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This article defines dramatic inquiry, exploring its possible contributions to discourses on subjectivity, embodied pedagogy, and relational knowing in art education. As a communal, ensemble endeavor emerging from the discipline of drama education, dramatic inquiry offers strategies for enhancing arts education's critical inquiries by facilitating imaginative, transformative dialogues from within visual culture phenomena. Theoretical reflections on dramatic inquiry's origins and its potential educational value are accompanied by suggestions for teaching and learning practices that inspire "critical questions that envision alternative just futures" (Desai, 2009, p. 25) and imagine their fruition. Building on Heathcote's (1984) work in drama education and Edmiston's explicitly critical, socio-cultural orientation (Freire, 1970; hooks, 1994; Kumashiro & Ngo, 2007) we explore Edmiston's (2011) seven key dimensions of dramatic inquiry through their use in K-12 classrooms and their resonance with contemporary artists' and art educators' practices.

Purpose Critical writing practices in and around popular visual culture are under-researched and theorized in the visual arts education discipline. Addressing the research gap in visual arts education, this essay provides a theoretical reflection on a case study of undergraduate students' writing in the Criticizing Television course. As an exemplar of a psychoanalytic approach to research of student writing, the essay foregrounds the generative, analytic qualities of writing, articulating in the process an alternative construction of research validity. Design/Methodology/Approach This essay is a theoretical reflection on a qualitative, interpretive case study of student television criticism writing. A psychoanalytically-informed methodology is derived from contemporary Lacanian and relational psychoanalysis theories. Data include student interviews, essays, survey, and the instructor-researcher's reflexive journal. The analytic concept peripheral vision is developed to articulate, through writing, drawing, and reflection, the complexities inherent in theorizing subjectivity and representing research validity. Findings The case study reveals an irresolvable conflict: data that appear as signifiers of 'evidence' or 'intelligibility' may be the very mechanism that suppresses un-nameable affect, in the service of maintaining a unified, coherent subjectivity. The research finds that the impasses occurring in and around writing can be understood as the necessary gaps around which language creates an absent-presence, the traces of the writer's and researcher's unconscious. The study validates the presence of the unconscious in writing and its research, and articulates a method for re-presenting the slippery data of the unconscious as an expression of research validity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]