How Do You “Do” Language? Extending an Educational Conversation on Relational Aesthetics to Three Artists

This paper discusses a frame to reflect on the role of aesthetics in the development of a multimodal approach to critical pedagogy for adult education.We are three women, currently on a research journey, aiming to re-connect some binaries in our lives: personal and professional, theory and practice, body and affect.What could be learned in conversation with three different artists (a musician, a dancer, and a visual artist) about the regimes of truth in our language, and what/who is ‘kept out’ from adult education research and learning settings? Will new con-versations, new dialogical detours into other modes of knowing and being, bring to life the circularity of syntactic and semantics? We are going to first each interview one artist auto/biographically; and then, by cooperatively writing as inquiry, we are going to draw on the interview material to play with academic language, identity, and spirituality in adult education.