An Overview of Research-creation in and with Interactive Media

DOI: https://doi.org/10.33008/IJCMR.2022.16 | Issue 9 | Oct 2022

Frédéric Dubois (Internationale Filmschule Köln)

Abstract

This essay contributes to and updates scholarship on practice-based research. More concretely, it situates research-creation vis-à-vis practice-based research and discusses the distinction between artistic and mediatic research-creation. The essay insists on affordances of interactive media as they are foundational for drawing accurate research results. The paper contributes to theorizing mediatic research-creation by adding the component of interactivity to it. By introducing interactive documentary (i-doc) as a creative media practice, and by providing a succinct case study of i-doc Field Trip (2019), the text engages with the notion of mediatic research-creation head-on.

Disclaimer: Some passages in this paper are drawn from the author’s doctoral thesis (Dubois, 2021)

Approaches to research

In 1981, Elliott Eisner discussed ten differences between the artistic and the scientific approaches to research (1981). His paper is a historical marker, as it is one of just a few early attempts at differentiating two modes of knowledge generation. While acknowledging that art and science can be defined in a variety of ways, he goes on to untangle the two modi with dimensions such as modes of representation, criteria for appraisal, and the degree of license (authorship) employed in each. Eisner’s short comparative essay can further be read as a plaidoyer for legitimising artistic approaches to research. “It is to the artistic to which we must turn, not as a rejection of the scientific, but because with both we can achieve binocular vision. Looking through one eye never did provide much depth of field” (1981, p. 8).

Interestingly, his essay is of particular currency today, where the debate about what’s scientific, fact-based and true and, what’s fake (as in fake news or alternative truths) is in full swing. Eisner is in no way advocating to reject truth-seeking, instead insisting on the different pages that scientific and artistic approaches to research are on:

Artistic approaches to research are less concerned with the discovery of truth than with the creation of meaning. Truth implies singularity and monopoly. Meaning implies relativism and diversity. Truth is more closely wedded to consistency and logic, meaning to diverse interpretation and coherence (1981, p. 8).

Forty years on, Eisner’s text continues to be foundational for differentiating modes of inquiry. But since Eisner, there has been a plethora of literature discussing the type of knowledge that artistic approaches to research bring about (e.g., “unique, particular, local knowledge” say Balkema & Slager, 2004, p. 13; ‘unfinished thinking’ dixit

Borgdorff, 2010). These perspectives have not fundamentally put into question Eisner, but much more followed suit in specifying art-based research.

The ‘scientific’ and the ‘artistic’ have both evolved, branched out, and hybridized. In the social sciences today, ‘scholars’ have largely replaced ‘scientists’ loosening up the very idea of research, and by what norms research should be done. In parallel, the ‘artists’ have been joined by the ‘designers’ (UX designers, architects, audience designers, etc) in the larger context of the creative communities (Meroni, 2007) and creative industries (Hesmondhalgh, 2008) paradigms. Yet to this day, the long shade of the ‘scientific’ continues to have an effect on our shared understanding of what research is.

In the next section, I am defining the types of practice-based research, so as to delineate what research best applies for inquiries in interactive documentaries. The aim is that by exploring typologies of practice-based research, I contextualise my own practice, and at the same time underline the importance of integrating interactive media affordances in the research design of media inquiries.

Types of research

Practice-based research

Researchers in Australia, the UK and many other Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development ( OECD) countries have been adopting the notion of practice-based research as one way to provide the needed depth of field. But what is practice-based research? Gauntlett (2021, n.p.) states that “Practice-based research is work where, in order to explore their research question, the researcher needs to make things as part of the process. The research is exploratory and is embedded in a creative practice”. Under the umbrella of practice-based research there are competing concepts embracing the binocular vision that Eisner is referring to. For each of these denominations, there are different ontologies and epistemologies. Brad Haseman (2006, p. 98) for instance, speaks of performative research, which he defines as “an alternative to the qualitative and quantitative paradigms by insisting on different approaches to designing, conducting and reporting research”. Others have used the terms practice-led research, or research through practice for describing their strategies—aimed at running truth-seeking and meaning-making alongside each other. These closely-related terms have family resemblances, particularly when it comes to methodologies.

Research-creation

For the field of media studies I prefer using the term research-creation, without denying that it is a ‘close cousin’ of the more general practice-based research denomination. Generally defined, “research-creation projects typically integrate a creative process, experimental aesthetic component, or an artistic work as an integral part of a study” (Chapman & Sawchuk, 2008, p. 1). Research-creation has a relatively long tradition in both French (recherche-création) and English, which not so coincidentally are also Canada’s main languages. Second to none, this North-American country’s research institutions have integrated and formalized this designation, among other with the support of dedicated (research-creation) funding.

Beyond the ‘Canadian tradition’ though, it is fair to ask why this notion should have a role to play moving forward. Some have argued that “a key step towards the specificity of ‘research-creation’ is the move to disseminate its knowledge in the language of practice” (Cohen, 2015, n.p.). It is true that some research-creation endeavors have helped rejuvenate and break up scholarly conventions by allowing forms of knowledge expression common to the arts (e.g. music compositions, artistic projections, photography). But there is more.

For one, when contrasted with other maker practices, such as purely technical or mechanical ones (e.g. engineering), the notion of research-creation speaks specifically to a creative work (as in: das Werk, in German) and a creative process (as in: die Gestaltung, in German). In the field of media studies, more so in creative media research, this emphasis on what is creative (understood here as art and design) is helpful, as it sets up the right context of inquiry. Secondly, research-creation leaves no doubt as to what comes first, research or creation. The term starts with the word “research”, thereby foregrounding that any endeavor of this type is driven by a research question—or what is behind it: an open and investigative curiosity. In other words, a project might well be creation-led, i.e. the knowledge generated through the making of a designed work might be dominant (over that of academic literature and theory), or the research question might have been initiated in practice. But to fall within the boundaries of research-creation, the project needs to be initiated and defined within the limits of a research mindset. Paquin and Béland (2015, n.p.), drawing on Chapman and Sawchuk (2008) warn us though, that “at either end of the spectrum are those who support research for creative purposes and those who argue that creation is a form of research”. This is an ongoing discussion which can only be settled by the researchers themselves, as it relates to the purpose with which they do research. In my own view, creation in and of itself is in no way research. For an endeavour to be called research, it needs to pursue a research question (which attempts to better practice, or which triggers answers which are more philosophical in nature).

Thirdly, instead of just positioning research and creation side-by-side, research-creation stresses the interplay between two approaches. The hyphen in research-creation reinforces the iterative ambition of researching with conventional research strategies and creative ones at the same time. The researcher-creator is ‘walking and chewing gum at the same time’.

While the exact position of the researcher on the spectrum of research-creation might vary, even at times challenging its boundaries, this does not dispense the researcher-creator from using basic inquiry methodologies, i.e. rigorous documentation (e.g. with the help of a research diary), systematic analysis of the creative work, etc. Particularly the care put into documenting one’s own creative practice will determine the researcher’s ability to draw valid evidence from the practical side of the investigation. There are many methods with which creative practice can be documented, including thick description (Geertz, 1973), to name just one. What’s common to most documentation though, is the aim to hold on to key descriptions and observations of creative practice processes through time. Documentation, if adequately performed, provides an access to ‘the backstage’ of a project. It is the memory of at times mundane actions and larger decisions by creative teams, which all serve to situate a creative practice in time and space.

Mediatic research-creation

More recently, Paquin has started distinguishing, together with Noury (Paquin & Noury, 2020), artistic research-creation from mediatic research-creation—where the latter refers to endeavors in which creative projects are bound by constraints specific to the media ecology. As I interpret these constraints from my own media practice, they relate to things like the political economy of the media, time constraints in media-making, emphasis on the product over the process, performance requirements, audience taking on a defined/target role, and short-term impact accountability.

This distinction is useful to better contextualize the specific affordances of creative media practice and to acknowledge that as a result, the findings of this type of practice might differ in sometimes decisive ways from those of artistic research-creation. In the latter, one could be researching on how to render a dance performance more compelling with the choice of colour of costumes or sound aesthetics. They would be testing and experimenting different moods. In the case of an interactive motion comics, to be distributed online as well as on-site in a museum, the team might be researching along aesthetic lines, just like in the dance performance example, with the difference that the audience design will be treated in a much more granular manner, segmenting audience on different social media platforms online and the museum-goers on site. By doing this, the makers adopt mediatic affordances, such as algorithmic selection on social media to help craft the motion comic. While in the dance performance the findings might indicate certain aesthetic preferences based on systematic testing of colour schemes in costumes, the findings in the motion comic will include data about the different target audiences and how this is integrated in aesthetic choices. In other words, mediatic research-creation is oftentimes rationally more complex than artistic research-creation, and also closer to production studies, in which technological affordances and the political economy of media play a more salient role.

By zooming-in from practice-based research to research-creation, and sharpening the lens even more to identify mediatic research-creation, it brings us in reach of research done with and/or through interactive media more specifically – the dominant form of media consumed today (e.g. social media, video games, interactive and immersive audiovisuals). It is necessary to grasp and recognize the parameters of interactive media so that as a researcher and practitioner, we get a chance to develop research projects that are state of the art in terms of methodology (i.e. the correct use of netnography for analyzing trends in viewing habits might require an appropriate reading and handling of mainstream video games).

Interactive media

Interactive media have their own set of affordances. Independently of the genre, i.e. from video games to virtual reality, from touch screens in museums to interactive fictional series, and from long form narratives on social media to digital performance art, they put the relationship to the audience in the focus. Back in 2006, Cover wrote: “The interactive and digital nature of computer-mediated communication results in several new tensions in the author-text-audience relationship, predominantly through blurring the line between author and audience, and eroding older technological, policy and conventional models for the ‘control’ of the text, its narrative sequencing and its distribution.” (Cover, 2006, p. 140). If interactive media authorship is often distributed, creative practice happens in collaborative teams, or even in co-creation arrangements with specific audiences. Although the dialogic use of media is not new (see Brecht, with his theory of media), the social media age has multiplied the collaborative potential of media making and consuming. This might entail a qualitatively increased sense of agency for users of such platforms, and at the same time raise important questions of copyright, which are not explored in this paper.

This said, in certain forms of interactive media, “text or its content is affected, resequenced, altered, customized or re-narrated in the interactive process of audiencehood” (Ibid). This is also what in more recent literature on creative media production has been referred to as co-creation (Rose, 2018) of narratives, where the audience has a part to play in the crafting of the story itself.

As we will see in the next section, interactive documentary is such a form in which co-creation is often present.

Affordances of interactive documentary

In the case of interactive documentary (i-doc)—a non-fiction form of interactive media that is mainly browser-based—I have regrouped the main characteristics under Table 1, as drawn from my own doctoral research (Dubois, 2021).

Common characteristics of interactive documentaries

Table 1 Common characteristics of interactive documentaries. Source: Dubois, 2021.

Table 1 summarizes the main affordances of i-docs in terms of product and process. Similar to other interactive media, i-docs have hypertextuality at their core.

In i-docs, makers generally create, assemble and present documentary material in a form that is native to web technologies. Interactive documentary productions are media works that typically include one or more point(s)-of-view, an interactive interface, a delinearised narrative, and at times, participatory features meant to involve citizens in the storytelling. Over the decade spanning 2007 to 2017, i-doc makers have produced and distributed their works with the help of higher education institutions, public service media, the public interest press, film and media funds, as well as film festivals.

I-docs qualify, as I argue elsewhere (Dubois, 2020), as media innovations, i.e. they are “multidimentional and risky products” (Dogruel, 2014, p. 52). I-docs are not standalone art works, although they might possess similar characteristics in terms of their experimental or exploratory nature. Unlike art works, i-docs are proper media productions, i.e. they are closer to complex crafts productions in terms of riskiness and they come alive through the relational dimension of interaction and manipulation by users (Gaudenzi, 2013). This uncertain encounter with its audience, its users, or produsers (Bruns, 2007), is what make them high-risk productions.

Field Trip

Image 1 Screenshot of i-doc Field. Source: Field Trip GbR.

Field Trip is an interactive documentary produced independently by a small team of media makers in Berlin. It was started in 2017 and released in its first version in 2019. It is accessible in open access on fieldtrip.berlin. The documentary takes the user onto the Tempelhof Field in Berlin, in what was once an airfield and is now the largest park in that metropolis. The user visits the field through the stories of 14 protagonists told in an interactive fashion. Every story is separated in scenes from which the user can jump into scenes from other stories, thereby allowing for an interactive viewing experience. Beyond viewing, the user can co-create the larger narrative of Field Trip by simply leaving an anecdote, via the hypertextual interface, on an answering machine. The team behind Field Trip curates the best anecdotes and includes them into the Storyboxx, which is one of the protagonists of the field.

