Author Archives: Nicole Brown

Still Moving: Conversations with Senior Professional Dancers Still Performing

Image of a dancer wearing red pointe shoes in red dust. Photograph taken whilst filming in the outback of SW Queensland.

Source: SYork-Price

In 2023, Dr Sonia York-Pryce kindly presented her work as part of our Practice As Research seminar series. At the time, Sonia reflected on ethical considerations in her work beginning with an outline of the context of her work and what inspired her research. She then explored the taboo of ageing and aesthetics and highlighted the difference of the older dancer’s body. She drew on her expertise in ageism and embodiment to talk about Practice As Research, which for her meant the creation of dance films with national and international senior professional dancers, but also with herself as a dancer. Since then, Sonia’s book Still Moving: Conversations with Senior Professional Dancers Still Performing has been published with Intellect, Bristol/Chicago.

The concept of this book is “dance and ageing” and is driven by the possibility that everybody in the Western dance community, in particular young dance students, but also readers beyond the parameters of dance, will profit if the voices of senior professional practitioners are heard. It features dancers from USA, Canada, UK, Europe and Australia, all interviewees are practitioners of stature and prominence who continue to contribute, despite ageism, to the dance industry. They are inspiring role models for younger dancers but also for an ageing demographic in society; it is a celebration of the body and the indomitable urge to create and express. Conversations with twenty senior professional dancers explore how they sustain performing despite the inground ageism that exists through society and is mirrored within the dance world. This cohort of older dancers, aged between 41 and 107, illuminate inspiring life stories that convey their passion to continue performing, while overcoming the prejudices in an artform that champions youth.

“Still Moving rightly spotlights the skills and artistry of senior dancers when the stage often dims. This ground-breaking book celebrates the expertise and form that only maturity can bring. A must-read for anyone ready to rethink the curtain call and dismiss dance-by dates.” Mark Edward, author of Mesearch and the Performing Body

“Still Moving brilliantly explores the lived experience of dancers throughout their lives with an embodied wisdom. Through astounding interviews, York-Pryce, a dancer herself and an astute writer, addresses ageism and invites the reader to the truth that dance is necessary to the dancer as breath is to the lungs. A truly inspirational book, affirming how dancers work with limitations and the necessary beauty to celebrate dance as a life-long offering. Here on these pages written between skin and bone, dance takes flight as the body shifts and changes. Be ready to be transformed.” Professor Celeste Snowber

Sonia is currently in the 2nd year of her PhD research at Flinders University, Adelaide, South Australia, where she is investigating three companies that champion “dance and age”: the Netherlands Dans Theater, (NDT3), Dance On Ensemble Berlin, and the Australian Dance Artists.

5.8. Sonic ways of knowing: researching life using sound

Seminar on the 10 June 2026.

Sonic ways of knowing: researching life using sound

Register here for the seminar.

In this session Richard Longman explores how sonic practices can serve as creative modes of organisational inquiry.

Source: RLongman

Richard begins with the Organising Songs series, where he approached popular music not as cultural backdrop but as a way of knowing organisations – their tensions, atmospheres, and affective architectures. Treating each track as an analytic site allowed questions of voice, power, conflict, and emotion to emerge through the grain of sound rather than through thematic reduction. As this work evolved, Richard widened the listening field to include everyday sonic textures such as the hum of data servers, the background noise of open-plan offices, the chants of protest in the street, and the crackle of poor phone reception. These sounds reveal how organisational life is shaped, disciplined, and occasionally disrupted by the sonic environments it produces. Alongside these textures, Richard approaches silence as an active presence: a material through which refusal, exclusion, and organisational power can be heard. Drawing on sound studies and creative research traditions, he considers how writing itself becomes a form of sonic practice: a method for tracing atmospheres and affective residues that rarely surface in managerial accounts. The session proposes songs, sounds, and silences as relational methods that unsettle dominant ways of understanding organisations and open space for more nuanced, sensory, and politically attentive forms of analysis.

Register here for the seminar.

Richard is a researcher, educator, and academic leader working at the intersections of critical management studies and the humanities. His work explores how organisations are shaped by the ethical, political, and sensory conditions of contemporary life. Trained originally as a classical musician, he brings an embodied and affective sensibility to organisational inquiry, using sound, silence, and listening as ways of unsettling dominant managerial assumptions and tracing the atmospheres through which power circulates. His research spans critical organisation studies, cultural and creative industries, and emerging conversations on sonicity in organisational life. Through projects ranging from opera companies to open-plan offices, he investigates how practices of listening, rhythm, noise, and refusal open questions of voice, authority, and inclusion. This work informs his public scholarship, including Organising Songs, a Substack series that uses music and the unsounded world as analytic and political method. Richard currently serves as Associate Head of School at The Open University Business School, where he his responsibility is for the taught postgraduate programmes. Across his roles, he works to cultivate epistemic plurality, inclusive pedagogy, and organisational spaces capable of engaging with the complexities and contradictions of polycrisis.

