Conference Proceedings 2010 [pdf] - Art & Design Symposium ...

Figure 7. A view of the room’s entrance from the hallway shows the context of the dutch door
and new changeable signage that permits the family to claim the room.
Visual Narrative Study of Transnational and Relational Immigrant Identities
Anniina Suominen Guyas, Florida State University
The presented interdisciplinary study examines socially and culturally constructed individual and communal
identities through visual representations and personal narratives. The goals of this project are to develop new
concepts and methods for studying and understanding immigrant experiences; to inform a diversity model for
art education; and to advocate for the importance of individual and communal narratives of immigrants and
other disempowered individual’s/groups’ when working toward equity and social justice in education, arts, and
society.
Art is well known to have the potential to speak of meaningful things on multiple levels with a complexity
unique to aesthetic and metaphorical representations. Art education then can transfer this potential to
meaningful and authentic curricula. The presented interdisciplinary study examines socially and culturally
constructed individual and communal identities of immigrants and refugees through visual representations and
personal narratives to inform a diversity model for art education. The project began with the conceptual and
theoretical goal to explore identity construction beyond contextual and site-specific identifications through the
concept of transnationalism. The educational goal is to examine and reform the investigators’ pedagogical
practices, and eventually to engage participants and readers in the re-imagining of a diversity education model
that extends beyond pre-accepted categories of ethnicity, race, age, gender, ability, and sexuality and instead
draws attention to the inherent multiplicity, fluidity, and relational complexity of selfhood and identity.
In this study transnationalism is used as a conceptual stimulus and indicator to further the researchers’
understandings of the nature of identities and immigration narratives (un)bound to locations and to explore the
power of collective memory, cultural domination, and relationality of experience. The goal is to develop
rhizomatic concepts and models for understanding diversity, equity, and education that reach beyond preaccepted
categories of selfhood. The project strives to develop methods and language to comprehend the
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