In my own doctoral research, I have pursued a research-creation approach. My research-question reflects this approach particularly well: how to account for the societal impact of interactive documentary, as much from a theoretical reflection as from a maker’s understanding?

I have spent three years producing the independent interactive documentary Field Trip as an interactive producer. In parallel, I have developed my research agenda, leading up to this research question. Now, when performing the research, I had to read into the artistic work both in terms of product and process, extracting theoretical knowledge from impact, reception and documentary studies on the one hand and experiential knowledge from my tasks as producer on the other. Through the practice of interactive documentary making particularly, I was able to gain privileged and first-hand information on impact strategies and tactics and how to evaluate impact in a context of constant media innovation.

One of the most striking findings from that research, beyond the definitional work or the identification of affordances of interactive documentary, is that interactive documentary and interactive media in general, need to account for societal impact in terms of their openness. Drawing mainly from the creation (Field Trip), I was able to establish that openness in interactive media can be understood as a triad: open content, open format (interface) and open technology (Dubois, 2021). In other words, the specific makeup of Field Trip has permitted me to generate grounded theory that I could then feed back into the larger research endeavor on the societal impact of interactive documentary. Now, when compared to a free artistic creation, Field Trip was a proper production, with production deadlines, funding and constraints. Therefore, what resulted from my research is a mediatic research-creation which cannot be compared one-to-one to an artistic research-creation project of doctoral colleagues. One of the main differences is that colleagues would in general look much more at aesthetics and internal artistic processes, much more than production and utilitarian questions, such as those related to the notion of impact. I am on purpose not developing the findings on impact here, as they are exposed in long form in my doctoral thesis, available in open access (Dubois, 2021).

Conclusion

Interactive documentary is a subgenre of interactive media with which to engage in mediatic research-creation and to inform and expand this type of research-creation. It is rich in intrinsic artistic and narrative components and affordances, as well as production and process-oriented learnings. Field Trip, as only one illustration of this subgenre permits me to affirm that it is important to specify what type of practice-based research a researcher is doing. By positioning my own research as a mediatic research-creation, I was able to situate my research as part of a larger body of creative media research. What this entails for other projects moving forward, is that it is important to examine typologies around practice-based research, including those most closely related to media studies.

This paper has permitted me to learn to differentiate between more artistic and more media-related research-creation endeavours and thus to adopt a more accurate lense (which makes room for affordances of today’s dominant form of media - interactive media) when approaching fieldwork.

The challenges I faced in this essay are similar to those of most qualitative enquiries, where single case studies and self-produced projects might only tell one part of a much more complex system, in which interactive media affordances are many, and their nature and aims vary much. Researching with and about a blockbuster video game or with and about an independent podcast are two different things. The motivations behind these media forms are different and the technology, authorship and co-creation affordances are diverse. In this sense, this paper is to be understood as an essay with a limited scope of research, only focusing on certain features of interactive media.

References

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Can artistic practices inform an unlearning of normative thought structures?

Towards an ethico-onto-epistemological co-constitution with other worlds’ knowledges

DOI: https://doi.org/10.33008/IJCMR.2022.17 | Issue 9 | Oct 2022

monika Jaeckel(Independent Artist and Researcher)

Abstract

A positionality within the framework of Western Modernity most poignantly is depicted through agency's interpretation as one-sided. It accounts for a belief in control and mastery over a presumably silent or mute 'othered' side, leading to an exclusionary and singular view of the world. Essential for breaching this prevalent approach are questions like how can other knowledges be approached without being appropriated, how can something unknown be made perceptible when generally approved unable as to provide a valuable contribution?

Practice-based research emphasises the intertwining of practice and theory rather than juxtaposing reason over the sensual, culture to nature. Focusing on results based on intuition and creativity activates a link between science and the arts. Such intertwining involves the participation across sectors and informs a specific sensitivity to differently defined norms. Creative research's prospect of divergent approaches in these transdisciplinary excursions entails an awareness for critical attitudes and differing possibilities. Its potential to address the normative frameworks surrounding the specific fields derives from these experiences. The text argues that these transversal abilities of creative research are essential for interrogating a worldview based on western modernity towards a co-constitutional attitude. A paradigmatic reference is an engagement with sound/noise in performance practice, as equally on a theoretical level. The intertwined approach allowed to unravel potentialities and also problematics surfacing throughout the project. Response-ability to the resonance of a new tone necessitates an openness to encounter 'new' or other knowledges, which incites an inherent co-constitutional ethics following feminist new materialism.

Introduction: practice-based research as transdisciplinary knowledge creation

Practice-based research is also known as practice-led research (Uk, Australia), creative research (North America), and artistic research (Europe – mostly northern countries). Any of these comply with research-creation as comprised of creative or better arts-based practices as a necessary distinction. They thereby admit that all research, when it comes to contributing to knowledge, demands the inclusion of creative and intuitive elements. Furthermore, as the researcher and writer Sarah Truman remarks, practice-based research, like any inquiry attempt, at least partially involves a speculative process (2021, 6). Any experiments or explorations anticipated in this sense are risky endeavours due to their processual nature (Truman 2021, 13). The further interweaving with theory to evaluate aspects of the research findings may eventually imply trespassing across predefined fields by demanding “more reading and thinking in relation to what emerges” (Truman 2021, xxi). An interdisciplinary approach, however, carries its specific risks, possibly revealing incompetence in one subject when skills prove insufficient by not being transferable into another distinctly demarcated discipline (2019, 45).

Aside from interweaving practice and theory, practice-based research also sits at the crossroads of various fields, intersecting with the humanities or sciences and the arts. This complement intersectional positionality suggests a research practice beyond the study of the existing but an analytical framework that enables “bringing something new into the world” (Couillard in Loveless 2020, 55). As a new interdisciplinary “object” (Barthes 1986, 72), it eventually enables a shift concerning the existing borders of knowledge (Haraway, 1988) of established fields. As a result, the creation part in practice-based research exceeds Barthes' interpretation of 'the text' in the literary sense of being ‘the new object’. Most emerging outcome that investigates “cultural objects or social situations” through artistic means in a co-constitutive intertwinement with a scholarly discourse may be able to activate such a 'new object' position (Truman 2021, 14; Lowry in Loveless 2020, 163). In this regard, the chosen form of expression or ‘language’ for the dissemination of an interdisciplinary 'object' aims at 'undisciplined' forms that also involve the de-tuning of “a well-trained sensorium [..] upending everything we thought we knew” (Myers in Bakke and Peterson 2018, 78).

Thereby practice-based research provides the challenge to recognise that there is no one universal way to think or practice by exemplifying that “it matters what ideas one uses to think other ideas” (Strathern 1992, 10). This request for a sensitisation toward own knowledge-producing practices insinuates the problematic whether those “can engagingly be captured within the strictures of methodological ordering” (Manning 2016, 26). Hence Haraway's reformulation of Marilyn Strathern’s above insight emphasises the relevance of “what thoughts think thoughts, what descriptions describe descriptions, what ties tie ties” (Haraway 2016, 12). Haraway's suggestion demands a general reworking of the thought concepts coined by the cultural structures accompanying its emergence to avoid reverting to habitual patterns of dichotomous argumentation. Refusing the placing of “thought squarely within the linguistic limits of intelligibility” (Manning 2016, 28) provides a movement out of the established comfort zone, away from known tools. Thereby posing essential questions like how something ignored or unknown can be made perceptible. Furthermore, how can such other(ed) articulations (noise) be known without preeminent appropriation?

How to think undisciplined or what noise can do

Interdisciplinarity's challenge and opportunity expand the definition of what counts as 'writing' in research dissemination (Loveless 2019, 14). Pushing against the disciplinary boundaries through research objects and methods, as equally unaccustomed ways of 'publishing' procedures, provoke an irritation that creates the opportunity to re-evaluate what approves as “knowledge” (Loveless 2019, 40). Loveless thus refers to the output of research-creation as possible boundary objects (Bowker and Leigh Star, 1999), which touches on specific requirements of various disciplines without “belonging properly to any one of them.” As an in-coherent object, Barthes' suggestion that the interdisciplinary object belongs to no one demarcates its untying from strict disciplinary boundaries. Due to their interdisciplinary emergence, the production of such outputs exceeds “what is demonstrably present in their constituent parts” (Loveless 2019, 26-32). Therefore, research-creation in certain ways, performs a new category to address problems from within a cultural mode of knowledge production without intentionally provoking a rupture.

Through collaborative approaches engaging visual artists and participatory projects shift towards “a very particular form of trans- and interdisciplinary research” also “within, with, and for an ever-adapting university landscape” (Loveless 2019, 10). Inherently thus expressing the need for integrating different ways of seeing and knowing by a resistance towards “dominant social ideals” (Lowry in Loveless, 2020: 173 - 174). Such changed environments demand deep and rigorous interdisciplinarity that argues against the dominance of one discipline over another and assigns 'practice' as 'theory' equal professional weight (Penny 2009, 35). Such a transdisciplinary position counters “disciplinarily “othering” habits that privilege either artistic or technoscientific or social scientific or humanities-based habits of thought and dissemination” (Loveless 2019, 31). Hence, aside from opportunities, transdisciplinarity evolving from within the existing system of knowledge production offers persistent challenges for artistic research practices. These defiances occur by being countered through the “ideological insistence that artistic output, the “art object,” cannot effectively communicate scholarly research” (Loveless 2019, 44).

The renowned performance artist Alan Kaprow describes the artist as “a person willfully enmeshed in the dilemma of categories [by performing] as if none of them existed” (Kaprow 1993, 81). Lina Dib thus concludes that “artists can be said to generate noise in established systems” (Dib in Bakke and Peterson 2018, 204 fn). However, in considering the concept of noise, we can see that it is more than an indicator of disturbance or a possible system failure, but rather may equally be involved in the provision of information. Dismissing noise, just as a negative aspect that must be eliminated may overlook indicative interferences, which eventually must be reconceived to have their meaning seep and condensate differently. This aspect is hinted at in the consideration that in Shannon's classical theory, noise can be argued to take the position of “the Other of information” (Goddard, Halligan, and Hegarty 2012, 3; Thompson 2017, 42). Furthermore, an interesting congruence concurs with the systemic maintenance of a 'self' in western modernity's interpretation through the suppression of a response-ability by being neither affective to sent or received interferences.

Regarding noise only in the sense of the missing or the rupture through another mode of organisation avoids what Marie Thompson calls an ethico-affective approach that recognizes these unwanted sounds as more than non-informative disturbance but “embraces noise 's variability and multiplicity” (Thompson 2017, 179). The noise produced by artist-researchers is as much an indicator of the richness of information as an interference signal, possibly revealing unheard and undecipherable signalling. 'Noise' thus produced across specific fields can also be read as positive emergence that counters habitual strictness of disciplinary boundaries, denoting – however, in a yet unclear sense - diversification.

Noise’s contribution to unlearning

Aside from re-evaluating the artist researcher's ability to create noise in the sense of interferences across established categories, a further concern is how to reach a point of unlearning. Understood to address “questions of equity and the historical legacies of colonialism” from a less categorical and normative differentiation between “scientific knowledge and culture,” unlearning is meant to enable accounting for matters of cultural appropriation regarding other forms of knowledges (Lowry in Loveless 2020, 184). Julietta Singh, in her approach toward a dehumanist education, requests the evaluation of means and mechanisms that can be engaged for the acknowledgement of the “vital entanglements with other forms of life and matter.” Her request for a “renarration and reorientation of what it is that we are aspiring to know” (Singh 2018, 67) is reminiscent of Lowry’s argument for a practice-based approach to de- and re-couple research and creative practices in order to provide “an opportunity to work through a deep-seated disparity between scholars and cultural producers, particularly among First Nations, Métis, and Inuit communities.” (in Loveless, 2020: 165). Singh's insistence intersects with Loveless in “that knowledge production itself [has to] become unpredictable, unanticipatable, unmasterful. “Crucial are processes of “critical becoming” entailing approaches to forms of care and practices of unlearning the ‘known’. Singh describes this as “a transformative act of becoming profoundly vulnerable to other lives, other life forms, and other “things” that we have not yet accounted for or that appear only marginally related to us” (Singh 2018, 67). It also entails a curiosity, which activates a sense of risk and thus vulnerability, necessary for discovering other modes of being. Interestingly, on an etymological level, curious converges with care as prevalent in careful or curate (Loveless 2019, 47).

