographers experimented with the gutter as a way of opening up not only borders but also what objects or things like the gutter could be, rather than what they are or had been to expand conversations about border aesthetics and the politics of autonomous space. In Chapter 3, it was said, however tersely, that it was never the intention of this a/r/tographical group to beat the images presented in this dissertation to death. Instead, following Mitchell (2005), images presented here were acknowledged for what they did not want: to be interpreted, decoded, worshipped, smashed, exposed, demystified or enthralled by their beholders (p. 48). What the gutter wanted, in the last instance, was to be asked what it wants, with the understanding that it may want nothing at all other than to give attention to human-thing dependence or the thing side of affect. Through a suspension of disbelief, openings were created for a/r/tographers to give their attention to what is and what is not known about the gutter, its bordering, and the politics of autonomous space (Bennett, 2010, 2011; Haraway, 2004; Hodder, 2012; Lima, 2011; Pahl & Rowsell, 2010; Miller, 2012; 99 Mitchell, 2005; Morrison, 2011; Ronk, 2013; Sousanis, 2015; Till, 2012; Watson, 1992). Throughout this visual study, a/r/tographers drew on Irwin's notion of a/r/tography as "thinking as an experiment" when they used movement methods, like cosmic treadmills, for deconstructing and transforming hard space in comic book art. In this way a/r/tographers were able to negotiate maneuverability in the face of constraints (i.e., stasis; Massumi, 2002) by using the monstrous as one example to work against convention, to force a shift in understanding of what autonomous space or politics could look like (Figures 33 & 34). Movement methods created openings for conditional withholding, forgetting, and/or an aesthetic refusal, where interrupting the givenness of human subjectivity, and with that baggage-ridden language, physically changes the gutter, revealing it as a quasi-agent, remaking itself into a space of nondomination, despite the fact that it is traditionally thought of as a peripheral or a shadow of the comics panel. This study has argued for the forcefulness of art through the performance of movement methods as a means to countering hard space (Baldacchino, 2012; Bennett, 2010; Cocker, 2010 2012, 2016; Hawkins, 2013, 2014, Till, 2012). Movement methods In Chapter 4, a/r/tographers intentionally backgrounded footnotes and foregrounded Gallery Notes with associated images. This was an intentional tactic to draw attention to the data or findings that are expressed in the context of image. They also began to negotiate subject suspension where the purview of the human subject is neither the agent nor the grounds for the political act. Monsters, speedsters, and things could be their means to further explore the politics of autonomous space and the co-production of art (Bennett, 2010; Morrison, 2011; Woodward et al., 2011). 100 Figure 33 "To be or not to be" Gallery Notes Figure 33 "to be or not to be": This image will be detailed further below as it was an important image that a/r/tographers referred back to. Forum Discussion May 2012 (asked by academy mentor): "Can the comics gutter, a site of possibility, hold us together as an assemblage that depends on one another's collective imaginations, skills, perspectives, experiential knowledge, and friendship to create place-based adaptive changes we progress towards reimagining the idea of a border in comics, as a fixed idea" (Houchon & Youth Researchers 2011, 2012)? Renderings or conceptual practices of a/r/tography helped a/r/tographers to portray the experimental conditions of this entangled work (things depend people, people on things). In Figure 33, dynamic movement or reverberations (Irwin & Springgay, 2008) dramatic, subtle, and extra subjective (Woodward et al., 2012), helped a/r/tographers can give their attention to what is and what is not known about the politics of autonomous space and the ways the gutter negotiated borders (UiT, 2016). 101 A/r/tographers drew on Woodward et al. (2012) when they examined the site or gutter from the vantage of extra-subjective and nonsubjective politics. The idea was to move away from the traps of subjective linguistic procedure, tired dualisms like: old/young; empty/full. They guessed it might be a more facile process (breaking panel borders) if they were thought of as a site's arrangement, the panel and gutter, outside of the viewpoint of the subject and the theoretical, methodological and disciplinary perspectives it engenders. Thus, thing power, monstrous hybrids and speedsters alike, were metaphors and metonyms used to deconstruct hard space. Figure 34 "Monsters in excess" Gallery Note Figure 34 "Monsters in excess": monsters are always in excess of their constraining parameters. They leak they ooze and refuse to be contained, often damaging demands of state-induced borders (McCormack, 2015). From a monster's vantage, pedagogy then, is not about what is already known but instead about creating conditions for the unknown, for looking beyond the limits, for thinking as an experiment, thereby 102 complicating our conversations (Irwin, p. 198) about bordering in comic book art. like BorderXing directed a/r/tographers' attention to the geographical work that art does in the world (Baldacchino, 2012; Hawkins, 2013; Irwin, 2013) or the ways the visual parts of the comic book page negotiated, produced, and transformed sites, spaces, and subjects-perhaps even itself. It was a turning point when a/r/tographers paid closer attention to the doing of art and the politics of the site, at the margin of the panel, where human life and "their" political activity was not central, rather, was thought of outside the view of the subject (Woodward et al., 2012). The forcefulness of the gutter itself was art's way out from symmetrical dualisms or that elusive moment when a/r/tographers understood that change happened and the threshold between two paradigmatic notions of space (hard/slack, panel/gutter) had been crossed (Baldacchino, 2012, Cocker, 2010, 2012, 2016, Till, 2012). It was in slack space or ambiguous space, at the margin of the panels, where the material lives of things and objects made claims upon us and we upon them (Ronk, 2013). Making Space: One Story We are back in the loft on Pierpont Avenue. 43 A/r/tographers are sitting about that expansive glass work table like we do every week, engaged in another forum discussion trying to figure out what a redrawn gutter ecology can open up. A mentoring artist and 43 The loft on Pierpont Avenue was the literal site for the second and third Comic Book Art Apprenticeship and Visual Studies. The glass table was where we drew and discussed. Forum discussions happened with regularity, every session, as needed. Both the academic mentor and the rest of the a/r/tographers worked across multiple, sometimes unfamiliar, disciplines. 103 architect has brought along a story he wanted to read to all about space in homes. He remembered having heard it at a research symposium about types of space (see Figure 35) and thought it could help with the deconstructive task. I think the idea of space in the home, as set out in the 1968 government publication of the same name, is really sobering. The guide says I have got to get certain furniture in. I then do dimensions of the furniture and of people sitting on the furniture and moving around the furniture, then put walls in-and that is called architecture. I then give the dimensions to the contractor who duly builds the walls and then the furniture is moved in, but only in the orientation it has been designed for because you cannot fit it any other way. Then the people move in and that is a kind of self-fulfilling logic (Till, 2008, p. 2). Figure 35: "House plans for space in the home" (Till, 2008) Gallery Notes Figure 35 "House plans for space in the home": This particular story of space pushed a/r/tographers to grapple with what lies outside the acceptable or the habitual, for example, the gutter is the space where nothing happens (Mazur, 2013). It was fundamental to unsettling a/r/tographers' perception of the gutter, that space could be reduced down to a kind of hard determinist sense. It was that hard sense that a/r/tographers countered, using other ideas about the way space is made: slack space and monstrous hybrids. Image Jeremy Till, 2008. 104 Hard Space In the third Comic Book Art Apprenticeship and Visual Study it was a very particular kind of space, hard space, which was disrupted. In hard spaces objects or things are set apart in fixed, nonrhizomic compartmentalized hierarchies because the space is made to retain physical associations, like that which existed between the panel and gutter (see Figure 36). We were shown another example of hard space that day. Additional images of house plans had been strewn across the glass table. There was one image of a dining room that stood out, in terms of the retention of physical associations that hard space makes. This dining room could only be used as a dining room, nothing else, much like the room in Figure 35. It was described at the same symposium (2008) as a space for status. "As soon as you try to use it for something else then it is redundant space" (Till, 2008, 2012), "even empty like the gutter, the space where nothing is supposed to happen" (a/r/tographers' forum discussion). The living room within the standard speculative house as pictured above gave a/r/tographers a sense of the ways comic book artists in the past had made the gutter, and the panel for that matter, into fixed or hard spaces. A/r/tography recognizes here that meaning making is often disturbing, unexpected, and even hesitant. It was easier to reduce space down to a kind of hard, deterministic sense, rather than unravel it (Figure 37) as something softer and to open up conversations and relationships where common ground is not overdetermined by regulation and order (Derrida, 2002; Till, 2008, 2012). Here the a/r/tographically rendered openings helped a/r/tographers to portray the condition of the work in the context of relational inquiry (Irwin & Springgay, 2008) and the aesthetics of making hard, soft, or slack space. 