International Journal of Education & the Arts

Citation: Woodring, R. (2024). Visual arts practices for invisible illness: An expanded autoethnography on rendering and reingesting affliction. International Journal of Education & the Arts, 25(si1.9). http://doi.org/10.26209/ijea25si1.9

Anthropological research by Joseph Dumit, Simon Cohn and others has demonstrated how effective the viewing and appropriation of medical imaging results portending to represent a known affliction can be in positively reorienting a person’s relationship with their illness. This paper, however, makes failure its focal point: what happens when a diagnosis seeker’s body refuses to produce diagnostically-useful medical imaging results of their affliction? Authored by an artist and professor of Digital Media harboring an ongoing undiagnosed illness, my research expands outwards from an autoethnographic project in which I 3D-modeled the speculative contours of an invisible affliction each day that I felt its presence, to explore how core principles in arts education such as defamiliarization, appropriation, and glitch can be used to synthesize alternative archives that renegotiate agency with amorphous chronic illnesses and provide new frameworks for care.