Singh’s method evolved from vulnerable reading practices of literature as an unmasterful tool aimed at forming new kinds of selves. In the search for new forms of language that equally tackle the formative education of existing power relations, Singh develops an ambivalently placed reading and writing strategy between the masterful and the undisciplined (Singh 2018, 63-64, 83). The latter provides another term for not mastering or conforming to the dominant guidelines of how and what to know. By pointing at other ways of understanding, Singh's method activates “the affective discomfort of the uncanny.” A point that meets Loveless' understanding of coming to know as “the experience of being both at home and not, intellectually speaking, disciplinarily speaking, affectively speaking. It is never certain; it is always […] responsively in the encounter” (2019, 51).

Loveless' psychoanalytical insight, a result of reading across the fields, is that the uncanny, like a boundary object, simultaneously resides within and outside of stable or predictable relations, thereby throwing a research-creation object into processes of constant renegotiations (2019, 46). An interpretation that allows touching upon the situated entanglement of the artist-researcher with any 'object' of research. Considering the researcher as part of the problem touches on Karen Barad's approach towards the (research) apparatus in which exteriority – or what western modernity claims as absolute objectivity – can only be achieved within-phenomena (2007). In Barad's version of feminist new materialism, such exteriority-within-phenomena marks the ongoing performativity of the world. That means that entangled (phenomena) while inciting an in/exclusive (agential) cut to define a specific object/situation ('creating' exteriority) cannot be claimed as a once-and-for-all determination due to iterative worlding processes. Truman distinguishes in Barad's approach a deconstruction of “the reductionist ontology of classical physics” that moves “away from a metaphysics of individualism.” By producing various exteriority-within-phenomena through different ex- and inclusionary apparatus settings, these offer an alternative description implying the entanglement of indeterminacy as threaded “through all being (and all research events)” (2021, 18). In that, these practices counter the production of a universalist normative. Like Singh's method of unmasterful vulnerability provoke an opening towards “other modes of performing humanity” undoing habituations (Singh 2018, 23). Such insight, though, does not condemn the habitual as, again, it holds a twofold paradox traced by Elizabeth Grosz (2013) in Ravaisson's thesis Of Habit (2008/1838), not only as a constraining force but also as an enabler in the unfolding of abilities. In a certain way, one might train “in order to develop habits, but sometimes one trains in order to free oneself of habits, even to become expert in not being habitual”, which again expresses as a new routine (Myers in Bakke and Peterson, 2018: 63).

Singh’s suggestion of developing a different relation to language that oscillates between masterful and unmasterful forms advocates the seeping of other meanings (Singh 2018, 88). These may not only allow circumventing mattering(s) of the dominant (habitual) interpretation but incite risking a “curiosity that gets one into (methodological/ontological/ epistemological/disciplinary) trouble” (Loveless 2019, 23). Though eventually rather, the discovery of turbulence, due to a new way of sensing, allows the detection of interference patterns that can be argued to be the reverberating murmur of other beings and matter, formerly shoved aside as noise. However, could such 'noise' not indicate all sorts of tasks and pending issues that stem from transdisciplinarity's transgressing of set-up boundaries between the fields - thus be scaled up to transcultural concerns as those of appropriation? As Lowry emphasises, prioritising “cross-disciplinary collaborations that bring together cultural production and knowledge production” raises important questions about how to deal with issues of “cultural appropriation, diversity, equity, or Indigenous knowledge?”(Lowry in Loveless 2020, 184). Therefore, what position can be taken to ensure that indigeneity is not reduced to another colonial method as “a 'transferable skill set' that white people can learn from and adopt for themselves” (Chandler and Reid 2020, 6, 16)?

Rather than 'integrate' other and indigenous knowledges into the dominating mode of thought and practice, this text attempts to recontextualise the situational particularities innate to practice-based research and un/learning to be activated for the specifics of various forms of knowledge creation. Thus the 'un' preceding learning is considered a vital necessity to deactivate habitual routines of doing-thinking. However, this exceeds the artist's position as a noisy factor in the system. It instead has to be questioned on what basis it can be said that s/he creates categories as if none existed to avoid idealising and a possible return to art's 'genius' approach. To excess, this systemic cul-de-sac of overcoming categories by neglecting them must return to a foundational point addressed in Barad's Agential Realism and sits at the core of western modernity's understanding of self and thus knowledge production – that of a one-sided agency.

Beneficial aspects of noise (for transdisciplinarity)

The concept of noise, generally oscillating between different structural terms, accords to Simondon's outline of an analogy. Despite a specific risk of being confused with a resemblance due to the same operations, “the combination of waves, whether they be light or sound, occurs in the same way in the case of sound waves as in that of light waves. But certain structural results are different” (2020, 667; emphasis in original). These structural differences allow Cécile Malaspina to speculate on the transdisciplinary abilities that noise introduces, possibly allowing for the discovery of “relations between hitherto 'incompossible' realities” (in Goddard, Halligan, and Hegarty 2012, 63). Malaspina defines “the transdisciplinary appeal of the concept of noise [as partially] inspired by the tremendous ability of a cluster of concepts from information theory.” Noise's ability “to traverse and transform a growing web of scientific disciplines in such a transductive manner” enabled the emergence of new fields “as cybernetics and later the study of complex systems” (Malaspina 2012, 65). In her recent analysis, Marie Thompson explores the “ethico-affective” impact of the ambiguous display of a “both-and” state, which allows noise to be both a force of domination and resistance (2017). Due to its transferring ability, noise establishes an essential component for mediation and provides a force for transformation. Crucially the realisation of a sound, even if it is classified, often negatively, as noise and thus declared negligible, yet, acknowledges that whatever is declared as the ‘other’ side is not mute.Whitehead has stated that as an “[a]bstraction from connectedness”, negation provides a doing by “the omission of the essential factor in the fact considered” (Whitehead 1938, 8). Diffracted through Ursula LeGuin's insight that listening establishes a connection instead of being dismissable as a mere reaction, thus discloses that the ignorance of noisy sounds as expression incorrectly assumes that exclusion and neglect prevent any response (LeGuin 2004, 196).

Disclosing noise beforehand as not fitting 'this way', as stemming from an isolated source with unimportant meaning rather than in a speculative reading of possibilities, is classifying and preemptively claiming unknown knowledge in the vein of disciplinary fatalism (Ahmed 2014). Such attitude not only negates the ongoing performativity of worlding but also ignores that the way an answer is given is “part of the situation, and that they (involved actants) will have to make themselves response-able, answerable for its consequences” (Debaise and Stengers 2017, 19). Even when declared to be of a different nature or culture, and thus as not belonging and insignificant, any matter(ing) responds in its limited, mutated, and redirected ways as “the effects of noise are, as a matter of fact, permanent constituents in the process of self-organization” (Malaspina in Goddard, Halligan, and Hegarty 2012, 70). Due to its ambiguous definition, noise is more than just a threat to a system; it must be regarded as an “integral part” (Thompson 2017, 179), capable of causing a disturbance as well as providing an essential initiative feature to transmission (and thus change). Malaspina contends that the occurrence of a crisis is not due to the “destructive effect of noise in a channel of communication” but rather to a lack of coding capability “that translates the information contained in individual channels of communication into the code that enables the communication between these channels” (2012, 70-72). On the other hand, her interpretation argues for accepting a certain level of transdisciplinary noise referred to as ‘conceptual resonance’.

If the quantity of information in an epistemological domain thus could be understood by its capacity to sustain noise (variety), this would ultimately increase redundancy at a meta-systemic level. The role of the paradigmatic codes/concepts it calls for to manifest the 'quality' of information would not be to minimize this meta-systemic degree of uncertainty, i.e. to reduce its 'quantity of information' to the clarity of a message (Malaspina in Goddard, Halligan, and Hegarty 2012, 71).

Not all noise indicates a crisis. Instead, there seems to be evidence that a particular background murmur is “a prerequisite for complexity and self-organization.” The “beneficial effect at the level of the system as a whole thus appears to suggest that a transdisciplinary approach is likely to benefit from a positive effect of noise” (Malaspina 2012, 70-72). To dismiss utterances based on their spectrum and emergence on a general negative interpretation of 'noise' (either visual or audible) as that which does not fit into a systemic field constitutes blindness or deafness regarding what establishes information outside the known/perceptible. The acknowledgement of a not-knowing or indecipherability instead opens up questions about which cultural connotations noise attributes to acts of crossing disciplines. Putting thus into question, if noise here stands for “obscuring the clarity of the message, there causing genetic mutations or signifying the random input from the environment?” (Malaspina, 2012: 66). Following through what noise can do in systems theory, Malaspina arrives at the question of whether the previously developed notion of conceptual resonance can engender a new epistemic domain – “a ‘cross-discipline’ in its own right” (Goddard, Halligan and Hegarty, 2012: 7).

From transdisciplinarity to new knowledges

Following Barthes' argument, practice-based research may be able to output a new cross-disciplinary 'object', yet such creation also needs to critically challenge an 'object's/subject's' evaluation solely based on an entrenchment in western modernity's systematicity of knowledge production. To leave room for an ethics of not knowing, as Natasha Myers proposes, thus seems to resonate with Malaspina’s creation of a system-immanent conceptual resonance of the undecipherable. Myers’ argument for “not knowing as an ethic and a practice” can be read as a deferral of “the desire to capture some truth, or attempt to render the world legible to the constraints of our colonized imaginations” (Myers in Bakke and Peterson 2018, 75). However, the acknowledgement of situatedness within the educational structures of western modernity's knowledge production through the pronoun 'our' is significant in the above-quoted statement. It acknowledges that there is no universal 'we' but lives under different círcumstances, various modes of knowledge productions, i.e. worlds. Such initiates a recognition and acceptance of unknowable, almost imperceptible, and thus seemingly undecipherable other 'wes’.

Considering noise not just as the unwanted but as reverberating from and caused by (our and other) interferences from various sources, matters, and voices eventually allows to recognise these phenomena-within a situatedness as expressions of caused crises. In such a case, it may be worth considering whether noise as a consequence “on the basis of information” (Malaspina 2012, 70) indicates a systemic dysfunction that eventually necessitates a paradigm shift. Nevertheless, rather than indicating disorganisation only, noise in its double-bind function must also be analysed to the effect “how and under what conditions can randomness contribute to create organizational complexity”? Such recognition of noise as a multi-faceted factor eventually involved in systemic self-organization (Malaspina in Goddard 2012 68, 70) can aid in reading curiously “the material-semiotic entanglements, the “worldliness” out of which each of us, at any given moment, emerges (Loveless 2019, 23). Loveless' argument is similar to the redefinitions in which Haraway and Barad indicate affectivity's mutual activity in entanglement. This statement also impacts determining “material situations that create worlds” by the chosen in-, as likewise an exclusion in research events. In Barad's interpretation of agency as an intra-active doing-being (2007), also 'non-actions', such as exclusion, ignorance, and neglect, are deeds that are responded to through mutual exchange by improvement, decline, or the many areas of the in-between. Agency must thus be understood as something that is never done alone or solely by choosing or being chosen (Barad 2007, 178). A one-sided interpretation does not elevate a self-declared actant above any response/ibility, nor does the insight of situatedness subvert the possibility of an adjustable response-ability.

In a feminist materialist sense, this point of matter(ing), also in terms of practice-based research, defines (research) events as doings that affect worlds, whether they are empirical sites or “the radically empirical sites of reading and thinking with theory” (Truman 2021, 26). Similarly, research-creation is entrusted with “an ethical commitment to learning to become affected (in a Spinozist sense)”, which, due to relational movements, involves a political strain of “relational matrices” that in becoming part of involvement never can be determined prior to their occurrence (McCormack 2008, 9). Relationality in a Deleuzian-Spinozist sense always involves both affecting and being affected in the processes of becoming-others. In Braidotti’s vitalist approach, such understanding suggests “an idea of evolution of the non-deterministic, non-linear and non-teleological kind”, which considers “the intelligence and the mobility of matter” (2004/2005, section 11). Assessing the responsiveness of matter(ing), as prevalent in the works of Haraway, Bennett, and Barad has become a prominent marker of feminist new materialist thinking. In their attempt to think through how art, theory, and research intersect within the conceptual field of research-creation (Loveless 2019; Springgay 2019; Truman et al. in Loveless 2020) “a multiplicity of responsive practices structured by situated (emergent, erotic, driven) accountability” (Loveless 2019, 29) are drawing from or aligning “with a queer feminist, anti-colonial orientation to art and research” (Truman 2021, 10). There seems to be a consensus between Truman and Loveless to define research-creation as a “logical extension of post-1968 interdisciplinary and theoretical interventions” with the intent “to remake the academy from within” (2019, 57), often influenced by forerunners from feminist, queer, decolonial, and other social justice movements (Trumann 2021, xvi).