105 Figure 36: "Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13)" Gallery Notes Figure 36 "Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13)": Panel 1: What I could be, 2AM. Panel 3: "I was nine when I got into MS-13 aka Mara Salva truche gang. I got out when I was 17. I have been stabbed twice and shot once." When this gag, or a shorter 3 panel comic, was imaged, the research conditions of a/r/tography: relational aesthetics, relational inquiry, and relational learning (the rhizomatic in-between) were not being expressed spatially. Note the panel and gutter arrangement, where the panel appears to be full, and the gutter empty. Thus, that whole notion of what Derrida called creative contact with another text (e.g. the panel and gutter), had to be pushed further both in theory and action. Hard spaces or edges pictured, which draw up or tighten the limits of things, made the gutter into what seemed to be the empty stuff between physical objects, or the panels (Merleau-Pont, 2007; Till, 2012). This notion of hard space, where the panel and the gutter are made to retain specific physical associations, impeded the idea of rhizomic flow, where meaning circulates, moving in all directions simultaneously in our a/r/tographical process (Springgay, Irwin, & Kind, 2008). Space seen as a place of measure as seen in Figures 32 and 33 reinscribed the assumption that space can be divided, contained, and controlled (Till, 2012)  Image a/r/tographer El-Rey, Comic Book Art Apprenticeship III 106 Figure 37 "Unraveling hard space? Reverberations" Gallery Notes Figure 37 "Unraveling hard space? Reverberations": In Figure 37, "Unraveling hard space," nervous performative imaging anxiously crosses texts (the panel and gutter) unsettling historical contexts, where the gutter is empty and the panel dominates. Here a/r/tographical reverberations, or dynamic movement both subtle and dramatic, suggests how motion can operate to characterize and visualize borders in motion to counter hard space.  Image a/r/tographer El-Rey, Comic Book Art Apprenticeship III 107 In this instant, the gutter is foregrounded. Still, the "pigs" are stand-ins for authoritative fixes and hold on to ideas of hard space and what's left overthe stuff between objects, the empty space or its stand-in, the gutter. Here a/r/tographers are poised at the inter-of-esse, the in-between of being-or more precisely how we are connected to the world and the world to us. A betwixt, in-between, space where neither the I of the subject nor the it of the object or the gutter takes precedence (Abrahamson, 2012). Here art or the gutter intervenes between things, making a shift away from an authoritative fix, hard space, to an open-ended description of multiple actions that go into making space in comic book art. The visual parts of the comic book page called a/r/tographers to transformation. Again, consider the a/r/tographical rendering excess, where control and regulation begin to disappear through entangled deconstructive acts that unmasked a dialectic dependency between humans and things, or the a/r/tographers and the comic book gutter (Bennett, 2010, 2011; Hodder, 2012). In Figure 37, the human-thing relationship, however, is unstable. The gutter wants to be unruly despite police presence. Ideas that lie adjacent to one another needed to be further negotiated. What if we were to unmask too sedimented ways of thinking, and control and regulation were to disappear? 44 What if we moved beyond subjective relations and considered the site as autonomous with respect to the subject in two crucial ways: first, organizationally autonomous, where the site is the legislator of its own assembly; second, politically autonomous, where the site or the gutter is not conditioned by subjectivity? What, then, would the political event, bordering 44 Again, control and regulation refers directly to excess, an a/r/tographical rendering already discussed in Chapter 3. 108 in comic book art, look like if theorized in ways that did not presuppose class or gender positionalities, or categories such as citizen, voter, resistance fighter, corporate fatcat, disidentified anarchist, left-wing academic and the rest, where pigs are authorities and hard space is locked down? What if we delayed the givenness of subjectivity as a frame of reference for a site so that we might better inquire into the complexity of entangled happenings where things go awry and offer new potentials and opportunities for understanding the ways in which the gutter had the power to act (Bennett, 2010, 2011; Hodder, 2012; Woodward et al., 2012, p. 205)? Slack Space: Noun to Verb Slack space is a term used by the British architect, writer, and educator Jeremey Till (2012) to push thinking beyond measure and the reduction of space to a hard deterministic sense. He originally developed the counter to hard space, as soft, together with Tatjana Schneider in 2008. Till then shifted away from using the term soft space (2008) to slack space (2012) not only to avoid reinscribing symmetrical dualisms but to address the concern that "the social implications of the term are overtaken by its physical connotations" (p. 133). Instead Till turned to William Connolly's concept of slackness that he outlined when discussing political theory in The Politics of Ambiguity (1987). The term slack will be used from here on forward. Slack space is by implication a space that is "softer" because the space made is not founded on principles of abstraction, normalization, and control that underpin hard space as already imaged in Figure 37. Slack space does not presume to control or divide in the same way hard space does. In hard space lines are drawn to represent form. What is 109 left over on the paper, the white stuff; that represents space (Till, 2012), or in the case of the gutter, the space where nothing happens. In the context of Derridean geographies, slack spaces are spaces for undecidability and invention. A space, perhaps, where the characters actively resist (Morrison, 2011) and the gutter could take on a life of its own and legislate its own assembly (Bennett, 2010, 2011; Haraway, 2004; Hodder, 2012; Woodward et al., 2012) and the gutter could unravel the very logic of subject-based politics so that boundaries or edges became fluid; space was conceived of as rhizomic flow (Ingold, 2010). Noun to Verb The shift from hard to slack space was like the shift from a noun to a verb, from "the plan" (noun) as an authoritative fix on form and function, to "to plan" (vb.) as an open rhizomatic description of multiple actions that go into the making of space (Irwin, 2013; Till, 2012). Figure 39, "All Borders Leak" points to the shift from a noun to a verb as the hand is seen to be snaking across the edge, no longer a limit. All borders leak because all borders are constituted by and through a process of leakage, which is only temporarily stabilized in border regimes. This idea of leakage, later expressed by Nail (2016), lent support to the a/r/tograhical, deconstructive process in and the effort to counter hard space with slack, where a slight of hand called a/r/tographers to edgy transformations. 110 Figure 39 "All Borders Leak" Gallery Note Figure 39 "All Borders Leak": Slack space is simply a more flexible, ambiguous space that welcomes a wider range of inhabitants and experimental movements (see movement as method in Chapter 3; e.g., dérive or drifting or wandering in-between spaces). Look closely, as the human arm/hand seems to be taking an unplanned detour or dérive, drifting into the next panel. Borders have never succeeded at keeping everyone in or out (Nail, 2016).  