Research Statement
My research sits at the intersections of philosophy, art, and education, with a focus on how diverse human and more-than-human experiences become perceptible, thinkable, shareable, and teachable through artistic practice. Diversity is the throughline of my research: embodied diversity in human perception and experience, biocultural diversity in human–more-than-human relations, and the ways these forms of difference become entangled through artistic and educational practice. Drawing on phenomenology, comparative philosophy, and arts-based research, I investigate how art can reveal forms of experience, agency, and knowledge that dominant able-bodied, anthropocentric, or disciplinary frameworks often overlook. Across my work, I approach art not only as an object of interpretation but also as a mode of inquiry through which different ways of perceiving, knowing, creating, and inhabiting the world can be investigated.
The Hyper-Dialectical Body: Embodiment, Perception, and Environment
The theoretical foundation of my research is the hyper-dialectical body, a framework I developed through my dissertation, Hyper-Dialectical Body in Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology and Its Implications in Art Education. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty, I conceptualize the body not as an autonomous organism encountering an external world, but as a dynamic configuration of sensory, bodily, cultural, material, and environmental relations. I theorize interconnections across sense, body, and environment to understand perception as hyper-dialectical: not a simple opposition or synthesis, but an open and continually evolving relation. This framework allows me to connect questions often separated within art education, including sensory and cognitive difference, artistic perception, disability, ecological relationships, and more-than-human experience.
My monograph, Hyper-Dialectic Body: Chinese Philosophy, Phenomenology, and a New Environmental Aesthetics, currently under contract with Springer Nature, extends this framework by bringing Chinese philosophy into conversation with Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology. The project develops an environmental aesthetics grounded in lived entanglements among body, perception, and environment. Comparative philosophy is important to this work not simply as a comparison between traditions but as a method for questioning assumptions about embodiment, aesthetic experience, and human relationships with the world.
My methodological work similarly develops phenomenology in dialogue with artistic practice. I co-edited with Tyson E. Lewis a special issue of Visual Arts Research, “Phenomenological Methods in the Arts,” forthcoming in Winter 2026, which brings together international scholarship examining methodological innovations in phenomenological and artistic inquiry. I also draw on arts-based research as a boundary-crossing methodology capable of generating knowledge across disciplinary contexts. In “A Deleuzian Interrogation on the Independence and Interference of Art and Science,” published in Research in Arts and Education, I examined how arts-based research complicates conventional boundaries between artistic and scientific knowledge. Together, these projects establish the theoretical and methodological foundation for my research on embodied and ecological diversity.
Embodied Diversity: Disability Creativity and Reverse Inclusion
One major direction of my research investigates embodied diversity, particularly disability, sensory difference, and neurodivergence. Drawing on years of collaborative art practice with students with disabilities and neurodivergent learners, I approach disability not primarily through deficit but as a distinctive way of being-in-the-world that can disclose alternative perceptual, aesthetic, and creative possibilities. This perspective shifts the question from how students who differ from established norms can be accommodated toward how different forms of embodiment might transform what art education understands as perception, creativity, and learning.
The concept of reverse inclusion develops this proposition pedagogically. Reverse inclusion describes more than the structural movement of nondisabled participants into disability-centered spaces. I conceptualize it as a pedagogical and phenomenological reversal through which normative assumptions about perception, ability, and creativity become objects of inquiry, while disability experience becomes a source of pedagogical and aesthetic knowledge. In this framework, inclusion is not assimilation into an established norm; it becomes an opportunity to reconsider how the norm itself has been constructed.
Building on this work, I am developing critical phenomenological methods that center lived sensory and cognitive experience. Drawing on phenomenological and critical reflection, these methods make assumptions about bodies, perception, and ability available for examination rather than taking them for granted. Through arts-based research, I investigate how artistic encounters can surface and disrupt ableist assumptions while foregrounding modes of perceiving and expressing that are frequently overlooked. This research will inform a practice-oriented project on perception-based pedagogy, including the development of flexible approaches to curriculum and assessment that value process, perception, agency, and differentiated forms of creativity.
Biocultural Diversity: Art, Plants, and More-than-Human Relations
A parallel and increasingly interconnected direction of my research examines biocultural diversity and more-than-human relations. While my disability research questions normative assumptions about human bodies and perception, my ecological research questions anthropocentric assumptions about agency, knowledge, and creativity. Across these contexts, I ask a shared question: How might art and art education make perceptible forms of experience, agency, and knowledge that dominant human-centered or able-bodied frameworks tend to overlook?
My work in critical plant studies examines plants not simply as artistic subjects or environmental resources, but as participants in ecological and cultural relationships and as living archives of practical, aesthetic, and place-based knowledge. I co-edited Linking Arts with Biocultural Conservation, Restoration, and Communication(Springer Nature, 2026), an interdisciplinary volume bringing art and the humanities into conversation with biocultural conservation. My contributions examine marginalized plants and the aesthetic, ecological, and cultural knowledge associated with them, demonstrating how Indigenous and local knowledge practices can contribute to environmental understanding, art education, and community engagement.
Building on this work, I am developing international and place-responsive collaborations connecting art education, biodiversity, environmental humanities, and biocultural conservation. These projects explore how field-based observation, artistic practice, philosophical reflection, and engagement with local knowledge can diversify art education while cultivating environmental literacy. They also extend my interest in artistic practice as a form of interdisciplinary inquiry capable of connecting scientific, cultural, aesthetic, and ecological ways of knowing.
Future Research: Toward a Perception-Based and Ecological Art Education
My future research brings these trajectories together through three interconnected orientations: reverse inclusion and disability creativity, critical phenomenological methods, and biocultural art education. Rather than treating disability studies and ecological inquiry as unrelated specializations, I understand them as addressing a shared philosophical and educational problem: how dominant frameworks determine which bodies, perceptions, forms of knowledge, and modes of existence become visible and valued.
Across these projects, my contribution is theoretical, methodological, and pedagogical. Theoretically, the hyper-dialectical body provides a framework for understanding embodiment as a dynamic entanglement of sensory, cognitive, cultural, material, and environmental relations. Methodologically, I develop phenomenological and arts-based approaches for investigating forms of experience and agency that normative frameworks often overlook. Pedagogically, I translate these insights into perception-based and place-responsive approaches to art education that value diverse ways of sensing, making, knowing, and inhabiting a shared world.
Ultimately, my research asks how art education might move beyond simply accommodating difference toward recognizing diversity itself—human, sensory, cultural, biological, and ecological—as a generative condition for perception, creativity, knowledge, and education.