Listening to affect and being affected – noise as indicating co-constitution

In co-operative practice-based projects, realised throughout my recent doctoral studies, noise was used as an interference signal. As laid out prior, interferential impact is omnipresent and unavoidable. While every flap of a butterfly may be considered relevant (at least in chaos theory), human actions seldom are regarded as leaving pertinent traces. Further, interference signals or noise do not continuously occur within frequencies audible to the human ear but cause disturbances. This point returns us to the ethical aspect of research-creation. Rosi Braidotti’s affirmative ethics recognizes that the loss of such relationality, such as the disregard of caused noises (interferences), leads to a disconnection regarding the harm done to others. Rather than denying or cancelling pain, violence, and vulnerability, the affirmation of “the deeply affective and relational nature of all living entities” manifests a vital bond and discloses the re/generative powers of affirmative ethics. Braidotti’s approach provides “a different practice of ethical care and containment of the other, based on the constitutive affective ability of all entities to affect and be affected, to interrelate with human and non-human others” (2019, 169).

Thus, noise became an indicator of possible interferences, eventually providing additional – so far overlooked – information that can help introduce a desirable reduction in sameness. Such redundancy may indicate an over-sustenance of a systemic similarity, possibly creating a crisis. Continuing Braidotti’s path of thought, interference (possible information), read as affect from being affected emerging from another source or matter, indicates sensitivity and announces a possible systemic change through repercussions of this affectivity. Noise regarded this way acts as a potential index marker to information from sources often considered to be interjacent and marginal. Emerging from and as interferences, noise may only be regarded as outside the sphere of interest if no effort of 'reading' regarding affectivity and impact is made. Once audible, these reverberating interferences are no longer negligible sounds but bring the affordance for response/i/ability to the fore through their affective resonance. Thereby reminding Braidotti's affirmative ethics, which argues in spite of ‘not knowing’ for what evolves as seemingly undecipherable.

Doing the research: can ‘we’ find our place in the family of things? – issues of a flat ontology

In the recent performance project reverberating interferences – explorations into thingness (2020/2021), we (the performers and I) attempted to explore a version of such an understanding by using simple Arduino-built devices to amplify possible voices of 'things'. Inspired by the increasing use and visible street waste of to-go containers and cups, particularly during the first phase of the Covid-19 pandemic, such 'trash' pieces were outfitted with sensors that reacted to physical approach, touch, or light. An imagined mycorrhizal network traced by yellow tape marked the provided connective route between them, technically fixating the interconnecting cable work.

Image 1: Pepa Unbera, Giulia Iurza, Selene Travaglia, Louiseanne Wong, and Paolo Pisarra interacting by reacting on amplified sound devices in front of the interactive moving image projection Untitled 1 by Lilia Strojec in reverberating interferences – explorations into thingness, 2020, image: camera still: Lene Vollhardt

Image 2: Amplified food container. Image: monika jaeckel

However, the approach based on a flat ontology extrapolated the problem of a one-sided human agency as the aspects of such a backdrop were not sufficiently called into question. Disregarding the connotations (systemic inscriptions) that mechanisms such as 'thingification’ (Césaire) carry upon themselves introduced a second highly problematic point. Yet, it brought the focus straight to the problem threaded throughout western modernity's knowledge production, tending to ignore other knowledges outside its verification mode. Symmetrical flattening introduces a disregard for “asymmetries of power, such as obtain – routinely, structurally, and institutionally, in contemporary Western society” and conceals the unequally distributed capacities inherent to the definition of agency (Vetlesen 2019, 148). The goal of these experiments with 'thingification' was to explore interdependence and relationality. In this sense, our investigation can be regarded as having 'worked' because it brought such problems to the fore. to the fore. Our situated starting point was not to imagine everything on a human level, as this would have appropriated an indigenous philosophy described by Viveiros de Castro (2014, 63). Rather than approximating some form of animism, but deals with the task of finding a place “in the family of things”, as expressed in “Wild Geese” (1986) by the American poet Mary Oliver.

Its experimental grounding with a literal focus on 'things' almost immediately turned the performance project's attention towards the problem of a near entirely 'white' or (settler)colonialist framework that still enframes much of the disciplinary fields. In terms of agency, it is best expressed through Frank Wilderson's (2010) notion of capacity as unequally assigned potential. Barad's Agential Realism constructs the exteriority and separation required for performative reactions to ruptures of “the supernumerary forms of acting [..] that both sustain and undermine any relational configuration” (Ernstson and Swyngedouw 2019, 26, 27) not as absolute, but as exteriority-within-phenomena. Yet, such distinction or 'cut' (Barad) generally remains oriented toward the foundational epistemological terrain of the dominant scientific Universalism. However, acknowledgement of an uneven leveling of agential capacity demands a relationality that allocates possibilities of intra-active change and transformation throughout, depending on the grounding perspective or positionality (in Dylan Robinson's sense). Barad, therefore, advocates entangled objectivity established in exteriority-within as agential separability, which exposes the uneven leveling and must be addressed through the inherent ethics of response/i/ability. However, such ethical response-ability can only be incited if a certain degree of not-knowing, for Barad indeterminacy, is allowed to interfere with the established definitions of western modernity's mono-humanist Background assumptions (Wynter in McKittrick 2015; Robinson 2020). Such insights, considering 'our' positionality within the project, led to interrogations regarding noise's conceptual contributions to sustainable redundancy for transdisciplinary work, eventually also can be applicable between worlds.

The reference to Wynter's conception of human/Man as homo oeconomicus as a “monohumanist symbolically encoded configuration” (Wynter in McKittrick 2015, 11) thus indicates that despite postcolonial and postapartheid tendencies, the ongoing “universalization of the genre of the Human” continues unbroken. Such assignment still regurgitates “the biocentric categories of gender and sexuality which not only hurt our analysis of gender (by rendering the conceptual models of sex/gender birthed under the overdetermined Western physiognomic models of the Human universal) but also through decoupling the violent connections between bio-humanist sexuation, anti-Black slavery, and metaphysical violence” (Gillespie 2022, 10-11). Despite Gillespie's and Wilderson’ focus on the “metaphysical violence” of racist epistemes and methods of anti-Black slavery, their afropessimist reading offers a methodological exteriority-within access point to established phenomena of western modernity. More specifically, to the prevalent epistemes developed along the “over-representation of the White Body as the body from which theory is produced and constructed.” Not only have distinct bodies been assigned different capacity levels (Wilderson), but entire “geographies (the ghettos of the Black, the reservations of the Indigenous, and the theoretical shaping of the Third/Fourth World)” were marked by significations as not-as-Human (Gillespie 2022, 12).

The assignment of varying degrees of capacity levels to many other(ed) humans and non-humans generally declares them as anti-modern or nonmodern, including forms of “(non)being, thingification”. Blackness, though, ranges as “the antithesis to the Human in modern onto-ethico-epistemology” (Gillespie 2022, 4; Césaire). Thus, when Fred Moten considers the sound of an unasked question also, the bifurcation of western modernity's consciousness regarding the meaning of (black) things is implied: “We study in the sound of an unasked question. Our study is the sound of an unasked question.” (2013: 756). Moten here speaks of a different we than the universal one, a different sound – one sounding outside the established epistemes of western modernity. Referencing a different background hum clearly indicates that the sound of an unasked question is not silence or muteness but affectivity that can be studied (Robinson 2020; Thompson 2018, 4). If the unheard could not be listened to, there could be no noise as the preexistence of any form of sound. In this regard, rather than demonstrating a 'truth,' our performance experiment aimed at excavating our own (mostly white, western, European) educational coinage to create a different sensational awareness for unasked tones and unheard voices.

The habitually known as the background’s imperceptible affectivity

As laid out research-creation enables the attention towards aspects that are usually not attended with much interest within a discipline, often just because the general orientation is kept strictly within the field boundaries. However, if a concept is applied cross-disciplinary, as in our case noise, in its broadest sense, it can enable to transport an impulse to act and reason differently. The noisy signal can also be understood as a response, as the incited or remaining ability, of what is irritated, limited, or mutated by a disrespected response-ability.

The researcher Susan Simard contends that the “separation of humanity from nature, mind from body, spirit from intellect” (Friedman, 2021) is a critical factor in the inability to see other lifeforms’ gestures and utterances as meaningful expressions. Feminist new materialist argues that “feeling, desiring and experiencing are not singular characteristics or capacities of human consciousness” but elementary expressed in any matter's mattering. When considering entangled materializations, the given power imbalances activated in these agential processes inherently provoke an ethics of response-ability (Barad in Dolphin and van der Tuin 2012, 59, 69). The acknowledgment of being listened to demands in return the exploration of response-able efforts. Redefining agency in such responsive way expresses its genuine linking with indeterminacy, thereby establishing non-doing as 'constitutive withdrawal' (van Dooren 2016, 46). An ethics in this sense then deviates from an 'it is like this' attitude of habitual means or disciplinary fatalism and constitutes an eminent acknowledgement of the intra-active agential/responsive interaction process (Ahmed 2014; Barad 2007).

Image: Paolo Pisarra and Selene Travaglia with amplified Shitake mushroom in reverberating interferences – explorations into thingness, 2020, image: camera still: Lene Vollhardt

Image: amplified Shitake mushroom in reverberating interferences – explorations into thingness, 2020, image: camera still: Lene Vollhardt

One of the hardest things to reach is what Calvin Warren refers to as the “scientific unconscious” (2018, 115). Thus, reflecting on the foundation of western humanities, Wynter's conceptions of capital M man provide a considerable definition. Enacting research from within the territory of western modernity's knowledge conservatories demands thus a critical positionality (Robinson 2020). Finding ways to reach the undetermined (unknown) means looking for research practices that do not “structurally privilege certain modes of knowing, certain stories about knowledge production and dissemination, and not others”. But instead, a search for transdisciplinary approaches able to stretch across and move between “more than one disciplinary, methodological, epistemological, affective, etc., set of differences, needs, and demands” (Loveless 2019, 24, 58). It requires the work of “channeling other worlds” aside, beneath, and within this ‘we’ world (Myers in Bakke and Peterson 2018, xii) to account for the multiple worlds of this one planetary (Mol 2003). Their acknowledgement needs alternative methodologies, “able to reveal the speculative possibility of 'different worlds'“ (Chandler and Reid 2020, 2) also to engage with life forms that already live in the ruins of capitalism and indicate possible futures (Tsing, 2015). What appears as the “unnatural marriage of the speculative” enables an opening to “the insistence of the possibles, and of the pragmatic, as the art of response-ability” (Debaise and Stengers 2017, 19).

Such radical impetus towards a changed way of doing-thinking, yet, also poses the question what rigorous practice in this type of research can avoid the appearance of arbitrariness across fields. Which speculative modes can activate the possibility and co-existence of different worlds?

Beyond categories – noise in the system

As stated, the reconsideration that “it matters what ideas one uses to think other ideas” (Strathern 1992, 10; Haraway 2016, 12) indicates not only world-becoming's performativity, but that ways to practice and think indeed do and must depend on situatedness. In this sense, if there is a universal approach, it lies in “the political importance of participating in” retelling and recrafting “the constitutive power of the stories through which we come to understand the world .”When stories are viewed as a discursive practice manifested in material-semiotic events, they become knowledge-making practices of essential matter(ing). In this context, Loveless contends that “ particularly art attuned to human and more-than-human social” and environmental justice is capable of developing generative ways “to re-envision and re-craft — to re-story — our practices and labor, and, perhaps most importantly, our pedagogy” (Loveless 2019: 14, 16, 20-22, 27).

These insights support Robin Nelson's argument that the various modes of knowing generated during research creation should “depart from positivism and 'the scientific method' as the only valid research paradigm” (2013, 51). However, such telling and recrafting work of stories “requires ongoing engagement and a willingness to denaturalize the social, disciplinary, ideological structures within which we are embedded” (Loveless 2019, 20). Such engagement provokes a propositional logic of mutuality in a rather “ontological sense of what an actor offers to other actors”. This citation by Latour brings to mind the critique of transparency formulated by Denise Ferreira da Silva (2007), as Latour emphasises that an analytical clarity may be established just by “words severed from world and then reconnected by reference”. Rather than providing insights gained by “granting entities the capacity to connect to one another through events” a judgment aiming for transparency eventually rather conflates (Latour 1999, 309; Truman 2021, 9-10).

A statement that resonates Whitehead's sentence that “[c]onnectedness is of the essence of all things and all types.” As quoted earlier for Whitehead the diminishment of connectedness omits essential points in what is to be considered (1938, 13). For Debaise and Stengers, thus “experience, however factual, is saturated with interpretations, ideas and multiple links”. Speculating means to intensify “the sense of possible […] as expressed by the struggles and claims to another way of making it exist”. Attuning to a situation is not “a human privilege in the face of an indifferent world”, but rather part of all sensuous experiences (Debaise and Stengers 2017, 15, 17, Whitehead 1938, 12).