Image a/r/tographer Vaché, Comic Book Art Apprenticeship III 111 Monstrous Hybrids Who Lift the Veil So what happens when great artists/animal/hybrids/things and other chimera breach normative categories? What happens when they appear to transgress and move from one category, like hard space, to another? It's another forum discussion, same glass table, the same loft. This time, the talk spotlights Merleau-Ponty's notion of edges, which had reinscribed familiar debates about the gutter as passive and fixed. Merleau-Ponty saw edges as the end of things. An area or a place where a person or thing runs out, by either ceasing to exist or dropping out of sight or touch (Casey, 2007). Worse yet, according to Merleau-Ponty, when an edge draws up or tightens the limit of a thing, acts of violence (e.g., masking the gutter) are hidden from view (Casey, 2007). This notion of hard space that retains physical association creates a notion where the panel may seem to dominate; the gutter then is the space where nothing happens (Mazur, 2013). It was this hard tendency that needed to be countered. Two topics were explored when discussing ways to counter hard space that day: first, boundary crossings with hybrid monster bodies; second, edge effects, an ecological point of reference we had followed before when discussing some of Félix Guattari's work. Monstrous Hybrids: Entanglement In Chapter 3 reference was made to movement methods (for example, BorderXing), monsters, and the monstrous and the ways these are tethered to the a/r/tographical process. In an a/r/tographical research process meaning circulates and moves in all directions simultaneously (Irwin et al., 2008). A rhizomatic model conscripts 112 a/r/tographical work, which then acknowledges multiplicities and multilinearities that are acentered, nonhierarchical, nonsignifying systems without, as Lima puts it, a general (2011). There are flows of matter, energy, and information then, always readying to transform (Ingold, 2010) through costume, performance, and hybrids (Mittman & Dendle, 2013). Monsters could literally knock up against, infiltrate, and deconstruct hard spaces in forms like the giant hairy Heap, a 1940s comic book character discussed and modeled in another forum discussion. The Heap was a WWI flying ace, who had been shot down over a Polish swamp. He did not die but retained a shred of human life, amalgamating with the swamp water, vegetation, and soil. He fell, supposedly died, and rose again only to roam like Lancelot, in his madness, eventually turning on his fellow Germans, now Nazis, doing occasional good deeds, like pummeling edges in comic book art, for the ally cause (see Figure 40; Mittman & Dendle, p. xxvii). Monsters could exit and mediate realms, that is, hard space, which humans created for themselves (Baldacchino, 2013) as a stand-in for a rhizome as a philosophical mentor. Heavy Lifting In parts of China the inherent natural order (dao) was understood to be constantly transforming (Mittman & Dendle, 2013) as it is an a/r/tographical process through rhizomic flow. Animal hybrids and other chimeras were known to breach, deconstruct, normative categories-especially at boundaries between familiar and unfamiliar forms of existence, like hard and slack spaces. Category breaching could include both the transversal of ordinary intact boundaries, at the margin of the panel, or the transformation of monstrous beings or spaces themselves (Mittman & Dendle, 2013). Again, a mode of 113 Figure 40 "The Heap" Gallery Notes Figure 40 "The Heap": Hillman Comics, 1940. Source, The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous (2013) and Todd McFarlane Productions (2011). It was a turning point when a/r/tographers paid closest attention creative geographies or the work art does in the worldperhaps pushing and shoving through renderings like reverberationsMonsters could produce and transform sites, through modes of circulation, in short, its geographies, human and not (Hawkins, 2014, 114 p. 14). By attending to the forcefulness of art, to its monsters or the thing-side of affect (Bennett, 2010) at the margin of the panel, a/r/tographers could co-produce or develop ontological alternatives to scalar approaches (e.g., national, transnational, local, translocal, and states of mind) and with it the notion of borders as reducible to any stable, fixed side (Nail, 2016). Simply, by espousing vitalism and lively gutter, through aggressive forces of matter processing, be it monsters or speedsters, human politics or dualisms were easier to deconstruct. When a/r/tographers worked against convention (excess) and borders were not theorized as a reflexive concept grounded in the experience of the subject (race, class, or gender) and with it that baggage extrasubjective experiments with monsters like the Heap, created extra-territorial spatial potentials. analysis, which worked from the suspension of subjectivity, where artful monstrous bodies or speedsters broke though the usual boundaries creating an ontological inversion or a space where terms panel and gutter, hard space and slack could be experienced as a Derridean geography where oppositions could dance in the free play of nonhierarchical, nonstable meanings, if just for a time (Myhre, 2013; Powell, 1997; Van den Braembussche, 2009). This unstable, unruly, rhizomatic, entangled geographical and a/r/tographic process of untying, playing with, and/or countering hard space, expanded a/r/tographers' understanding of emerging material processes and extra-territorial possibilities or potentials in spaces where edges not only meet but can mix in the Derridean spaces for free play and unlearning. In these spaces comic book borders were recharacterized and 115 revisualized in motion (Baldacchino, 2013; Konrad, 2015; Nail, 2016; Woodward et al. 2012) producing parallel emergent phenomena or edge effects (Cronon, 2014). The idea of entanglement or entangled geographies where humans depend on things, and things on humans, or where assemblages formed out of components in relation, morphed into a concept of how people, creatures, and things come together on the edge. Edge Effects/Ecotone In Chapter 2, it was noted that the a/r/tographers drew on the ecological terms ecotone and edge effects mutually, to create a basis for their redrawn gutter ecology in which panel borders were broken and the gutter was liberated. By instantiating movement methods, like BorderXing and the monstrous in the context of ecotone, the transition zone between two biomes, the panel and gutter, a/r/tographers created conditions for a new theory of borders in motion in comic book art to be characterized and visualized (Figure 41). Moreover, by choosing the margin, the ecotone or place for radical openness where edges meet and mix, a/r/tographers made a distinction between a margin that is imposed, hard space, and one that is more flexible, slack space. Hooks, too, made that distinction. I am located in the margin. I make a definite distinction between that marginality which is imposed by oppressive structures and the marginality one choses as a site of resistance -as a location of radical openness and possibility. This site of resistance is continually formed in that segregated culture of opposition that is our critical response to domination. We come to this space through suffering and pain, through struggle. We know struggle to be that which pleasures, delights, and fulfills desire. We are transformed, individually, collectively, as we make radical creative space which affirms and sustains our subjectivity, which gives us a new location from which to articulate our sense of the world (1990, p. 53). The third-world of political choice or the ecotone, ensured that a redrawn gutter ecology 116 Figure 41 "Monstrous Hybrids," Noun to Verb Gallery Notes Figure 41: "Monstrous Hybrids," Noun to Verb: Monsters were a movement method or a playful technique used to discern and to cultivate non-human vitality or the forcefulness of art, where the gutter operated beyond and with a/r/tographers to co-produce and visualize borders in edge spaces for mixing (Bennett 2010, 2011; Konrad, 2015; Nail, 2016; Wood, 2011). Here border crossings were enacted by a/r/tographers through monster bodies who broke through the stubborn boundary in-between hard space and slack. Again, Derrida installed invention as a vitally important aspect of the deconstructive reading as art's way out of symmetrical dualisms (Baldacchino, 2012, Van den Braembussche, 2009); monsters got that. Thus, meaning was found in the neglected corners, at edges, or even in aberrations of text, by a/r/tographers' chimera friends.  Image a/r/tographer El-Rey, Comic Book Art Apprenticeship III. Image taken from a/r/tographer's sketch book. 117 nurtured resistance, and provided openings on the edge (hooks, 1984). Rather than thinking of the space at the margin of the panel as empty, or the gutter as the end of things where the panel ran out, a/r/tographers formed an assemblage with monsters and things (the gutter itself) by transgressing, moving, and mixing the ways space is imagined and remade in border zones where edges meet and mix. A/r/tographers' redrawn gutter ecology, where panels were broken and the gutter liberated, demonstrated that there was an ecotone between the gutter and the margin. In other words, a/r/tographers were able to deconstruct hard space, Merleau-Ponty's notion of the edge as a cliff, or as he puts it where the edge is the end, the end of something, some place, or some person, that tightens the limit of a thing. In an ecotone edges are lively rather than an intensely focused ending. This redrawn gutter ecology is a space that is simultaneously central and marginal, a Thirdspace of political choice where edges are reimagined. This evocative process of choosing marginality, or edge spaces for mixing, reconceptualized the problematic of subjection by deconstructing and disordering both the margin and the center. In those restructured and recentered margins the gutter became a new space for opportunity and action. Visible Shifts: When the Edges Meet Series Figures 43-45, and their related Gallery Notes, footnotes, and other errata, take over the narrative at this point in the dissertation. 