Self-Inquiry into Art-Based Integration of Non-Ordinary States of Consciousness (DTATI 2026)
This Major Research Project (MRP) explores how art-based integration practices help people navigate non-ordinary states of consciousness (NOSC). Drawing on harm reduction, access, and cognitive liberty frameworks, the study examines how art-based integration practices might support the meaning-making within a harm-reduction framework.
This study employs heuristic inquiry and autotheory, approaches that underscore how meaning and understanding emerge from direct sensory experience, personal beliefs, judgments, and embodied knowledge (Kapitan, 2018). I recruited 26 participants from two groups: NOSC practitioners (Group A) and individuals with lived experience of NOSC (Group B). Using purposive sampling, I interviewed three participants.
Data were analyzed to identify five emerging themes: self as a relational process; harm reduction as relational and embodied care; meaning-making through creative practice; integration as a process and an unfolding; and relational integration, therapy, and community.
Keywords: art-based integration, non-ordinary states of consciousness, harm reduction, meaning-making, creativity, symbolic process, self-inquiry, autotheory, heuristic research, psychedelic experience, altered states, visual art, cognitive liberty
This study employs heuristic inquiry and autotheory, approaches that underscore how meaning and understanding emerge from direct sensory experience, personal beliefs, judgments, and embodied knowledge (Kapitan, 2018). I recruited 26 participants from two groups: NOSC practitioners (Group A) and individuals with lived experience of NOSC (Group B). Using purposive sampling, I interviewed three participants.
Data were analyzed to identify five emerging themes: self as a relational process; harm reduction as relational and embodied care; meaning-making through creative practice; integration as a process and an unfolding; and relational integration, therapy, and community.
Keywords: art-based integration, non-ordinary states of consciousness, harm reduction, meaning-making, creativity, symbolic process, self-inquiry, autotheory, heuristic research, psychedelic experience, altered states, visual art, cognitive liberty
| slater_dtati_mrp_self-inquiry_into_art-based_integration_of_non-ordinary_states_of_consciousness.pdf |
Critical Digital Making in Art Education
Chapter One: Toward a Practice of Digital-Handicraft
co-authored by Mary Callahan (MC) Baumstark and Theresa Slater
This book integrates the three fields critical theory, digital art making, and pedagogy, drawing from scholarship and practices of new media, social practice and community-based arts interventions, and arts education pedagogy. Our chapter speculates emergent themes in the practice of the digital-handicraft, a hybridized field of making by considering the sense of touch, and its implications in interdisciplinary artmaking, new pedagogical models, and alternative modes of organizing and resisting.
To Purchase or Download: Peter Lang Publishing