To ask more concretely in terms of our performance project, what do squeaky sensor sounds or noise generally have to do with speculation and not knowing? “The use of strategic ambiguity”, as the allowance of a certain amount of noise on an epistemic level (conceptual resonance), provides for Malaspina a possible “characteristic of speculative, synthetic approaches” (Malaspina 2012, 72). Noise, thus, could be interpreted as a “differential link between a situated curiosity and speculative possibilities or potentialities” (Truman 2021, 7), providing a methodological interference that, according to Truman, already “fuels much feminist materialist thought” (2021, 7). In a broader sense, borrowing from the artistic attitude of performing “as if none of [no categories] existed” (Kaprow 1993, 81), transdisciplinary's 'noisy linking' can be interpreted as the critical initiator of cross-disciplinary approaches that many minor sciences already execute (Braidotti, 2018). Nevertheless, a curiosity inherent to transdisciplinary methods, generally informed by “the interdisciplinary humanities”, spurs the debates at the intersection of practice and theory and demands for “new literacies” (Loveless 2019, 37). Such development of a general shift in arts and humanities thinking combined “with dialogic and pedagogical shifts in the world of artistic production and discourse” exceeds for Loveless what Rosalind Krauss once termed the expanded field (1979) for sculpture in the arts. It rather must be admitted that the progression “of academic interdisciplinarity” has been prompted by interventions from minor fields “such as feminist studies, cultural studies, critical race studies, Indigenous studies, and gender and sexuality studies”  (Loveless 2019, 10 - 14).

These minor sciences, in particular, reveal that “pedagogical ideologies — regimes of truth — configure the parameters of legitimate research questions as well as what counts as rigor or excellence for both student and teacher.” According to Loveless, the arts have historically been devalued as a source of knowledge on their own. A fact that is mimicked by “the structural relation of art maker to art thinker”. While art historians consider artistic works regarding their “capacity to seriously impact”, artistic practice itself is granted that its works reflect on “social experiences and issues” but at the same time dismissed as failing “the benchmark of rigor and accountability to which academics hold” (Loveless 2019, 12 - 13). Indeed, research-creation’s intersectionality not always meets the established excellency demands of western academic frameworks, which require “singularity, codification, and relentless intelligibility that stultifies imaginative education or research” (Harris and Holman Jones 2020, 2). However, foregrounding questions should not just concern which knowledge matter(ings) are deemed valuable. Considering the material effects of a researcher's positionality and intentionality on the research-creation's outcome, it is equally essential by whom and how they are produced (Loveless 2019, 14; Truman 2021, 7).

Undisciplined concluding: noise as an indicator of the presence of otherworldliness

Paradoxically practice-based research's positionality of not fully belonging to the acknowledged forms of knowledge production (Loveless 2019, 56-57) may be advantageous too. Especially to persevere in the search for “modes of attunement and forms of representation beyond what has been deemed disciplinarily natural or neutral” (Thompson in Bakke and Peterson 2018, 14). Attunement to modes that are yet not decipherable or noisy is required to stabilize processes in self-organising systems, as a surplus of sameness is just as detrimental as too much noise. Thus, in concluding, I am referencing Malaspina's notion of conceptual resonance that she has developed on the background information theory and cybernetics. It is based on the insight that “a compromise is needed between redundancy and variety: to reduce noise and enable the transmission of information, without which the system would break down, and yet allow noise which introduces variety, which in turn augments the number of possible responses of a system to random fluctuations of the conditions imposed on it by its environment” (in Goddard, Halligan, and Hegarty 2012, 69).

Finding unaccustomed forms and 'undisciplined' ways to act and respond to and with the undecipherable furthermore involves telling and listening to “other stories, uncanny stories, that (have the potential to) carry within them the other ethics” (Loveless 2019, 57; italics in original). The voices who tell these stories may use unaccustomed sounds or other movements to express themselves. As such, one could argue that noise is “a discernment or sensing—perhaps beyond or before words—of an otherworldliness already present in this world, a worlding neither immune nor innocent of violence, horror, and harm” (Thompson in Bakke and Peterson 2018, 14). The ability to improvise, which is prevalent in forms of music, dance, and artistic performance, may be of interest here as offering a “sped-up, imaginative, expressive negotiation with constraint” (Goldman 2010, 27). Such vital technology provides a method to defy certain conditions and improvisation's “keenest political power” for a practice of change (Dumit in Bakke and Peterson 2018, 58).

Improvising as an ethics of not knowing is not a license for “cultivating ignorance or indifference”. Instead, it provides “a capacious and humbling space that offers some refuge from the hubris of knowledge systems […] bound so tightly to colonial conquests and their enduring discursive regimes, cultural norms, and moral economies” (Myers in Bakke 2018, 77). Instead it provides “a capacious and humbling space that offers some refuge from the hubris of knowledge systems […] bound so tightly to colonial conquests and their enduring discursive regimes, cultural norms, and moral economies” (Myers in Bakke 2018, 77). The writer Emily Ogden defines the positionality of “not knowing yet — possibly of not knowing ever,” as a valuable “discipline, one that requires practice, concentration, and study” (Aubry 2022). It might be a study that, in Moten's sense of “speculative practice,” may extend the disciplinary into the undisciplined (Moten in Shukaitis 2012).

“[I]n the fierce urgency of the now” co-constitutional affirmation “means thinking critically about world-making practices” that are used for acknowledging other worlds that co-inhabit this one planetary. According to Truman, an incisive interrogation of the methods used to unsettle the habitually known must engage “with an anti-racist, decolonial, and feminist politics” in order to prevent what calls itself radical empiricism from devolving into radical imperialism (Dumit in Bakke and Peterson, 2018: 58; Truman, 2021: 23, 25). Practice-based research holds a uniquely uncomfortable position of sitting between the fields. To stay with the troubles caused may provide a chance to sustain just the right amount of transdisciplinary noise to push existing boundaries and even hold some potential to (re)connect between worlds of various knowledges. The noise may be annoying, but worth to be listened to.

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TV Representations of Autism Spectrum Disorder:

A Cross-Cultural Analysis of South Korean K-Drama ‘It’s Okay to Not be Okay’

DOI: https://doi.org/10.33008/IJCMR.2022.01 | Issue 8 | May 2022

Amber Wisteria (Bath Spa University)

This work is one of two 2022 winners of our Centre for Media Research Student Award, a special prize awarded to a Media Communications student each year whose dissertation research shows exemplary quality, scope and ambition, and which has also been creatively reimagined to engage and benefit a wider industry audience. The winner of the Student Award is invited to publish their dissertation research alongside their accompanying creative project, and this work is also presented at our annual Degree Showcase event.

Abstract

This research took the form of two stages. On an academic level, it seeks to uncover the links between representations of ASD TV through a Cross-Cultural analysis of South Korea (SK) and the West by utilising a case study It’s Okay to Not be Okay. An argument is made that the case study represents an accurate understanding of ASD, but also of the family values surrounding it, such as the relationship those with ASD have with their family and siblings. Through a textual analysis, it was uncovered that the case study has accurate portrayals of ASD through its character Moon Sang-Tae (Oh Jung-Se). Not only this, but realistic portrayals of the relationship between family and siblings of disabled persons was uncovered, mainly relating to the character of Moon Gang-Tae (Kim Soo-Hyun). A reception analysis was then undertaken to understand if and how audiences in South Korea and the West reacted to these portrayals. Western/International audiences openly discussed the portrayal and family relationships and believed it to be accurate, as well as educational. South Korean audiences were reluctant perhaps due to a more conservative culture, to discuss the representation of ASD as well as the sibling-caretaker relationship. Therefore, there is a cultural difference in the way in which audiences interpret and understand representations of ASD, as well as familial relationships around those with ASD.

On a second level, and going beyond an academic dissertation, this research undertook industry research into the charity sector, focusing on Autism Speaks, in order to develop the conclusions from the research into a practical and factual awareness campaign about autism representations that introduces broader audiences to concepts of personability with diverse content and even taking in stories and accounts of those with ASD or the people around them. In a similar direction to Autism Speaks, short blogs or articles about understandings of ASD were used, expanding and improving perceptions of ASD on a cultural level. In doing so, not only have I broadened my understanding of the literature in my dissertation, but also have opened it up to feedback from audiences about how it may affect their lives.

Below is documentation of the awareness campaign work for Instagram, which includes interviews with the community, research into the relationship between the charity sector and perceptions of ASD, and other analysis. You can read the project's accompanying blog posts, which examine culture and ASD, highlight wider community interviews and propose strategic advice for the charity sector, online: https://amberwisteria.wixsite.com/portfolio

You can also follow Amber's research on her Instagram, which currently focuses on representations of Autism Spectrum Disorder on screen: @letschatrepresentation

Beneath the social media content you will find the complete dissertation in full.

Introduction

As more research into ASD is available to the public, there is more of a push to offer realistic portrayals of those with ASD, rather than the stereotyped, entertainment based ones.

The aims of this research are to uncover the prevalence, common understanding and appreciation of ASD in South Korea (SK) compared to the UK/US, through the usage of the case study of a TV drama It’s Okay to Not be Okay (2020) where ASD is presented in the form of one of the main characters. Also called I’m psycho but that’s okay in a direct translation from the Korean Hangul 사이코지만 괜찮아. This dissertation seeks to understand any cultural difference audiences might have about representations of ASD, as well as the family relationships surrounding those with ASD. By utilising this case study as a focal point, reviews will be investigated, and differences in expression of understanding or appreciation of the representation of ASD and the familial relationship surrounding it will be researched.

Literature Review

1 Autism, Social Theory and Sibling Studies

1.1 Autism and its definitions

Autism Spectrum Disorder, henceforth mentioned as ASD are a group of neurodevelopmental disorders including autism itself which derive from differences in the brain, sometimes stemming from genetic conditions (NHS, 2021, CDC ,2021). Causes of ASD are not conclusively known, but research into the levels of ASD which has been assimilated into the term of ‘spectrum’ to describe the overarching neurodevelopmental conditions (CDC, 2021, Troyb et al, 2011). While symptomatic expression of ASD can be very dependent on case, there are certain symptoms which are seen often, such as repetitive behaviour, difficulties in communication and socialisation, aggressive behaviours, restricted interests, or hyper-focused interests, (Honey et al., 2007, Zandt, Prior, and Kyrios, 2007, Worley and Matson, 2012). While this list is not exclusive to symptomatic expression of ASD as a spectrum disorder, it provides an indication of relevant behaviours expressed.

1.2 Sibling studies

McLaughlin et al., (2008) report that siblings feel the burden of their disabled sibling and often must grow up while being a partial carer for them. Siblings often feel invisible in the eyes of their parents and pity their disabled sibling for their ailments (Mclaughlin et al., 2008). Studies have indicated that the ‘non-disabled sibling may encounter less parental attention, increased care responsibilities, risk for poor peer relations, lower level of participation in outside activities and loss of companionship’ (Wolf, et al., 1998 cited in Naylor and Prescott, 2004). It was discussed that siblings felt like they were expected to be involved in helping their disabled sibling and were under increased pressure to perform either academically or in sporting activities to compensate for their disabled sibling, or to attempt to gain attention from their parent/s (Nixon and Cummings, 1999, Naylor and Prescott, 2004). Furthermore, but they felt that their free time was taken up by their disabled sibling (Naylor and Prescott, 2004).

There are also developmental problems associated with the siblings of disabled children with intellectual disabilities, including difficulties with social skills and behaviour problems, especially when the disabled sibling is older than them (Begum and Blacher, 2011). It is also noted that in adulthood, when the parents are no longer able to be a caregiver, siblings assume to have to hold an involved caregiver role and tend to have less of an emotional connection with their sibling as well as being more pessimistic about the future (Orsmond and Seltzer, 2007). But the studies’ findings were not all negative, it was found that siblings were more empathetic and open-minded, especially in terms of understanding disability and the importance of inclusion (McLaughlin et al., 2008, Hodapp et al., 2010).

2 Cultural standpoint and differences between UK/US and South Korea

Mandall and Novak (2005) detail that there may be cultural differences in the understanding, recognition, and treatment of ASD. They discuss the reasons behind this and resolve that it may be due to familial influences and the way symptoms are viewed. Cultural acceptance of certain symptoms may occur, as certain cultures express these symptoms as just a result of upbringing or a result of their environment, such as inability or difficulty in communication and social skills. This may also similarly occur with how much certain cultures accept the views of modern medicine and academic research. Countries also have their own methods and categories of diagnosing ASD which can also lead to different statistics and views of ASD (Matson et al., 2011). Daley (2002) comments that while ASD and other pervasive developmental disorders occur similarly in different cultures, the symptomology seems to differ based on location and on reflection, culture. They also note and concur with Lotter (1980) that parental education may play a factor on openness to accept that their child has ASD.