118 Figure 43 "The gutter is where nothing happens" Gallery Notes Figure 43 "The gutter is where nothing happens": The gutter was imaged here as peripheral to, or as an unaccounted-for subaltern, or even an inferior border space where nothing happens. Simply the panels' border, which had been masked in the context of hard space. The gutter is not yet a co-presence with the gutter. It is not simultaneously marginal and central (hooks, 1990) rather a risky place on the edge, where the gutter is emptied and drops out of sight (Baldacchino, 2014; Haywood Rolling, 2009; Till, 2012; Van den Braembussche, 2009). Image a/r/tographer Vaché, Comic Book Art Apprenticeship and Visual Study II. Image penciled and inked on Manga Art Board. 119 In one research question a/r/tographers asked if ecological and architectural notions (ecotone, edge spaces for mixing, and slack) would help them to redraw the gutter ecology so that the gutter became active and the panel was no longer intractable. It was that notion of the gutter as fixed hard space, thus an empty space of a place where nothing happens, which they tried to counter through a reliance on subject suspension and co-production. That said, there was evidence that when the gutter was thought of as an edge space for mixing, or an entangled geography (people and things), a temporary stabilization or a temporary autonomous zone, where people and things came together, mingled, and changed, that its very blankness (Hetherington & Lee, 1999) ensured that all orders produced were temporary and provisional. Perhaps the gutter is active when it is empty and when it is not. This, however, is the stuff of future work for these a/r/tographers. 120 Figure 44 "Breaking panels, BorderXing, Exit Pedagogies" 45 45 As previously noted, there have been, and will continue to be, times that images are revisited to express a different concept or different and related a/r/tographical rendering in the study. The a/r/tographers revisited images repeatedly in forum. This revisiting was done in the spirit of the a/r/tographical process where there are only momentary groupings of relationships and, in the Derridean sense, where contexts are only temporary stabilizations of meanings drawn together in the articulation of specific discourse. In that regard, the images, like their monster counterparts, were shifters too. 121 Gallery Notes Figure 44 "Border Permeability, BorderXing": Here a/r/tographers tested the permeability of borders, like the Velociraptors testing the fences for weaknesses, systematically in the movie Jurassic Park. They conjoined movement methods, in this case BorderXing, with the monstrous to push the deconstructive process through image and language. -Image a/r/tographer Vaché, Comic Book Art Apprenticeship III. Image penciled and inked on Manga Art Board. BorderXing (Cocker, 2012) is an ongoing activist, geographical practice initiated by Brandon and Bunting in 2002. It is performed within the context of art practices that subvert, reclaim, co-opt or appropriate space, like the panel's, with a degree of mischief, invention, and play. Baldacchino (2012) calls artistic performances like these, exit pedagogies, arts power to pause and to cycle beyond contingencies imposed, e.g. symmetrical dualisms and fixed boundaries or edges where things are tied up and or disappear. Movement methods like BorderXing created opportunities for a/r/tographers to withdraw and to pause, to subvert automatic dualisms, like inside and out. BorderXing and other movement methods like the monstrous, disrupted habitual performances of the gutter as hard space. Movement methods like BorderXing are represented through a/r/tographical renderings like reverberation. The research conditions of a/r/tography reside in relationality and portrayed through renderings like reverberations. 122 Figure 45 "edge mixing": Gutter-panel faceoff Gallery Notes Figure 45 "edge mixing": Gutter panel faceoff. Despite the way the gutter was traditionally imaged, a/r/tographers imaged their claim that the gutter was a productive, mobile, even autonomous space for edge mixing where things begin (Bennett, 2009; Cronon, 2014; Wood, 2011; Sjöholm). Here the gutter is leaking and oozing into, is both simultaneously central and marginal, a slack space (hooks, 1990; Till, 2012), 123 which lent flexibility and ambiguity, and thus enabled a broad range of behaviors and forms by complicating notions of co-productive subject suspension, entanglement, and the co-production of art where things go awry and offer new possibilities for countering hard spaces in and around the comic book gutter. Following its monster buddy's lead (things depend on things/humans depend on things), the gutter has become hook's marginality or "wildness." It is a main edge space for mixing where monster hybrids, people and things, come together to mingle and change as they collectively disorder both the margin and the center, as they have been shaken free from their own subjectivities and related territorial traps (Derrida, 2002; hooks, 1990; Mittman & Dendle, 2013). Image a/r/tographer Vaché, Comic Book Art Apprenticeship and Visual Study III. Image penciled and inked on Manga Art Board. In this image, the gutter is heavily inkedprimarily in black. Notice the darkest areas. The panel is lightly inked in grays and blues. Panels and borders have now been "monsterized," broken or torn apart to create an ecotone or conditions for what hooks (1990) called wildness, a space where people, creatures, and things could mingle and change. Edge Spaces for Mixing: Openings Edge effects refers to the changes that can and do occur at the edge or boundaries of two habitats, like the panel and gutter. Species have often sought edges because of the variety of resources available at the edge of more than one environmental type (Conrad, 2014). Edge effects existed as intertwined relationships at the margin of the comic book panel, where an opening, cut, tear, rupture, or crack was created to resist predictability, comfort, and the safety that reason sets (Baldacchino, 2012, 2013; Irwin & Springgay, 124 2008; Wood, 2011). Ecological ideas that shape edge effects were enlarged and entangled with an architectural vison of the same. In this instance, edge effects are expressed through a sometimes-invisible net of interconnections in what Wood (2011) called main edge spaces for mixing46. Briefly, in architecture, main edge spaces for mixing are interim, unsettled, lively, wild (hooks, 1990), interrelated vectoral sites/sights, which link between the material and the conceptual of the core and the material and conceptual of the margins (Wood, 2011, p. 90). No lines mark the outside off from the inside in these dynamic, entangled or thrown together spaces (Massey, 2005) where edges mix. Consider the architecture of the contemporary home with designated spaces for transition or becoming (e.g., the pergolared patio). Here Wood (2011) suggests that the pergolared patio, an interrezone of introduction between the garden and the home, is a linkage space between the private and public. Important to this study's concerns was that notion that the patio is not a separate entity but rather a co-presence with the house, a mixing space of potential, which works because of and changes the other, as edges are mixed in an open and fluid plan. When hard spaces were deconstructed and imaged in main edge spaces for mixing, the gutter was no longer seen as the empty stuff between panels, or MerleauPonty's (2007) edge that drew up and limited things (i.e., the panel). Massey used the term "thrown togetherness" (2005), Hodder, "entanglement" 46 At times a review of the literature is installed more organically throughout this dissertation, as with this idea related to architectural notions of edge spaces for mixing, without which there would have been no way or no place for terms of opposition to dance in free play. A/r/tographers would not have been able to negotiate the deconstructive prose or maneuverability in the face of constraint (Massumi, 2002; Van den Braembussche, 2009) had they not found this place of mixing at the margin of the panel (Baldacchino, 2013; hooks, 1990; Irwin, 2013; Soja, 1996). 