Sarah Amira de la Garza is Associate Professor and Southwest Borderlands Scholar at the Hugh Downs School of Human Communication at Arizona State University.
She holds a Ph.D. in Speech Communication, and a D.Min. in Creation Spirituality, with an emphasis on Art as Meditation. She combines her interests in spirituality, spiritual practice, and human communication in work that stresses: the performance of personal and ethnic identity, uses of performance, ritual, and deep reflexive practices in auto/ethnographic research, with a commitment to uncovering ways to stimulate critical thinking on the road to change and recovery from habituated patterns of interaction and addictions.
She has held two Fulbright scholarships to Mexico, where she was inspired to create the Four Seasons of Ethnography, an ontological approach to inquiry that is rooted in native American indigenous practices of observation and circular order, Jungian practices of deep shadow work and active imagination, accessing embodied performative wisdom, and expressive creative writing.
She directs the Innovative Inquiry Project at the Hugh Downs School of Human Communication at ASU, and leads the work to launch the Journal of Mindful Heresy, an upcoming peer-reviewed open source journal and online blog.
Her book, Maria Speaks: Journeys through the Mysteries of the Mother in My Life as a Chicana (Peter Lang, 2004), introduces her application of the methodology of Art as Meditation and was inspired by her work with Matthew Fox and Anita Barrows, and researched while on a Fulbright grant to Mexico. In it, she explores the experience of women of Catholic Mexican ancestry through an autoethnographic performative examination of her own life, as well as through the creation of new prayers and poetry to various representations of the divine feminine and archetypal feminine icons from Mexican history.
She directs works by community artists as well as developing her own pieces, including the recent, “Fifteen Minutes with Frida,” performed at the Vision Gallery and ASU Art Museum during the summer of 2011. Her voice work continues to be part of the installation, “Beaten With a Hammer,” currently on display in Marfa, Texas. She is working on her second book,and a textbook on the use of grounded theory methods for creative and performative texts.