In a study by Matson et al., (2011) they approach a cross cultural examination by first dictating a generalised measurement of ASD, a 19-item checklist established as the DSM-IV-TR (APA, 2000). Using this generalised measurement they assessed participants from the US, UK, South Korea, and Israel. Participants from South Korea (SK) scored higher in items around communication and understanding, such as age-appropriate self-help and adaptive skills, verbal communication, language, expecting others to know their thoughts, experiences, and opinions without communication, and understanding age-appropriate jokes, sayings, or language development (Matson et al., 2011). These can more aptly be called social skills and dictate that those with ASD in SK are more likely to have a better understanding of social skills. As this was lower in both the US and UK, Matson et al., conclude that cultural differences, parents’ expectations, and different diagnostic screening for countries were the factors involved in these differences. In a follow up study completed in 2012 by Chung et al., they seek to understand the cross-cultural differences in challenging behaviours in children with ASD, taking the same four countries into account. Compared to the UK and US, the participants from SK showed noticeably fewer challenging behaviours which may also be attributed to cultural factors, or a resistance against the diagnosis or treatment of those with ASD in SK.

Encapsulating these studies and a study by Scarborough and Poon (2004) and Kim et al., (2011) locate culture to play a large role in the presentation of behaviour and development. Not only this but the cultural result in parents’ resistance to diagnostics and treatment is a contributing factor.

3 Autism in the media

3.1 General Outlooks

Those with disabilities have often been a marginalised group, and the ways in which disability is represented in the media influence and shape the perceptions of disabilities to a wider audience (Dean, Nordahl-Hansen 2021). Draaisma (2009) conceptualises ASD representations in film and TV into stereotype categories (Draaisma 2009). Draaisma reflects on many media representations of the ‘savant’, one who is incredibly gifted, or someone who is an anti-social, awkward member of society (Draaisma, 2009, Dean and Nordahl-Hansen, 2021). But there is also another flaw with even more recent interpretations of ASD on screen, where the diagnosis of ASD comes as something that completely changes one’s life, and becomes a disease that either the character or those around them should seek to cure and treat; which reflects a call to the audience to attempt treatment and curing of those with ASD around them, creating an environment of attempting to fix someone with ASD rather than accept them (Poe and Moseley, 2016).

3.2 Representations of Families of those with ASD

While there is not a lot of research into the on-screen dynamics of the family unit with a child with ASD, Allen (2017) discusses the dependency seen on screen for maternal nurturing, and how ASD is seen as ‘the big bad monster’ for the family environment (Allen, 2017). He comments that ‘Lifelong autistic dependency confounds popular autism narratives that promise to cure or significantly mitigate autistic symptoms through biomedical or behavioural interventions in childhood’ (Allen 2017). Often adult representations of ASD are those dependent on their caregivers, and that treatment and cure at the childhood stage would have negated the ‘monstrous’ adult with ASD (Kittay 2001; Simplican, 2015, Allen, 2017). Simplican also argues that the person with ASD and their caregivers reflect insensitivity and destructive tendencies towards each other (Simplican 2015). These struggles fluctuate and introduce a difficult balance that becomes everyday struggles for the caregivers and those with ASD who are dependent on their caregivers (Simplician, 2015).

3.3 The Savant & the anti-social

Despite being such a widely represented portrayal of ASD, Savant syndrome only occurs in fewer than one in three people with autism (Howlin, Et al., 2009). Yet, the media has become saturated with portrayals of this very convenient character plot (Nordahl-Hansen, Tøndevold, and Fletcher-Watson, 2018; Nordhal-Hansen, Oien and Fletcher-Watson 2018). ‘Savant syndrome’ itself is in fact another disorder, which can be related to not just ASD but to other developmental disorders as well as those with brain injuries, and so associating it directly with ASD is a misconception that popular media has developed (Treffert, 2009). While more ‘special’ abilities such as hyperfocus or better memory may be attributed to some individuals with ASD, the majority don’t display these in any extraordinary way (Happé, 2018). Parents of those with ASD often are frustrated with how the media portrayals of those with ASD as savants implicate that all the people with ASD are somehow specially talented (Happé, 2018).

Leading through to the other type of ASD representation, often overlapping with the savant stereotype is that of a lack of social skills. This comes in different forms but is often understood to entail the characters with ASD being unable to read the room, understand jokes, communicate effectively with their cohort, or understand politeness and courtesy (Poe and Moseley, 2016). Not only this, but there is also there is also a lack of understanding from the characters around the character with ASD, having no idea and not trying to understand what or how the character with ASD thinks and feels, leading to misunderstandings, comedic effect or simply an awkward moment (Draaisma 2009).

4 Family Values and Culture in South Korea compared to UK/US

4.1 Confucianism & value of family in South Korea

The inclusion of ‘values’ for this dissertation is understood to be ideals, behaviours and concepts that are upheld regardless of situations or events, and so become a universal appreciation of standards within the designated area that these values are held (Hitlin and Piliavin, 2004). SK, much like the rest of the Eastern world, has historically followed the views of Confucianism (Deuchler, 1992). Although there continues to be a shift in this environment as SK has moved more towards a democracy, as well as International influence from being more connected to the outside world, for the purpose of this study, the modernised family views will be considered while appreciating the formation of these values (Lee, 2018, Kim, 2009). There is an emphasis on hierarchy and respect through the ages in SK, where the head of the family will often be its oldest member who is usually male, and community is formed based around the idea of a leader and followers (Śleziak 2013, Kim et al., 2015, Deuchler, 1992). There remains a large placement on young people in SK to work towards the common goal of the state, contributing to the society and invocations requested by the state (Śleziak, 2013). Young people are motivated to achieve by almost a lack of privacy, as their exam results are published publicly, and there would be a degree of exclusion for those who do not achieve socially accepted grades (Śleziak, 2013). The shaming of those who underachieve is a factor in SK society derived from Confucianism, but even after becoming a republic, SK focuses on this as a way in which to control the views and perspectives of the SK people through public shaming of those not upholding the values set out by the government and society (Śleziak, 2013).

4.2 Cultures in the Western world

For the purposes of this dissertation, when talking about Western culture there will be a focus on the US and UK as they represent the biggest International audiences for K-Dramas. There is a focus on individuality and independence within both American and British Cultures, and young people are told to emphasise their individuality (Kim et al., 2013, Baker and Barg, 2019). Though there are differences depending on class status, such as middle-class families being more likely to instruct their children to be more individual, while working class families would influence their children to ‘value conformity and authority’ (Kohn, 1959, 1977 cited in Baker and Barg, 2019). Within the UK especially, there sits a wide variety of culture and dynamics as the UK has gone through a lot of restructuring, including the introductions of new cultures, religions, and societal expressions (Baker and Barg, 2019). In this way, it has been difficult to pinpoint specific values that are unilateral throughout the UK and the wider Western world, as they have benefited from a cross-cultural explosion of unification.

Overall, between both countries there is a more liberal approach towards the values of family, while remaining a family unit, there is a sense of individuality and understanding about each other, as well as ideas of respect moving both ways in the family environment (Kim et al., 2015, Feinberg et al.,2019, Woods, 2018). It is important to note that the usage of liberal is not of the political nature, but it entails minimal authority, policy, or influence from the state over the notions of family in the UK and US (Woods, 2018).

4.3 Culture of Family Comparison

In SK society, ‘togetherness, a clear hierarchy, and harmony among family members are highly valued, whereas independence, individualism, equality, and autonomy are often emphasized in Western cultures’ (Kim, 1997; Kim & Rye,2005 cited in Kim, 2015) While Confucianism and Liberalism seem to be quite different, there are some connecting factors, including that of democracy, though they take different approaches (Ackerly, 2005, He, 2010). In this way an inference to the family values expressed by both cultures can be connected in different ways. While the more liberal countries in the west express more of an individual nature, where each opinion counts, SK views on mutuality, where a people are connected in their views can also be seen in a democratic light, meaning that while their cultures differ, their concepts of expressing opinions and views are tethered (Ackerly, 2005).

Despite both SK and the Western World holding different values in family and culture, Kim et al., (2015) study indicates that differentiation in individuals, as well as family values and family functioning are high in both cultures (Kim et al., 2015). This study therefore indicates that both in SK and the US, the structure of family and the individual, both assert positivity and healthy family relations despite being founded on different principles (Kim et al., 2015). It should also be mentioned that on a wider scale, levels of the parents’ education influences the way their children are brought up, including things like conformity to authority, how hard working they are and independence (Baker and Barg, 2019).

Methodology

Textual Analysis

Firstly, this study will undertake an exploration into whether the case study of It’s Okay to Not be Okay reflects a representation of the theories discussed, while also recognising the shortcomings of the case study. The reason this case study has been chosen as it is not only recent (2020), but it is a popular series among both SK and Western audiences. This dissertation will explore the representation of Moon Sang-Tae as someone with ASD, as well as the relationship between him and his family. By investigating the character of Sang-Tae it can be discerned if the ideology of the content reflects the established research (Bertrand and Hughes, 2018). Such research will explore whether this character and series display authentic representations of ASD and familial relationships and if they reflect cultural status and stereotypes. While this dissertation may be effective as just a textual analysis, without factoring in the wider social context and cultural opinions the case study would not be effective.

Reception Analysis

Several reviews taken from different types of sources such as journalists, Google reviews, Naver and IMDb reviews will forward the second part of this analysis. This way an exploration of audience influence can occur, as media is often curated because of audience influence (Shrøder et al., 2003, Lippman, 1922 cited in Ruddock, 2001). Cultural and reception studies often go hand in hand as culture is often expressed through opinions and reviews throughout media and society (Bertrand and Hughes, 2018). By utilising audience reviews, an expression of the thoughts on the representations displayed within the series can be ascertained, to suggest whether audiences view the series as exhibiting realistic or stereotyped versions of ASD.

This follows on from the theories that the ways in which disability, predominantly intellectual disability, are viewed differently across cultures. A collation of responses signifies the opinions of the audience on this representation of ASD and the dynamics of those around Sang-Tae. While the sample size is low, it represents wider sentiments. This way a cross cultural comparison can be drawn to recognise features of the respective television audiences. It is important to discuss overall opinions of the K-Drama also, as even if the designated representations are well presented, if the case study itself is not well liked, it will have reluctant viewership.

For translation of SK language articles, translation software Google Translate will be used, along with the help of an SK national, who will also provide some cultural perspective on elements of this dissertation from the perspective of a SK citizen. This person will be referred to as K, as they would rather keep their identity private. In some cases, translation errors occurred, and so Gang-Tae may sometimes be called Kang-Tae, as well as genders being altered but this was acknowledged throughout translation.

Data collection

Eleven reviews from SK media, and the same number of reviews from UK/US sources will be analysed after being narrowed down from a wide pool to ensure a wide range of opinions are found, but there is not a repeating of opinions. Bertrand and Hughes (2018) infer that sample sizing can have a direct correlation with how accurate or in-accurate a study might be. An investigation into the differences or similarities of opinions will be conducted.

Evaluation of methods

Utilising a more textual analysis to confer if the case study fits into a category of accurate representation hinges on given literature being reflective of the current environment and experience of those with ASD. While there has been extensive research into such topics and this dissertation has pulled on a lot of them, it should be noted that there is a constant shift in the environment and understanding of ASD, its symptomatic expression and the family and societal connections involved. Identity can be difficult to trace by using the internet, but including official publications ensures that as much as possible the target audience is met (Wimmer and Dominick, 2011, Bertrand and Hughes, 2018).

Analysis

Textual Analysis

ASD representation in the form of Moon Sang-Tae

We are told that Moon Sang-Tae has asperges by his brothers’ interactions with their friends and strangers. While being 35 at the start of the series, Sang-Tae often displays characteristics unlike his age, such as an avid interest in children’s fairy-tale books, as well as dinosaurs. This, along with his struggling social skills inability to understand the wider world around him, creates a picture of the realisms of ASD from a learning perspective (Prior, and Kyrios, 2007, Worley and Matson, 2012).