125 (2012), to describe the lively site the a/r/tographers found in the gutter. The gutter had an innate capacity to push up against and change the spaces (edges) and the people it overlapped. The gutter, like Wood's pergolared patio, was not just a linkage space or "interstitial" site (Derrida, 2002), it had enough thing power to navigate coexisting publics (artistic and geographical; human and not) on the edge or the margin in a wild place (hooks, 1990), where the gutter had entangled or held people and tings together as an assemblage that depended on imagination or invention that was open, unruly, uncertain and continually generating emergent phenomena. Entanglement: Main Edge Spaces for Mixing Entanglement Series Irwin wrote in Becoming A/r/tography (2013, p. 207) that pedagogy is no longer about what is already known but instead creates conditions for the unknown and to think as an experiment, thereby complicating conversations. Regarding pedagogy as an experimentation in thought rather than a representation of knowledge of things already made, creates a profound shift in how we think about pedagogical intent or volition (Eisner in Irwin, 2013, p. 207). What comic book a/r/tographers' comic book art did on this earth in this world was to open up possibilities about what objects or things could be-an aesthetic world-in-the-making, that complicated conversations about the coproduction of spaces at the margin of the panel (see Figures 46-49). There at that margin, the subject (human) did not have to be either the agent or the ground of the political act (Woodard et al., 2012). A/r/tographers used creative geographical means, thing power, monstering, and BorderXing to deconstruct and subvert hierarchies about bordering in 126 Figure 46 "Living Inquiry" (wildness & hybridity in transition zones) 127 Gallery Notes Figure 46 "Living Inquiry" (wildness & hybridity in transition zones): Gutter Top This image is repeated directly above because it is the first in the edge mixing entanglement series where meaning and notions of space-making continued to emerge for a/r/tographers. Here the content has been revisited by a/r/tographers. Gutter 1: (the gutter is largely black) Old and new where old represents subject thinking and new an extra-subjective focus. Old/New face off in saturated geographies of contact or "wildness" where the panel and gutter are now imaged as a dynamic transition zone where edges, alter-egos or subject-thinking, and matter-processing are mixed. Here we glimpse the political force of the site when hard space is countered. The gutter has been unmasked. It is a lively slack space where things depend on things, things depend on humans, and humans on things in relational inquiry, aesthetics, and learning. Here the idea of the rendering, living inquiry helps to portray this process of artistic inquiry as the reflexive and reflective process that it was. - Image a/r/tographer Vaché, Comic Book Art Apprenticeship and Visual Study III. Penciled and inked on Manga Art Board. 128 Figure 47 "a/r/tographical renderingsOpenings & Metonyms" Gallery Notes Figure 47 "a/r/tographical renderings-Openings & Metonyms": The purpose of a/r/tography (see Chapter 3) is to open-up conversations and relationships, (e.g. about marginality as a choice) instead of informing others of what has already been learned. Metaphors and metonyms, two more related examples of a/r/tographic renderings, exist in intertwined meanings in this image. They help to portray the way a/r/tographers together with the gutter uncreated fixity (Derrida, 2002; Irwin & 129 Springgay, 2008, p. xxx). What is not seen and known is unmaskedthe gutter was imaged as a lively, variable, and creative place or the in-betweeness of a border where the gutter is neither a lack nor an absence (Irwin, 2013; Nail, 2016; Van den Braembussche, 2009). This image served as a metaphor for the struggle or sometimes standstill between the subconscious and conscious mind, old and new, where the site is composed as aggregations of matter processing rather than the authorship of subject thinking (Bennett, 2010, 2011; Hodder, 2012; Morrison, 2011; Woodward et al., 2012). The relationality that a/r/tography is in the context of the conceptual practice of renderings: contiguity, living inquiry, metaphor/metonym, openings, reverberations and excess is discussed in Chapter 3. 47 - Image a/r/tographer Vaché, Comic Book Art Apprenticeship and Visual Study III Here a/r/tographers are highlighting they ways they imaged intersubjective a/r/tographical renderings that help to portray the condition of their work. Renderings include: contiguity or relationships between bodies that exist alongside of and in-between one another (e.g., ecotones); living inquiry ongoing living practice of the artist/researcher/teacher (a/r/t) where the focus is an evolution of research questions and understandings (e.g., PAR Analysis); metaphor & metonymy, which help to make sense of the world and to express relationships through our senses (e.g., speedsters who world shift); openings or cuts, tears, ruptures and cracks that resist comfort, predictability, and safety (e.g., foregrounding the footnotes instead of the body of the text); reverberations or dynamic movement, dramatic and subtle (e.g., monsters who exceed boundaries); excess or that which is created when control and regulation disappear (e.g., optional rules). 47 For more information see Arts-based Research Education (2008) where renderings are further discussed as conceptual practices of a/r/t/tography, process spaces that allude to the condition for research (Irwin & Springgay, 2008). 130 Figure 48 "Openings Deconstruction" 131 Gallery Notes Figure 48 "Openings Deconstruction": Here the gutter has been imaged in creative or contiguous contact with its other text, the panel. Through an evocative process of choosing the marginality ("wildness") at the edge of the panel, problematic subjection was deconstructed and disordered. Openings were created for new conversation and relationships (e.g. entangled relations between people and things in edge spaces for mixing). The gutter has the power to act, it has vitality, and it has freedom, cut loose from hard space so the border in comic book art is in circulation, always in-between and in motion, a continually changing process, or in the Derridean sense, a temporary stabilization, that is art's pause, where bordering in comic book art is rendered plastic, capable of being something different from how it might habitually be (Baldacchino, 2012 Cocker, 2012; Konrad, 2015; Nail, 2016; Till, 2012; Van den Braembussche, 2009). Panel 1: Lady in prison walks in the hall. Gutter 2: The punch. Panels 3, 4, & 5 instantiated in the gutter: Lady confronts El-Rey. Lady argues with ElRey. Gutter continued: El-Rey was getting sick of fixity or hard space and anxious to focus on the forms of human-thing dependence, and the complexity of entanglement to better characterize and visualize a theory of borders in motion in comic book art. Again, here the a/r/tographers are falling back on Irwin (2013) and Derridean notions (Van den Braembussche, 2009) who urge researchers to think as an experiment or to instantiate invention into the deconstructive process. - Image a/r/tographer Vaché, Comic Book Art Apprenticeship and Visual Study III. Image penciled and inked on Manga Art Board. 132 Figure 49 "Excess" Gallery Notes Figure 49 "Excess": In this a/r/tographical study, excess was created when a/r/tographers thought as an experiment (Irwin, 2013) creating conditions for control and regulation to disappear. Here excess portrays what Massumi (2002) described as access to potential, or to the wiggle room, which is needed to face and to negotiate constraints (Massumi, 2002, 2015) turning hard to slack space, which enable a broad range of pedagogies and behaviors (Till, 2012). What has been made clear to a/r/tographers through art is that the process of circulation and recirculation performed by borders is not under the sole control of anyone. In fact borders, both internal and 133 external, have never even succeeded in keeping everyone out or in, especially monstrous hybrids, which continually transform them (Mittman & Dendle, 2013; Nail, 2016, p. 8). Borders are never done. One of their main effects is to produce hybrid transition zones, or edge spaces for mixing (Nail, 2016; Wood, 2011). What's important from the a/r/tographer's vantage are the ways the assemblage of people, spaces, and things come together and circulate, to co-produce, characterize, and visualize a theory of borders in motion. Gutter 1: New (extra-subjective focus) El-Rey defeats the old (subjective focus) El-Rey. Panel 2: a former inmate arrives and threatens New El-Rey. Panels 3, 4: El-Rey has a realization as the gutters morphs and moves. Panel 5. The mobile flows of humans and things, stop and loop-back and forth on one another. A/r/tographers started to explore the ways co-production of knowledge could be expanded beyond narrow human notions of community at the end of the second Comic Book Art Apprenticeship and Visual Study because subjective politics, like race, class, and status, seemed to be blocking their progress towards what hooks (1990) called a Thirdspace for radical openness in the context of bordering in their comic book art. Coproduction can refer quite straightforwardly to "doing things together," or developing knowledge through collaboration. In this third study, A/r/tographers sought to expand their analytical lens to investigate the numerous actors and processes that go into the co-production of comic book art in the bordered spaces at the margin of the panels. Within this remit of actors and processes they sought to draw attention not just to the human labor of art production, but also, alongside recent geographical attention, to more-than-human publics and technological devices such as the role of the nonhuman (e.g., Hawkins, 2013, 2014; Sjöholm, 2013). 