Traversing in-between onto-epistemic landscapes: Cultivating body-led relational practices and spaces in communal learning settings
Our world is experiencing an interregnum, characterised by an onto-epistemic climate of known failures, in-betweens, and not-yet knowns. In response, my research enquires into practices and spaces for cultivating radical transmutations of our ways of being, doing, knowing, and relating. Two conduits are proposed for this onto-epistemic encounter: the body and relationality. As active onto-epistemic sites, learning communities (eg. schools or community interest groups) provide a unique interface with the diffuse narratives of ‘in-between-ness’ (Berry, 1988) and ‘organic crisis’ (Gramsci, 1992) that beset our times.
My research asks how body-led relational learning can be facilitated within communal learning settings to cultivate the onto-epistemic conditions and orientation for otherwise ways of being, doing, knowing, and relating. How might we learn differently about learning to be different? Inhabiting a transdisciplinary junction between design-, education-, and dance theory and practice, the research unfolds across a series of prototyping and situated rehearsals with learning communities - assembling, prefiguring, and iterating a body-led relational learning approach.
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Funding
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Arts & Humanities Research Council / London Doctoral Design Centre
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More about Claire
Biography
Claire van Rhyn engages a distinctive post-disciplinary practice-research approach, seeking to enact body-led relational processes as a collective critical re-articulation of being, doing, knowing, and relating. Situated amongst the onto-epistemic tectonics of formal and informal learning communities, her work reimagines the modalities, practices, orientations and conditions for learning during an era of interregnum. Her background is in Design, Education, Social Arts, and community-led process, co-creating in diverse contexts across Europe and Southern Africa. Claire’s research at the Royal College of Art is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
Exhibitions
(2023) RCA Research Biennale. Copeland Gallery, London.
(2021) RCA Research Biennale. Royal College of Art. Online.
(2019) Design Research for Change. London Design Fair, Old Truman Brewery.
(2019) That which Transpires behind that which Appears. Sonics Immersive Media Labs, Goldsmiths, University of London.
(2018) Design Evolution. London Design Festival. Hockney Gallery, Royal College of Art. London.
(2016) Communicating the Intangible. London Design Festival. Hockney Gallery, Royal College of Art. London.
Publications
Wegerif, R., Fujita, T., Doney, J., Perez Linares, J., Richards, A. & van Rhyn, C. (2017). Developing and trialing a measure of group thinking. Learning and Instruction, Volume 48, pp. 40-50.
Conferences
'Future-making in education through Social Presencing Theatre: an awareness-based anticipatory methodology', Anticipation Conference, Oslo School of Architecture and Design, Denmark, 2019.
Panelist: 'Communicating Change', Fields of Communication Symposium, Westworks, London, 2018.
'Ancient Technology: The body as anticipatory tool in the relational emergence of cultural change', Anticipation Conference, School of Advanced Studies, University of London, 2017.
'Tracing the transmission of culture through sensory and embodied means', Emergent Culture Conference (European Sociological Association), Exeter, 2016.
Keynote: 'Intangible Communication: The role of the body in transmitting culture during rapid change in social systems', CSCY Visual Research Symposium: Visual Research with Children and Young people, University of Sheffield, 2016.
'The Role of Sensory Aesthetic Transmission During Rapid Cultural Change in Educational Settings', Emergence, Intersubjectivity and Aesthetics Conference, University of Exeter, 2016
'Being Relational', Design Research Society Conference, University of Brighton, 2016
'Intangible Communication', PhD by Design, DRS Conference, University of Brighton, 2016
'Places and Spaces: The mobilisation of social-centred learning across multiple places and spaces', BCUR Conference, University of Nottingham, 2013.