The mannerisms and symptomatic expression that Sang-Tae displays throughout the course of the series may be understood as ASD, as he displays a lot of the symptoms that ASD is associated with, such as a lack of social skills, self-destructive behaviour, repetitive play, flapping and aggression (Matson et al., 2011, Lotter, 1980, Mandall and Novak, 2005). When looking at this symptomatic expression through the lens of a cultural representation, Sang-Tae does demonstrate a better understanding of being able to read the room, understand age-appropriate jokes, and language (Matson et al., 2011, Mandall and Novak 2005, Scarborough, and Poon, 2004). This in some ways concurs with the findings of the research from a cultural perspective as those in SK who have ASD show greater understanding of social skills and the aforementioned skills, but Sang-Tae also demonstrates some tendencies that are associated closer with the UK and US symptomatic expressions, this being aggression and challenging behaviours (Matson et al., 2011, Mandall and Novak, 2005). The reasonings behind this can only be speculated and would need further investigation into the production of the series.

The characters within It’s Okay to Not be Okay show a strong opposition to the usual cultural environment in SK, that being a resistance and lack of understanding about ASD, and instead sought to understand Sang-Tae as well as help his brother in the caregiver role (Matson et al., 2011). Throughout the series, we see many characters, some friends of Gang-Tae, or people who have gotten to know the brothers along the way, undertake a caregiving role for Sang-Tae when needed and being accepting of his ASD which is something unexpected when referring to the literature uncovered by the earlier research, as SK has a high resistance to not only diagnosis of ASD, but the management of this condition as anything else but being deficient (Matson et al., 2011, Mandall and Novak, 2005).

One could argue that the inclusion of Sang-Tae being a brilliant illustrator as the Savant trope being imagined like it has in so many other media but Sang-Tae himself makes a comment on this, saying that “I was born with the talent. It’s a natural born talent”. At no point in the series either, is it assumed by characters in the series that because Sang-Tae has ASD, that he should be skilled in any particular manner (Draaisma, 2009). Sang-Tae also displays memorization skills, but these are mainly displayed when he is watching his favourite TV program, wherein he recites the lines word for word. While this could be attributed to Savant syndrome it’s important to understand that repetitive behaviours are a part of ASD, and so if Sang-Tae has watched this cartoon numerous times it would be understandable that he has memorized the lines (Zandt, Prior and Kyrios, 2007). During the series though, Sang-Tae shows growth in his social skills, becoming less anti-social as well as the characters around him coming to understand him and communicate with him as best as they can, which is often omitted in representations of ASD, and replaced with comedic moments or ignorance for their different ways of thinking (Draaisma 2009, Poe and Moseley, 2016).

Family dynamics surrounding Moon Sang-Tae

We are introduced to Sang-Tae as his brother Gang-Tae must attempt to calm the director of the vocational school Sang-Tae goes to, as Sang-Tae has caused trouble at the school. We see that he is remorseful but can’t voice his concerns, other than commenting that he knows when his brother Gang-Tae is angry by looking at his facial expressions. While Gang-Tae doesn’t let his brother know, he is deeply frustrated by always having to look after his brother and live his life for his brother. The reality of sibling relationships under stress due to the inclusion of disability is portrayed much like how Mclaughlin et al., (2008) investigated.

There is a turning point however, as Gang-Tae begins to stand up to his brother and vent his frustrations. At first this comes out as clumsy and usually escalates to a physical fight as this clip demonstrates. These siblings, as they grow into adulthood may also become more disconnected and more pessimistic about the future, which Gang-Tae is as he struggles with having to adjust to continually moving because of his brother’s nightmares (Orsmond and Seltzer, 2007). While sometimes subtle, Gang-Tae begins to open-up and express himself more as his relationship with Ko Mun-Yeong (Seo Yea-Ji) develops, allowing him to have a better outlook of the future, but also a better relationship with his brother. The empathy and kindness showed by Gang-Tae throughout the series towards the patients of OK psychiatric hospital can be seen in parallel to the kindness and understanding he has shown to his brother, exemplifying the research done for real world equivalents of this type of relationship (Mclaughlin et al., 2008, Hodapp et al., 2010, Orsmond and Seltzer, 2007).

Most notably, Gang-Tae struggles with the pressure of having to grow up quickly to take care of his disabled sibling, had to compensate for him and had no time for himself which Naylor and Prescott (2004) comment is a large part of the realities of having a disabled sibling. While their mother seems to have the best intentions, at times she has told Gang-Tae that he exists only for Sang-Tae, once again forcing the role of caregiver onto him, and leading to the memory of his mother Gang-Tae has in this clip (Allen, 2017, Kittay, 2001, Simplican, 2015). But, as Sang-Tae and Gang-Tae’s mother dies early on in their lives, a decisive answer to this drama’s representations in reference to the relationship Sang-Tae holds with his mother is inconclusive (Peterson, 2006 cited in Allen, 2017).

Throughout the series, there is a theme of ‘belonging’ not only in the sense of having somewhere to belong, but also belonging to someone. The brothers’ relationship, through themselves is expressed as belonging to Sang-Tae. There are arguments throughout the series where Sang-Tae is starting to make his own decisions, but Gang-Tae struggles to accept that Sang-Tae knows what’s best for himself. By the end of the series, we see another shift in the relationship between Sang-Tae and Gang-Tae, as Sang-Tae begins to understand that his brother does not belong only to him. There were times where, in Sang-Tae’s own way of expressing he proclaimed Gang-Tae as his “Moon Gang-Tae belongs to Moon Sang-Tae” but, as the series final arc begins to settle, Sang-Tae tells his brother that “Moon Gang-Tae belongs to Moon Gang-Tae”, and it is seen as the acceptance from both brothers that they belong to themselves, and are not controlled by each other. This is a pivotal turning point, as the brothers now are able to rest easy and live their own lives rather than simply relying on each other; a positive ending and new beginning for the relationship between the brothers which sees the caregiver role forced upon Gang-Tae released, and with it the sibling burden placed on him, so he can explore the country with Ko Mun-Yeong, something that a lot of real life people with a disabled sibling feel that they cannot do as they are pressured into burdens of care (Wolf, et al., 1998 cited in Naylor and Prescott, 2004).

It seems decisively, in the field of the portrayal of a realistic sibling relationship wherein one of the siblings are disabled or impaired, It’s Okay to Not be Okay follows the trend which was uncovered by research done into these relationships (Mclaughlin et al., 2008, Naylor and Prescott, 2004, Orsmond and Seltzer, 2007).

Reception Analysis

Overall reviews, positive and negative sentiments

South Korea

Overall, the reviews from SK are positive, but there is a lot of discourse around some of the actors within the series, as there was controversy surrounding the female lead. Unfortunately, therefore it cannot be allocated that negative reviews are exclusive or inclusive of the story and characters of the K-Drama itself, so when talking about negative reviews this dissertation will attempt to clarify this by using the reviews themselves as evidence for a reflection of the opinions, rather than any scoring or rating. Negative reviews commented that they were unable to relate to the characters within the series as they displayed characteristics unlike that of real life (Article 5a).

The series was commended for having good chemistry between the main characters, inclusive of Sang-Tae, becoming a ‘family unit’ through the series (Article 1a, 4a, 7a, 9a, 11a). Family values, as discussed in the literature review, are an important part of SK culture. While there is a romantic plot unfolding between the two leads, audiences infer that Moon Sang-Tae has his own story of love as he accepts Ko Mun-Yeong into the family and they become a family unit, accompanying traditional SK views on family (Article 1a, 4a, 7a, 8a, 9a, Śleziak, 2013, Kim et al., 2015).

International

A more diverse range of reviews were used for the International reviews, as different platforms reflect different audiences as well as access to these platforms. Overall, reviews were positive, and the reviews commend the series for its positive representations of mental health in a realistic manner (Article 1b, 2b, 3b, 4b). Some reviews also mentioned that the series became educational for them, teaching them about mental health and how it can affect people, as well as the realism in the healing process (Article 3b, 4b, 7b, 8b, 9b, 11b).

There were contrasting thoughts on the series’ use of a fairy-tale lens to approach the storytelling, many International reviewers found that it hindered the story by making it less realistic, less relatable, and even introducing some inconsistencies (Article 5b, 10b). The largest part of this that reviews comment on is the mother’s arc, concluding with Ko Mun-Yeong’s mother returning and being thwarted by the three leads, as being unrealistic and not well explained (Article 1b, 5b, 8b, 10b). There were also reviews that held a more positive regard for the fairy-tale lens, as it allowed audiences step back from the often-dark drama and see it from a lighter perspective, as well as allowing for more simplistic explanations for how characters feel, since some characters throughout the series show restraint in expressing themselves (Article 1b, 7b, 9b, 11b).

Another mentionable reaction was the dismay in the female lead, as some reviewers believed that the mental illness displayed by the female lead was not an excuse for acting like a ‘sicko’ or ‘bitch’ throughout the series (Article 5b, 6b, 10b). While this view ascertained a minority, a useful comment in a review believes that if the gender roles were reversed, there would have been an explosion of negative reviews as it would be a male assaulting a female rather than vice versa (Article 5b). Though, most other reviews in the sample disagree, saying that the character of Ko Mun-Yeong has a lot of development throughout the series, and heals from her trauma and begins to move on (Article 1b, 7b, 8b)

Comparison

Both SK viewers and International viewers overall liked the series. Though there were some outliers, with important points on the actions of certain characters, as well as disappointment in the series for its fairy-tale lens. Within the debate of the fairy-tale lens, International audiences disliked it much more than SK audiences, which seems to stem from the unrealistic approach it offers. It could be said that it is due to K-Dramas utilising a more unrealistic formula for its audiences; Lin (2019) approaches this as a reflection of SK society wanting to be swept off their feet by romance dramas that may include many tropes and stereotypes (Lin, 2019). If so, SK audiences would be more accepting of these trope filled dramas than International viewers who have less access to these K-Dramas.

It is also worth mentioning the discrepancies that SK and International audiences had over the female lead. While SK viewers were more sympathetic to the female lead Ko -Moon-Young even if they could not relate to her, many International viewers had less sympathetic views, calling her toxic (Article 1a, 4a, 5a, 7a, 8a, 9a, 5b, 6b, 10b) A conclusion cannot be drawn whether this is inherently cultural, but speculation can be made that due to the changing environment in SK as it continues its democratic learning, there may be restraint in communication of negative ideas as a result of previous Confucianism views, rather than the more liberal and ‘free speech’ driven west (Deuchler , 1992, Lee, 2018, Kim,, 2009, Śleziak, 2013).

Reactions to the representations of ASD and family culture

South Korea

As the sample of reviews reflects overall opinions without too much duplication, noticeably absent are mentions of ASD and its place in the K-Drama. Most SK reviews do not mention ASD specifically, they opt for praising the actor Oh Jung-Se who plays Moon Sang-Tae and comment on his effectiveness in the role (Article 1a, 8a, 9a). It could be ascertained that due to cultural resistance, there was less of a push to comment about the ASD representations in this K-Drama as in SK culture, even parents of those with ASD may reject and deny any identification or treatment and we could be seeing this ‘out of sight out of mind’ kind of reflection through a lack of mention in the reviews (Grinker and Cho, 2013, Matson et al., 2011, Mandall and Novak, 2005). This cultural resistance appears to stem from the almost formulaic beliefs that are part of Confucianism ideals and the endeavours of parents and families to seem not only as normal as possible, but to be highly achieved and make the family proud (Śleziak, 2013, Kim et al., 2015). Though this could also stem from the angle that the character of Sang-Tae developed and grew and got a happy ending, despite ASD, as we see that others throughout the series develop and grow despite their mental afflictions (Article 1a, 4a, 7a).

There are however some reviews that do mention ASD (Article 2a, 3a, 8a, 10a, 11a). The ratio of SK reviews that mention ASD has remained even when a wider range of articles were considered, which means that the selected articles containing this ASD representation are a conglomeration of reviews in which SK audiences directly mention ASD. While some of these representative reviews come from disability or ASD related blogs, they relay the same understanding, and were also some of the only blogs found to openly communicate the accuracy or appreciation of the ASD representation in the case study (Article 2a, 3a). Although one such article comments on the misrepresentation of characteristics of ASD, it boiled down to thoughts on how ASD effects certain individuals, and the series was criticised by including certain lines of dialogue like ‘’I think the back of my head is sensitive. Is that the erogenous zone?’’ (Article 3a). This dialogue, while criticised, represents a misunderstanding of ASD, but even the author of this post reflects that the K-Drama attempts to show a wider awareness for such conditions, and should be commended for such (Article 3a). Though there has been research into ASD and Erogenous zones, concluding that some with ASD may have hypersensitivity of these zones (Griffioen, 2021)

Within these articles, the ASD representation was seen as positive and has provided a good medium to be educational to wider audiences who may not have known or understood the disorder; as well as offering a realistic and dynamic approach to understanding ASD (Article 8a, 10a, 11a) One review calls out a specific comedy scene including Ko Mun-Yeong and Sang-Tae, wherein Sang-Tae is his honest self and comments on Ko Mun-Yeong’s hair, causing her to retort back at him; Ko Mun-Yeong does not treat Sang-Tae any differently and is still her same self (Article 10a). Another article mentions a scene that happened earlier on in the drama, where a misunderstanding occurs because Sang-Tae approaches a young girl wearing dinosaur clothing, and as Sang-Tae loves dinosaurs he attempted in his own way to communicate with the girl, which ended up causing a concerning scene for everyone (Article 11a).The author of this article compares symptoms of ASD also discussed in this dissertation, offering a comparison to the K-Drama and the understanding that Sang-Tae resides in an accurately represented form of ASD (Article 11a).This article also discusses other parts of ASD in relation to the series, calling out how characters are recognised and accepted for their disabilities, and are allowed to shine (Article 11a). This, and the other articles hope that this K-Drama offers up a chance for more realistic representations and awareness of those with ASD and other mental or developmental disorders (Article 3a, 8a, 10a, 11a).

