Creating, knowing, and caring - with Merel Visse

How are the practice of art and the practice of care connected? In what ways might intellectual inquiry be a caring practice? And what part do wonder, poetry and 'unknowing' play in research - and in care?

These are some of the questions we explore in this episode, with Merel Visse. Merel is a scholar, artist, editor and educator. She holds a faculty position in the Caspersen School of Graduate Studies at Drew University in New Jersey in the United States, where she chairs a master’s and doctoral degree program. Merel is also affiliated with the University of Humanistic Studies in the Netherlands, Care Ethics Chair. She serves on several editorial boards in the U.S.A. and was an artist in residence at the New York School of Visual Arts, and in 2018 at the NARS Foundation in Brooklyn. In the Netherlands, Merel co-founded the Meaningful Artistic Research Program, a collaboration between the University of Humanistic Studies and HKU University of the Arts, and with Elena Cologni at Anglia Ruskin University in the UK, she co-leads the Art and Care Platform Series.

Merel is the author of numerous journal articles and book chapters on art, care ethics, and research methodology. She’s the Visual Art Section Editor at the International Journal of Education and the Arts, for which she and Elena Cologni recently co-edited a special issue on ‘Art for the Sake of Care’. In April, she will start serving as the co-editor of Visual Arts Research (VAR), a publication from the University of Illinois Press. In 2018, Merel co-edited the book Evaluation for a Caring Society, and in 2021 she co-authored the book A Paradigm of Care with Bob Stake. Merel and Bob recently submitted their manuscript for a mini-book on Researching Care with Case Studies to Routledge. Merel is currently focusing on the manuscript for Precarious Knowing, a project that recently expanded to include members of the 'Enduring' research group, and is set to be published by Springer.

We discuss the following topics in this episode:

The roots of Merel's interest and involvement in art and care (03:48)

The 'Precarious Knowing' project (11:32)

Merel's practice as an artist (11:50)

The Meaningful Artistic Research Program (16:03)

The Art and Care Platform Series (18:59)

Special issue on 'Art for the Sake of Care' (20:45)

Relational autoethnography as a commitment to care (26:35)

Evaluation as a caring practice (30:23)

The role of wonder, 'unknowing' and the poetic in research and care (33: 52)

An 'aesthetic-apophatic' approach to qualitative inquiry (46:05)

The hospital bed as a landscape for materialised care (51:03)