Subscribe to the recordings:
Video hosted on the PAR YouTube channel.
Audio hosted on the PAR Buzzsprout channel and can be listened to on Spotify, Apple podcasts or on other RSS podcast apps.

The Practice As Research network with its resources is free and always will be, but it does of course incur costs to run and to keep it running. If you use it and benefit, enjoy it and would like to keep it going, please, consider leaving something in the tip jar. Thank you!

5.7. Creative writing as analysis in research with children: putting a light in the window

Seminar on the 7 May 2026.

Creative writing as analysis in research with children: putting a light in the window

Register here for the seminar.

Source: LGorellBarnes

In this session Luci Gorell Barnes will present on how she has used creative writing within analysis in her doctoral research.

Luci will present a creative writing method that she developed as part of her PhD analysis, in which she produced ‘portraits’ of individual children. Arundhati Roy (2009, p.134) reminds us to ‘never simplify what is complicated’ and this creative analysis process came out of her desire to deepen her understanding of what she had learned from her encounters with each child rather than homogenising her data into broad themes. She will discuss how being immersed in her data informed her writing as she considered the issues the children had explored, drew on metaphors and images they used, and remembered how they had interacted with her and each other. She saw each ‘portrait’ as a ‘light in the window’, guiding her through ‘the woods’ of her analysis and findings, and supporting her to write embodied interpretive accounts that foregrounded the relational nature of the study. Couceiro (2024, p. 304) challenges the idea that being creative is ‘antithetical to being systematic or structured’ and she found that engaging with her data in this highly subjective and ‘interruptive’ way (Clark, 2024, p. 3) meant she brought a level of accuracy and relationality to her analysis that she might not have otherwise found.

Register here for the seminar.

Luci Gorell Barnes is a socially engaged artist and artist-researcher. Her practice is concerned with developing creative participatory inquiries with people who find themselves on the margins for one reason or another, and issues of inclusion and access are central concerns in her work. She is interested in finding flexible and responsive processes that allow us to think imaginatively with each other and ourselves and her practice contributes to a community of disciplines that embraces academic research, family support, community development, health services, and education. She is currently a full-time PhD student on the Postgraduate Research Programme in the School of Education and Childhood at UWE Bristol. Her study explores how relationally engaged arts-based methods can support minoritised children to express, reflect on, and amplify their lived experiences and perceptions.

Subscribe to the recordings:
Video hosted on the PAR YouTube channel.
Audio hosted on the PAR Buzzsprout channel and can be listened to on Spotify, Apple podcasts or on other RSS podcast apps.

5.6. Theatre of the Oppressed: Reflections and Provocations from an Artist/Researcher

Seminar on the 26 March 2026.

Theatre of the Oppressed in Place-Based Research: Reflections and Provocations from an Artist/Researcher

In this session Olivia Maurer will present her experience using practice as research working with participatory theatre in a traditional policy and social science context.

Source: OMaurer

Drawing on her ongoing doctoral research, Olivia will share insights on conducting practice as research and how the duality of the artist/researcher identity has impacted her positionality, duty of care, and outcomes of the project. The challenges and potentialities of engaging in PAR within a PhD process will also be evaluated. This session will also discuss how practice as research is not just a “nice to have” in an urban studies and cultural geography research landscape, but a needed contribution to the field. We will consider how the body is a vital source of knowledge of place and a crucial lens through which we can gain a better understanding of place-based experiences. We will also examine how creative practice facilitates a space where this embodied knowledge is able to be teased out and reflected upon.

Download Olivia’s presentation here.

Olivia Maurer is a postgraduate researcher in Urban Studies and Social Policy at the University of Glasgow, with a background in public policy and arts-based community engagement. Her PhD works in partnership with the AHRC Place-Based Research Programme to build an evidence base of methodologies that are able to surface the “felt experience of place,” specifically focused on using Theatre of the Oppressed as both a research method and a policy engagement tool. Olivia is also a community theatre practitioner, with her work recently being showcased at the UK Parliament as one of 100 Creative Agents of Climate Change.

Subscribe to the recordings:
Video hosted on the PAR YouTube channel.
Audio hosted on the PAR Buzzsprout channel and can be listened to on Spotify, Apple podcasts or on other RSS podcast apps.

5.5. Social Fiction as a means of ‘unflattening’ disabled children’s educational childhoods

Seminar on the 4 February 2026

Social Fiction as a means of ‘unflattening’ disabled children’s educational childhoods.

In this session Jill Pluquailec will present her use of Social Fiction when researching disabled children.

Source: JPluquailec

This seminar presents a methodological reflection on the use of social fiction as a means of ‘unflattening’ disabled children’s educational childhoods. Jill argues there is a critical need for new ways of exploring the lived experiences of neurodivergent and disabled children to complicate ‘flat’ understandings that deny the embodied, affective, socio-spatially mediated experience of school life. She does this by making a case for social fictions as an ethical methodology and reflecting on techniques she used in developing a short story social fiction. She makes the case for why and how fiction-based methods destabilise dominant ways of knowing, seeing, teaching, and intervening with disabled children. Jill concludes by offering a series of ‘what if’ questions about the future development of social fiction as a methodology in Disability Studies and Education, one which brings greater nuance and a sense of three-dimensionality to understandings of neurodivergent bodies and minds in school spaces.