Within these articles that mention ASD representation, some also make mention to the characteristics of the Savant syndrome that Sang-Tae displays (Article 10a, 11a). While discussed in the textual analysis, Sang-Tae’s memorization skills and ability to paint can be inferred to be either because of ASD like these reviews state, or abilities that he has as well as ASD (Article 10a, 11a). Despite this, it is important to mention these reviews as it establishes the understanding that audiences have of ASD, and perhaps aligns itself with the representations of Savant syndrome previously seen in media and TV (Nordahl-Hansen, Tøndevold, and Fletcher-Watson, 2018, Nordahl-Hansen, Oien and Fletcher-Watson, 2018).

There is also an emphasis on the sibling relationship within this drama, running parallel with the mentions of family, further enforcing the importance of family in SK culture (Article 1a, 4A). While it is not expressly mentioned in the representative reviews, the discussion of a ‘happy ending’ for all the characters comes from the found freedom that the brothers find after having to rely on each other (Article 1a, McLaughlin et al., 2008, Orsmond and Seltzer 2007). Reviews also mention the journey of expression between the brothers as they learn to communicate with each other and become empathetic to each other and contained many ‘heart-warming’ moments for audiences (Article 4a, 7a, 8a, McLaughlin et al., 2008, Hodapp et al., 2010,).

International

There were more reviews Internationally that spoke directly about the representation of ASD within the K-Drama and spoke about the positivity and sense of connection it created as some reviewers compared it to friends or family around them who have ASD (Article 1b, 2b, 3b, 4b, 6b, 7b, 8b, 10b, 11b). These reviews also make mention to a scene that happens early in the drama, wherein we see the world from Sang-Tae’s perspective and how it was incredibly insightful for International audiences to take a step into their world (Article 1b, 10b).

More International audiences feel that they can sympathise and understand the character of Sang-Tae, as well as Gang-Tae as his caregiver (Article 2b, 3b, 6b, 7b). These reviewers who compare it to real life scenarios of their own experiences in these caregiver roles have expressed the accuracy and realistic manner that the ASD representation as well as the responsibilities of the caregiver and sibling relationships hold for them (Article 2b, 3b). Even reviews that do not expressly talk about their real live experiences, call for praise as they believe the topics of both mental health and ASD were displayed honestly and educationally (Article 4b, 6b, 8b). One reviewer, although giving a negative review for the series, commented that the only reason they continued to watch the drama was for Sang-Tae and the accurate and tear inducing portrayal of ASD (Article 6b).

It is important to note one of the reviews specifically talks about their own son with ASD, and how the series has provided them with informative examples, with some being negative (Article 3b). This is also greatly important, as the show does have moments as discussed previously where a toxic or unkind relationship or scenario happens, and this review has expressed that they understand that not only does the case study display excellent and educational understandings of ASD, but also has been shown in a manner almost to avoid at times, demonstrating the wide variety of representation for ASD and the caregiver role associated (Article 3b, 9b, Kittay 2001, Simplican, 2015).

International audiences’ reason that the development of Sang-Tae throughout the series, going from “Moon Gang-Tae belongs to Moon Sang-Tae” to “Moon Gang-Tae belongs to Moon Gang-Tae” as one of the pinnacles of the series (Article 7b, 8b). Throughout the series, he was seen to be an integral part, and having someone with ASD as part of the main cast has resonated well with International audiences who became attached to Sang-Tae and his found family (Article 1b, 7b, 8b, 9b, 10b, 11b). Sang-Tae’s development over the series, expressly not in a manner to cure his ASD by the end of the series, but to adjust to a changing environment and come to love his new family and be independent is a highlight for many International viewers, who found it heart-warming and tear jerking to watch Sang-Tae develop (Article 1b, 4b, 7b, 8b, 9b, 10b, 11b).

There are mentions to family, and how the trio become a ‘true family’ through the events of the series, as well as how realistic the interpretation of the caregiver role put upon Gang-Tae throughout the early parts of the series is ( Article 1b, 2b, 4b, 6b).This view on sibling relationships, especially those with a disabled sibling, matches with the research and confirms the realism in the representation of the positives and negative of sibling relationships in this K-Drama (Article 1b, 2b, 6b, Orsmond and Seltzer, 2007, McLaughlin et al., 2008,) It should also be mentioned that some International reviews included dismay for Gang-Tae being stuck to Sang-Tae and forced to take care of him (Article 1b, 6b). Despite holding more liberal views in terms of family values, audiences reacted well to the ‘wholesome’ depiction of siblings transforming into a family trio (Article 1b, 4b, Kim et al., 2015, Feinberg et al., 2019, Woods, 2018)

Comparison

There is different consideration given to the family values discussed in both SK and International reviews. While both make mention to the ‘wholesome’ family unit made up of the three leads, it is important to understand from a cultural standpoint that their appreciations come from different angles; SK being a more traditionally focused, family above all else, while more liberal views are expressed by International audiences (Śleziak, 2013, Kim et al., 2015, Feinberg et al.,2019). Regarding this, International audiences have expressed a concern for Gang-Tae as towards the beginning of the series he is very much bound by Sang-Tae; creating what International audiences feel is not a healthy relationship; which is reflected in the literature discussed (Begum and Bachler, 2011, Orsmond and Seltzer, 2007). In the International reviews, there is more of a focus and appreciation on the care and consideration that Gang-Tae gives to Sang-Tae, and how he gives up a lot for his big brother and is held down by him, while learning to let go during the series (Article 1b, Article 2b, Article 6b, Article 7b, Article 11b, McLaughlin et al., 2008, Orsmond and Seltzer, 2007) This discussion was not apparent in the SK reviews , and there was little mention to the burden of care (Article 4a). While definitively, a conclusion cannot be drawn as to why SK reviews were less likely to talk about the responsibility of care that the siblings endure, it could once again lead back to notions of family, where there is more of a pressure to perform family roles in SK, leading to this duty of care to be a given, not something that Gang-Tae is actively doing because of his love for his brother (Mandall and Novak, 2005, Lee, 2018, Kim et al., 2015, Nixon and Cummings, 1999).

Compared to SK reviewers, International reviewers were much more open and expressive of how they spoke about the representations of ASD in the K-Drama. Many SK reviews only opted to talk about the actor accurately portraying Sang-Tae, rather than discuss the accuracy or inaccuracy of the representation (Article 1a, 8a, 9a). It was discussed that this could be due to cultural resistance, and this may be even more likely as we see a lot of International reviews discuss their thoughts and feelings on the portrayal of ASD within the drama (Article 1b, 2b, 3b, 4b, 6b, 7b, 8b, 10b, 11b). While it cannot be concluded that the reason behind this disparity is due to cultural differences it can be inferred and through the literature discussed it seems the most likely scenario; with SK’s more conservative views leading to less of a discussion on representations of disability compared to more liberal views Internationally (Grinker and Cho, 2013, Matson et al., 2011, Mandall and Novak, 2005, Baker and Barg, 2019).

Delving into the reviews that do talk about the representations of ASD in the case study, both SK and International audiences believed it was accurate and educational, many SK reviews simply talked about it on the surface, and only two of them talked about wider views and information on ASD (Article 2a, 10a). International reviews often decided to go into greater detail, some mentioning their own experiences surrounding ASD and creating more of a relatability to the characters, as well as expressing their love for the character and his development throughout the series (Article 1b, 3b, 4b, 7b, 8b, 9b, 10b, 11b). In SK, disability is often discriminated against, and anything derived from the normal Confucianism family values becomes a struggle against the tide (Śleziak 2013, Park, 2017). Although we do see this environment shifting as SK continues to learn as a Republic, perhaps there is still a way to go for these kinds of representations to be talked about and expressed as freely as International audiences do.

It is interesting to discuss also, that some SK reviews who do mention ASD, also mention Savant syndrome, which occurs in fewer than one in three people with ASD, and how the character of Sang-Tae shows these characteristics (Article 10a, 11a, Howlin et al., 2009). What is increasingly interesting however, is that International audiences did not mention this in their reviews. While in this dissertation it has argued both ways that Sang-Tae does or does not display Savant syndrome, could this be SK attempt to open up dialogue about these types of skills? During research of Savant syndrome, it was uncovered that parents of those with ASD had often become frustrated with media portrayals of those with ASD having Savant syndrome, as it implicated that all people with ASD had special talent (Happé, 2018). With SK’s competitive environment, and the fact that SK takes part in the public shaming of those not upholding the values set out by the government and society, could this be their way of attempting to justify expressions of ASD, by entailing it as something expressly positive, and not something that debilitates or restricts those with ASD (Śleziak 2013)? It is important to note that these practices do not happen all over SK, especially as it shifts and learns from International cultures, but often students’ exam results are displayed publicly, as well as class averages, leading to a more competitive environment growing up (Śleziak, 2013).

From an interview with K about this, they discussed that from their experience rather than SK being against disability, they don’t talk about it much because they just want to treat them as ‘normal people’. K recounts a time when they were in school and had a physically disabled classmate, and how they and their friends interacted with this person without restraints due to their disability. As K is a young person in SK, this could reflect a more optimistic approach with younger generations, as age was not considered during debates about disability, discrimination, and opinions on the case study. Perhaps an avenue of future research would be any possible link to viewership, age and identity embedded within a similar case study surrounding disability. In terms of role and rule resistance for SK, K comments that from their experience it’s half and half when it comes to upholding values set out by society. They mention that there is a lot of expression within their culture, which may be to do with the shifting environment within SK to a much more democratic and open view. Despite this, literature and experience still entail SK to be quite conservative in certain ways, including expressions of disability.

Conclusion

From a coalition of both a textual analysis and reception analysis, this dissertation set out to identify the intent, accuracy and understanding of ASD as well as the family values and roles situated around it as it is represented in TV, using the case study of a Korean drama It’s Okay to Not Be Okay (2020).

The textual analysis identified areas in which accurate ASD representation was found, including in the symptomatic expression of the character Moon Sang-Tae and how he interacted with the world around him and the pivotal development he underwent. Gang-Tae’s role as a caregiver to Sang-Tae expresses the explored literature on sibling relationships with disabilities, and encapsulates research into sibling relationships, as well as the understanding of both the positive and negative connotations such as empathy and understanding, arguments and frustration and learning to understand each other (Hodapp et al., 2010, Orsmond and Seltzer, 2007. Mclaughlin et al., 2008). Therefore, this case study contains a progressive and modernised representation of ASD and family relationships surrounding it.

The reception analysis identified key differences in SK audience and International audience understanding and appreciation of ASD, and its representations in TV. SK reviewers were less likely to talk about ASD, instead opting to talk about the effectiveness of the actor. When they did speak about it, their focus was either on raising awareness for ASD and related conditions or discussing Savant syndrome. As discussed, this seems to come from a cultural understanding that these things should go unsaid, as well as a cultural resistance to the diagnosis and understanding of ASD. The South Korean citizen who was interviewed during the dissertation commented that in their opinion it was the former, that these kinds of things would go unsaid as to not raise the question of making people with ASD feel different or anything but ‘normal’. The role of the caregiver Gang-Tae was briefly discussed, but the reviewers focused more on the notions of a family between the three main characters and how they each helped one another.

International reviewers were more open to discuss the relevant representation of ASD, and some even discussed personal experiences with ASD. An important mention for International viewers was the development of Sang-Tae throughout the series, becoming more independent and understanding others better. As cultural differences were a main theme in this dissertation, the reasoning behind these differences can be said to be the difference in cultural values, between family culture and disability culture (Grinker and Cho, 2013, Matson et al., 2011, Mandall and Novak, 2005, Baker and Barg, 2019).

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Appendix

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