134 comic book art. By reconsidering the site's or the gutter's arrangements outside of the viewpoint of the subject, it was possible to characterize and visualize a theory of borders in motion in the context of slack. In doing so, a/r/tographers deconstructed legislated conditions of existence or knowledge as a thing already made (Baldacchino, 2013; Irwin, 2013). Thus, the gutter had the power to operate beyond and with a/r/tographers to coproduce, characterize, and visualize a theory of borders in motion, which countered hard space, insisting that the gutter was a mixing place on the edge, filled with contradictions, ambiguities, perils, and new possibilities: a Thirdspace of political choice (Figure 50; Soja, 2009). Summary In Chapter 4 a/r/tographers claimed there are undecidables in the a/r/tographical deconstructive process. The deconstructive process does not conform to either side of the dichotomy, or a seeming oppositional claim that the gutter is empty and the panel is not. Contexts and concepts are always in motion. This interstice that a/r/tography creates intervenes between the panel and gutter to create a space for edge mixing. Through edge effects the gutter was re-visioned as a dynamic terrain of habitation, livelihood, selforganization, and politics. It is in spaces for edge mixing where the gutter is active and the panel is no longer intractable. The significance of borders became obvious to a/r/tographers only when they were violated. This visual study confirmed that hard space can be countered and that borders can be negotiated in comic book art by using deconstruction and movement methods (i.e., BorderXing, a/r/tograhical renderings, and subject suspension). Further, 135 Figure 50 "Thirdspace of Political Choice" Gallery Notes Figure 50 "Thirdspace of Political Choice": The gutter had the power to operate beyond and with a/r/tographers to co-produce, characterize, and visualize a theory of borders in motion, which countered hard space, insisting that the gutter was a mixing place on the edge, filled with contradictions, ambiguities, perils, and new possibilities: a Thirdspace of political choice (Soja, 2009). In this Thirdspace of political choice a dynamic terrain of habitation, livelihood, and self-organization was coproduced to disrupt dualisms and counter hard space by creating an ecotone at the margin of the panel, where the gutter is active and the panel is no longer intractable. 136 this a/r/tographical study has demonstrated that borders are dynamic phenomena that can emerge, disappear, and reemerge. Borders in comic book art are transnational zones of negotiation. Finally, this study suggested that the material site or the gutter can enlist the sensuous experience of the a/r/tographers, and even organize them in autonomous ways. By focusing on site-based politics, a/r/tographers enlarged conversations about the ways art's forms can and do negotiate borders in comic book art. CHAPTER 5 DISCUSSION AND RECOMMENDATIONS: THIS IS POETRY AND NOT THE GUTTER: CONNECTIONS ACROSS A DISCREDITED BREECH Chapter 5 provides an opportunity to further discuss and contextualize the ways two disparate visual parts of the comic book page, the panel and gutter, could engage and extend discussions of hard and slack space discussed in Chapter 4. Notions of spatial agency expressed through the concepts of extra-subjective (Bennett, 2010, 2011; Haraway, 2004, 2026, Hodder, 2012; Till, 2012; Woodward et al., 2012) and extraterritorial (Irwin, 2013) spatial experiments could also be used to expand our gutter analytic in future arts-based work, touched on below. This work has significance for the emerging fields of comic studies, border studies, border and or migratory aesthetics, human geography, youth resistance studies, and youth mobilities and migration. Geography-art relations, which could engage the visual parts of the comic book page, specifically the liveliness of the gutter, have further extended Bennett's (2010, 2011) conversation about vital materiality and, relatedly, co-production through a/r/tographical work. Assemblages, or components in relation, gave a role to geography and to art in the dynamic process of composition of entanglement between people and things (Allen, 2012; Hodder, 2012). As such, the gutter had had the power to influence and push 138 a/r/tographers understandings of co-production, a kind of hybrid voicing or rhizovocality, 48 in what a/r/tographers now thought of as more-than-human arts-based participatory research (Bennett, 2010, 2011; Hawkins, 2013; Houchon & Youth Researchers, 2011, 2012; Irwin, 2013; Jones, 2014; Kraftl, 2013; Morrison, 2011; Sjöholm, 2013). In all, the third Comic Book Art Apprenticeship and Visual Study was an epistemological counterpart to notions of fixity, dualism, and flatness in comic book art and border theory. This study aimed to complicate conversations about what art does in the world by countering hard space (Till, 2012) to better characterize and visualize a theory of borders in motion (Konrad, 2015). Creative geographical practices (e.g., Monsters and BorderXing) challenged taken-for granted notions (i.e., that borders are static and that edges are the end or the limits of things) that draw things up and define spatialities. The forcefulness of art practices (and here emphasis is on entangled geographies where things depend on people and people on things), along with interrupting the subjective overcoding of the site, disrupted systems of knowledge, resulting in a practice where the site's arrangement was thought of outside the viewpoint of the subject and the theoretical, methodological, and disciplinary perspective such a viewpoint engenders (Woodward et al., 2012). The evocative process of choosing marginality, "wildness," or edge mixing, reconceptualized the problematic of subjection 48 Rhizovocality: The figuration of a rhizome used to rethink the heterogeneity of vocality in a spatial configuration, accentuating its connection to things, human/nonhuman bodies, through its diversity or hybrid nature (Houchon with Youth Researchers, 2011, 2012; Kraftl, 2013). Rhizo is borrowed from Deleuze and Guattari's (1987) figuration or image of a rhizome. Vocality is borrowed from music theory, emphasizing the performative dimension of voice, its expressive power, its tensions of dissonant counterpoint, and its variation on thematic connection (Youngblood, 2010). 139 of the gutter by deconstructing and disordering both the margin and the center. The margin at the edge of the panel (slack space/gutter) was a chaotic space of creativity and power, contrasted with the center (hard space/panel)-a place of hierarchy, definition, and limitation (Derrida, 2002, hooks, 1990), the a/r/tographer's choice. Choosing marginality or slack spaces where edges meet and mix, pushed spatial formations beyond exclusionary struggles onto new terrain by creating zones of exception, slack spaces, or edge effects where different kinds of people and things came together to mingle and to change (Cronin, 2014). Hard Space In the end, a/r/tographers realized, it was a very particular kind of space, hard space (Till, 2012), that they needed to counter or deconstruct. In hard spaces objects or things are set apart, again in fixed, nonrhizomic, compartmentalized hierarchies. Hard space is made to retain physical associations like those which have existed between the panel and gutter. In hard spaces an edge draws or tightens things like the panel and gutter up. Hard space retains physical associations whereas slack space does not aim to control (see Figure 51). The idea that bordered spaces were static or fixed was a sticking point throughout the third Comic Book Art Apprenticeships and Visual Study. The a/r/tographers' gutter analytic, where the gutter was repositioned as a terrain of habitation, livelihood, and politics with the agencement or power to act (Bennett, 2010), was created to suggest that borders are social motion and circulation, always made and remade, never done. The gutter analytic could be further developed to extend conversations in border aesthetics 140 Figure 51 Atlanta-Near Atlanta-Around Atlanta "Border of Destruction Series" Gallery Notes Figure 51: Atlanta-Near Atlanta-Around Atlanta" The Border of Destruction Series. The city is at the border of destruction. "He's supposed to pity them because he's burned them, they didn't listen. But he is also glad that they are suffering. He walks away laughing." Panel (colored) and Gutters (white), imaged traditionally. The content does not invade the negative space or the gutter. Hard space is made to retain specific physical associations like those which exist between the panel and gutter in the image above. It is an area where the gutter runs out, either by ceasing to exist or by dropping out of sight and of touch (Merleau-Ponty, 2007). There is ‘nothing' happening in the gutter as imaged (Mazur, 2013) because the gutter is made to tighten up or to limit things, e.g. the panel. (This image was used in Chapter 1. Here the notion of hard and soft space is discussed.) -Image a/r/tographers El-Rey & Vaché, Comic Book Art Apprenticeship III 141 and border studies by integrating contested border terrains of varying landscapes. For example, another digital comic book art collaboration could be done together with Mexican youth who have boots on the ground both in Mexico and the United States. Methods like BorderXing and other psychogeographical practices (e.g. derive), performed in the context of art practices have, as was written by Eve L Ewing in an April 2017 Op-Ed, the capacities the power to act and to challenge structures of power in ways that would be otherwise dangerous or even impossible: Like the proverbial court jester who can mock the king in his own court, artists who occupy marginalized [slack space] social