The Integrative Potentials of Arts-based Research for the Study of Culture: A Reflection on The Lagoon Cycle by Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison

The future of the study of culture can generate reflections from several different perspectives involving issues related to contents, methodologies, and political stances, as well as academic and/or social relevance, and epistemological ethics and responsibility. For early career researchers like myself, this can be ambig-uously motivating, as a set of opportunities to engage in new and challenging endeavors, but also can sometimes seem a tiring and frustrating practice, partic-ularly when one encounters outdated academic structures that are too rusty to be moved and transformed. This 360 foot long and eight foot tall mural is an extended semi-autobiographical dialogue, with stories and anecdotes, plays between two characters, a ‘Lagoon Maker’ and a ‘witness’, and serves to establish the philosophical basis for the ecological argument in many later works. Beginning in Sri Lanka with an edible crab and ending in the Pacific with the green-house effect, it seeks ever-larger frames for a consideration of survival. It looks at experi-mental science, the marketplace and megatechnology, finally posing the question, “What are the conditions necessary for Survival” and concluding that it is necessary to reorient consciousness around a different database.