Yanke and Catal Yst (pronounced Yan-kur and Cattal-yist) is about the imagined life of a young boy, fleeing war in his home country. This fictional, speculative account is told through images that loosely resemble a graphic novel. The graphic novelling approach enables slow thinking about the imagined life of a fictional character to explore issues and concepts of refugeeism, asylum, childhood, and persecution.

As ideas and understandings grow about what counts as research, and what can be thought of as data, new theorisations about research practices and methodologies also develop and expand. For example, post-qualitative inquiry can offer different modes for thinking about the complexities of pressing and often difficult contemporary social issues.
Yanke and Catal Yst explores how visual texts might operate as data and how research can be generative and continuous and not always preoccupied with finding a fixed answer or simple conclusion to a straightforward question. This ‘graphic novel’ explores how, in speculative research, assumptions and fixed ideas about the world can be explored through non-representational aspects such as affect.

In the Yanke and Catal Yst project drawing is an affective inquiry into what we think we know about issues and methods of analysis. The novel offers a challenge to the conventions of research and dismantles the hierarchies between material, metaphysical, corporeal and intellectual knowledge.

Exhibions:

8/2015. Solo show. Yanke and Catal Yst: A graphic research novel. Percolator Gallery, Brisbane, Australia. 25 – 30 August.

Events:

7/2015. Invited presenter. The Graphic Novel as Post-qualitative inquiry: using arts-based research practices to rethink data. Provocations, Improvisations: Encounters Between Arts, Sciences & Qualitative Research. 4th Summer Institute in Qualitative Research. Manchester Metropolitan University, UK.

6/2015. Invited presenter. Placespace Pedagogy and Art/ist Interventions. Pedagogy for the 21^st Century: performing methodologies in early years. Oslo and Akershus University College of Applied Sciences, Norway.