Rethinking Methodology Matters in Art and Design Education Research Through the White Cube

In his March 1976 germinal work Inside the white cube, Brian O'Doherty critiqued the modernist gallery space as a highly ideological construct that shapes our perception and understanding of art.O'Doherty located the white cube as a purified, clinical container that claims timelessness, power and autonomy.Within its walls, art is housed in a hermetic space of aesthetic contemplation, severed from politics, histories and life itself.Today, we find ourselves confronting a similar challenge in academic publishing, where the peer-reviewed journal article functions as a kind of intellectual white cube.Just as the gallery space claims neutrality while imposing specific viewing behaviours, the academic article asserts objectivity while enforcing particular ways of thinking and knowing to its subject.Much like the ideological constructs that permeate how we create, curate and engage in and with art, the subject/object tension in academic work is rooted in the privileging of particular onto-epistemological ways of knowing, being and doing.This privileging surfaces through the methodological choices that underpin both academic knowledge creation, with these choices shaping what gets found, felt and reflected in academic outputs.Much of the research featured in iJADE reveals the generative tensions that emerge from the interplay of practice and theory, shaped by people in place.Ultimately, it is the ripple effect of dilemmas and the decisions made in response that determine which-and whose-knowledge is deemed to matter, as well as that which gets overlooked or left behind.This special issue of iJADE explores the methodological possibilities that emerge from critically unsettling the constraints of the white cube and opening that seal.By engaging with its opacity and edge conditions, we crack open the frame to explore what porous rethinking (Benjamin 1999) might reveal for the methodologies brought to art and design education research.In this context, porosity helps surface permeable boundaries between inside and outside, subject and