positions can use their art to challenge structures of power in ways that would otherwise be dangerous or impossible. (Ewing, 2017, para. 3) Comic book art, much like the court jester, can approach with a certain degree of mischief and play. The visual parts of the comic book page, especially the unaccounted slack spaces like the comic book gutter, can meet dominant structures (authoritarian, hierarchical hard space) head on in the margins, to decenter and to scrutinize because the margins slip and flow between the center and the margin, they are for a time beyond hieratical control. Slack Space Slack space is a space like the margin (hooks, 1990) that focuses on flexibility and a sense of ambiguity, or as Irwin put in in Chapter 3, the rhizomic in-between. Slack space does not presume to control or divide in the same way that hard spaces do through fixed bordering of spaces. Slack space is not made to retain or fix physical associations. It is a place for difference or deviation (Till, 2012). In slack spaces the problematic subjection of the comic book gutter was 142 recontextualizsed or deconstructed and disordered both at the margin and the center (Derrida, 2002; hooks, 1990; Till 2012). Real and imagined slack spaces on the margin became places of radical openness, which welcome a broad range of thoughts and actions (a need for common ground) in spaces were edges mix. Slack space can be made and remade by human activity (and thing power) in everyday social interactions with material space. The implication for youth resistance studies also apply. Consider Bakhtinian work associated with carnival and the notion of second worlds and second lives outside of officialdom (Bakhtin, 2002). What if a/r/tographers were to extend that notion to another second world, Second Life, an online environment created by Linden Lab, in which residents create virtual representations of themselves, called avatars, and interact with other avatars, places or objects? We used Second Life Virtual Galleries to explore notions of transnationalism, who we are in the world, in the second Comic Book Art Apprenticeship and Visual Study. That project was presented together with youth at a conference for the Royal Geographical Society in 2012. In that case, transnational youth from cities like New York, LA, and Sydney, skyped-in at the same time to represent themselves. This sort of collaboration could also be tethered to issues for Mexican/American youth, who reside both in hard and slack spaces. There are real opportunities to instantiate this sort of digital presence together with in-country youth in countries like Sierra Leone. A sister relationship could be established with youth from Salt Lake City or any other city in the world where there was interest. Again, the focus could be, as it was with the second study, an opportunity for transnational youth to hammer out a point of voice for themselves while facing new obstacles, and leveraging new opportunities at a 143 point of danger and possibility (Soep, 2010). The idea of slack space in comic book art has ramifications for other organizations with whom I have affiliated, for example the WISE Qatar Foundation, 49 under the leadership of its Chairperson, Her Highness Sheikha Moza bint Nasser. WISE is an international, multisectoral platform for creative thinking, debate, and purposeful action, established as a global reference in new approaches to education. WISE furthers these goals through such initiatives as the biennial Summit and a range of ongoing programs, including the WISE Learners Voice Program, which brings the perspective of young people to rethinking education (Retrieved from: http://www.wise-qatar.org, April 7, 2017). There is also the Oxford World Literacy Summit with which I have affiliated. The next summit will take place at Oxford University in 2018. The attendees and presenters are world leaders who will be interested in the types of partnerships that I have discussed: The World Literacy Council is a peak body that supports and facilitates connections between educational organizations on a global scale. It is the intention of the council to establish strong links between literacy groups worldwide to speak with a single voice to raise awareness of the state of literacy rates. The 2018 conference in Oxford will represent 156 literacy organizations around the world who aim it is make a real difference in the outcomes of the lives of thousands of young people who presently do not have access to education The attendees and presenters are world leaders who will be interested in the types of partnerships, which I have discussed (Retrieved from: http://www.worldliteracycouncil.org/about, April 7, 2017). I was a delegate at Oxford World Literacy Summit in 2012. I have maintained those contacts. I also believe there are real opportunities to use digital spaces in comic book art to 49 See: http://www.wise-qatar.org/learners-voice 144 partner further with other scholars across disciplines and in such organizations as Doctors Without Borders (MSF), Reporters Without Borders (RSF), and Human Geographers from across the globe. There is genuine need to further explore the notions of slack space, expressed through edge effects or edge mixing, at the margin of the panel in comic book art (see Figure 52). Conversations in Youth Résistance Studies, Border and Migratory Aesthetics, Transnational Literacy Studies, and in More-Than-Human Participatory Action Research, to name a few, could immediately be expanded. Spatial Agency Towards the end of this study a/r/tographers came to believe that spatial agency implied that the action to engage transformatively with a structure like the comic book panel was indeed possible through the privileging of extra-subjective political potential. Extra-subjective political potential means that the political event is not seen as a legal, moral, or self-consciously reflexive concept grounded in the experience of the subject, but as something immanent to the inevitable variability of difference that is the site (see Figure 53; Woodward et al., 2012). We did not place emphasis on subject-thinking, where concepts like racism and class are sorted according to the unifying logic of the subject, but rather on matter-processing or the vital materiality of the site-the comic book gutter. Quite simply the gutter resisted control (contextualization) and took on a life of its own. Woodward, Jones, and Marston (2012) asked, "are we capable of thinking a site's arrangement outside of the viewpoint of the subject and the theoretical, methodological and disciplinary perspectives it engenders?" (pp 205-206). Perhaps we are witnessing the 145 Figure 52 "Slack Space" 146 Gallery Notes Figure 52 "Slack Space": Slack space focuses on flexibility and a sense of ambiguity. Slack space does not presume to control or divide in the same way that hard spaces does, that is, through fixed bordering of spaces. Here the artwork is about disordering both the margin and the center at once, or mixing and blending the edges in comic book art. The panels' boundaries are broken here. The gutter carries equivalent narrative weight. Fixed ideas of the panel and gutter have been disrupted. This image was a revision of another presented in Chapter 4.Image a/r/tographer Vaché, Comic Book Art Apprenticeship III Perhaps the gutter's blankness (Hetherington & Lee, 1999) ensured that all orders produced were temporary and provisional. Could the gutter be active when it is empty and when it is not? This is, as was already said, the stuff of future work for theses a/tographers. 147 Figure 53 "Pimp Duck" Gallery Notes Figure 53 "Pimp Duck": The gutter expanded a/r/tographers' understanding of emerging material processes and the ways extra-subjective political potential can be explored. Emergent placemaking, and with it theories of bordering, could be further imagined through appropriation, or the dialogic relationship between harder and softer aspects of space, both real and imagined.-Image a/r/tographer ElRey, Comic Book Art Apprenticeship III 148 development of a new kind of life form? Or are we investing objects and things with a life force through the attention we give them? Or just sensitive to the minute, natural patterns that all matter has (Watson, 1992)? Regardless, the entangled geographies herein are interactive processes, or assemblages, where things depended on things, humans depended on things, and things on humans (Hodder, 2012). Scholars like Woodward et al. (2012) and Kraftl (2013) agree, there is a need for further exploration of the work a/r/tographers have begun, perhaps a more-than-social 50 approach to youth resistance studies, and what Kraftl has called hybrid voicing. Hybrid voicing is youth voice extended and supplemented by all kinds of material artifacts (Pahl & Rowsell, 2010) and technologies, which are hybrids of nature and culture (Haraway, 2004, 2016), where things can pull together and things can assemble (Hodder, 2012) as the gutter did in unaccounted-for places like the comic book gutter. Notions of co-production in border works, more-than-human-participatory action research, and with them the implication for engaging a more-than-social approach to youth resistance studies, will be discussed briefly as sites for future research. This is also a call to enlarge and further direct a/r/tographers' early forum explorations in the third Comic Book Art Apprenticeship and Visual Study, which focused on vital materiality (Bennett, 2010) and acting objects (Pahl & Rowsell, 2010), or even disobedient objects (Morrison, 2011). In other words, to expand conversations on the ways things (humans 50 The nonhuman constituents of social life, and their "thing power," that is, the comic book gutter's power to act. (Bennett, 2010, 2011). 149 are things) depended on other things-there at the margin of the panel, where border works 51, like the gutter, had the power to act and to make claims upon us and we upon them (Ronk, 2013). Co-production in More-Than-Human Arts-Based Participatory Action Research Recent geographical work on art can be seen as a move away from representational politics towards an understating of art as a process constitutive of experience and meaning. Here Hawkins (2014) refers to art as a material being, less about art and sensation than the creativity of it. In other words, art holds within it the potential to enable new forms of co-productive experience. Co-production in art is not a new phenomenon; however, the creative process of participatory art has become a topic of increased intrigue in social and cultural geography where attention can be drawn to messy materialities and more-than-human publics in the co-production of art as in Figure 54. The rile of the nonhuman (Dixon et al., 2012) has raised questions about how we can think of the nonhuman bodies as co-producers or as an assemblage, helping researchers to think more critically about spatial agency and/or hybridity in youth voicing. Art's Way Out Study Challenges: The process of creating slack space-or a place for marginality, flexibility, and ambiguity-was bewildering at times. It was one thing to withdraw our consent 51 Border works: Art forms that negotiate borders (UiT, 2016). 150 Figure 54 "Co-productive breakage: Entanglement" Gallery Notes Figure 54 "First Efforts Breaking Panels": Blurred boundaries. The gutter continually pushed a/r/tographers attention towards creative geographical methods, e.g., BorderXing, that artists and researchers could use both to visualize borders in motion, creative hybrid geographies in which bodies assemble and move, affect and are affected together. -Image a/r/tographer El-Rey, Comic Book Art Apprenticeship III 151 (Buadrillard, 2002); it was quite another to think about subject suspension or extra subjective political potential (Woodward et al., 2012) when the idea of aesthetics refusal was a fuzzy concept. A/r/tographers had to trust in theorizing, rather than theories, and practicing to transform the intention of theory and practice from stable abstract systems to spaces of exchange, reflexivity, and relationality found in a continuous state of movement. The gutter made theorizing and practicing something other than it was so that they existed in a constant movement towards becoming. The gutter created conditions for the unknown by foregrounding extra-subjective and extra-territorial experiments (Figure 55) that destabilized habitual patterns of behavior (Baldacchino, 2012; Cocker, 2010, 2012, 2016; Derrida, 2002) and complicated a/r/tographical conversations (Irwin, 2013) through optional rules of engagement (Cocker, 2010; Deleuze, 1972, 1990). At times, theoretical discussions moved very quickly in forum discussions, even abruptly, from topic to topic. Notions that a/r/tographers thought reinscribed fixity, dualisms and flatness, for example, Mazur's (2013) notion that the gutter is empty while the panel is not, were often rapidly discounted. This type of creative work had not been previously done. In our searching for different ways of doing art (Baldacchino, 2012; Irwin, 2013; Hawkins, 2013) that produces effects, we borrowed widely from a variety of disciplines, however, especially from human geography, geophilosophy, border aesthetics, and art. None among us were formally schooled as geographers, art theorists, and/or experts in theories of bordering. That had its challenges putting pressure on me as the academy ally to grow beyond my own disciplinary bounds in my role as a theoretical mentor. Joint knowledge continually emerged, while problems of fixity, dualism, and flatness were kept central; a space was re-visioned. At times this a/r/tograhical work read 152 Figure 55 "Thinking- as an experiment" Gallery Notes Figure 55: "Thinking as an experiment": This entire endeavor was a messy processual struggle to create conditions for the unknown by interrupting subjective overcoding to locate that "something else" expressed in the sites' material process. This was done in order to counter hard space and to characterize and visualize a theory of borders in motion in comic book art. The text, "I want to say I told you so," literally refers to the then idea we held at the time, that the gutter could not act on its own. "The question of the nonsubject is not a search for an alternativemarginal, minoritarian or counter hegemonicsubject but an attempt to unravel the very logic of all subject-based 153 politics from the point of view of the remainder that it necessarily produced and excluded at the same time." (Bosteels in Woodward et al, 2012, p. 213). -Image a/r/tographer ElRey, Comic Book Art Apprenticeship III like a collection of fragmented, deconstructed, and mashed-together ideas around subalternity, spatial agency, and the like, as expressed through varying comic book art practices. This work that was intentionally done at the margin of the panel, to create a chaotic space for creativity and possibility where behavioral codes that no longer held things (the gutter) in place were worked until malleable, bent back, and folded to reveal other possibilities within (Cocker, 2010, p. 94; Irwin, 2013; Sousanis, 2015). Thus, spatial configurations were pushed beyond exclusion onto new terrain (Cocker, 2010, 2015; hooks, 1990; Irwin, 2013; Soja,1996; Till, 2012). The margin was always contrasted with the center-a place for hierarchy of space, hard (fixity) contrasted with slack space where edges meet and mix. Contradicting or deconstructing the idea that space is just stuff between objects-the gutter as empty, the panel as full-again was no small feat (Figure 56). Summary The findings from Chapter 5 reinforce art's power to move and intervene in the epistemologies and methodologies of bordering in comic book art. The study findings have enlarged conversations about spatial agency and other ways of doing bordering by characterizing and visualizing a theory of borders in motion in comic book art. This study emphasizes the importance of art forms in constructing and tracing borders, actively re- 154 Figure 56 "Breaking Panels Matter-Processing Subjectivity Suspended" … Gallery notes Figure 56 "Breaking Panels Matter-Processing Subjectivity Suspended": But without cultivating subject-suspended orientations, we risk blurring recognition and authorship by overlooking the forces of unfolding matter and taking their strange articulations as merely the result of the hard work of human hands and dead materiality. Both slippages can cause us to miss how the site (the gutter) is composed, as aggregations of matter-processing rather than the authorship of subject-thinking. Where the comings-together and negotiations of autonomous materials resolve themselves into unexpected thoughts, orientations, and possibilities, we glimpse the political forces of the site where edges mix. Subjectivity is the drunken salesmen, the squeaky wheel distracting us from other potential relations, or even from the impossible impossibility of a relation altogether. Overcoding a site is the peculiar capacity by which subjectivity 155 reflects the world back on itself; and it is precisely this procedure that, when it is somehow forced into or held in abeyance, enables us to recognize the political potential that inheres in varying, situated formations. There is something else that lay outside of subjectivity, even something else that creates new opportunities for characterizing and visualizing a theory of borders in motion in comic book art where the edges don't really exist (Woodward et al., 2012, p 214). Image a/r/tographer Vaché, Comic Book Art Apprenticeship III bordering space, and regulating embodied border crossing narratives in migratory culture. This third and final Comic Book Art Apprenticeship and Visual Study has both theoretical and practical implications for the field of border poetics, migratory aesthetics, creative geographies, comics studies and geophilosophy. It reinforces the concept of what comic book art can do in the world when the thing-side of affect is a topic and all the producers of space are enmeshed and intertwined in hybrid transition zones where edges mix. The most challenging as aspect of this study was discussed in Chapter 2. Simply put, the work has not been done before. The resulting search strategy was to widen boundaries to include related and framing scholarship as they transgressed disciplinary borders and comics' interactions with them. This took a great deal of time and ability to weave together and create theories anew from that transdisciplinary search. Another challenge, in the context of the academy, was the improvisational nature of a/r/tography as a research methodology. 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