You can read Jill’s short story social fiction, If Walls Could Talk, here.

Source: JPluquailec

Dr Jill Pluquailec, Senior Lecturer in Autism, Sheffield Institute of Education, Sheffield Hallam University
Jill’s teaching and research is concerned with social justice for disabled children and families with a particular interest in the ways bodies and spaces in education are both produced and reproduced within matrices of power and surveillance. Her work sits within Critical Disability Studies, Disabled Children’s Childhood Studies, and Critical Autism Studies centring on destabilising dominant knowledges in relation to what it means to be, and be understood, as marginalised. Jill has a specific commitment to social justice and ethics for groups that have been historically excluded or oppressed in both research design and practice.

Subscribe to the recordings:
Video hosted on the PAR YouTube channel.
Audio hosted on the PAR Buzzsprout channel and can be listened to on Spotify, Apple podcasts or on other RSS podcast apps.

5.4. Weaving and untangling: using craft and creative process as a researcher-practitioner across the doctoral journey

Seminar on the 13 January 2026

Weaving and untangling: using craft and creative process as a researcher-practitioner across the doctoral journey.

Source: CKinnunen

In this presentation, Cynthia shares some of the ways in which she has been making use of creativity in multiple ways throughout her doctoral research work, including as reflexive practice and as data co-creation with participants.

Download Cynthia Kinnunen’s slides.
Access Cynthia Kinnunen’s song.
Access the Unpsychology substack.

Cynthia Kinnunen is a music educator, community musician, and doctoral researcher based in Guelph, Ontario, Canada and at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario. As a practitioner, she is influenced by community music principles, responsively blending pedagogy and participation in her musicking activities. In her current doctoral research, she is engaging with multiple methods, including a/r/tography and narrative inquiry, in a relational and creative exploration of the experiences of women participating in her community music ensemble, including herself as practitioner with a multi-modal iterative and reflexive process.

Subscribe to the recordings:
Video hosted on the PAR YouTube channel.
Audio hosted on the PAR Buzzsprout channel and can be listened to on Spotify, Apple podcasts or on other RSS podcast apps.

5.3. Stitches of Self: Restorative textile-based approaches to define the lived experience

Seminar on the 3 December 2025

Stitches of Self: Restorative textile-based approaches to define the lived experience.

In this session Dr Suzy Tutchell will report on her research using textile-based approaches to explore lived experience.

Source: STutchell

Stitches of Self was and is an inclusive, textile-based research project exploring the restorative and empowering potential of textile work for those experiencing displacement. Through sensory and somatic approaches, the project engaged teacher education students working with children, young people and families with forced migration experiences, using art-engaged, non-verbal activities to prompt hidden stories of resilience and identity. By creating safe, listening-friendly spaces, the project explored how textile methods can support healing, amplify voices, and open dialogue where words may falter. Developed in acknowledgement of Refugee Education UK’s work, Stitches of Self highlights the power of creative research to foster dignity, hope and collective understanding.

Access the slides for Dr Tutchell’s presentation from here.

Source: STutchell

Dr Suzy Tutchell is Associate Professor in Art Education at the Institute of Education, University of Reading. As an artist-researcher-teacher, she explores diverse, sensory and creative methods at the intersection of art and social justice. Suzy leads the art specialism on the BA Primary Education programme and the creativity pathway on the master’s in education, whilst also serving as School Director for Racial Equity and Justice. With a background as an art subject leader and consultant in London schools, she brings over fifteen years’ experience in higher education to her work in shaping inclusive and imaginative practices in education.

Subscribe to the recordings:
Video hosted on the PAR YouTube channel.
Audio hosted on the PAR Buzzsprout channel and can be listened to on Spotify, Apple podcasts or on other RSS podcast apps.

5.2. Embodied knowing: Foregrounding the multi-sensoriality of the body as epistemological site

Seminar on the 14 November 2025

Embodied knowing: Foregrounding the multi-sensoriality of the body as epistemological site

In this session Dr Elsa Urmston will consider the body as a site of knowledge as well as a tool for generating knowledge.

Source: EUrmston

Embodiment is a complex construct with varied meanings in different fields. What unifies research on embodiment is its emphasis on the body, where embodied knowledge production challenges Cartesian privileging of mind over body as the locus of knowledge. Drawing on phenomenological understandings of embodiment where the body is proposed as an epistemological site, and movement, alone and with others is the “originating ground of our sense-makings” (Sheets-Johnstone, 1999), this presentation is grounded in research exploring students’ and teachers’ embodied pedagogical experiences in vocational dance education.

In this session, participants will be invited to consider filmic data gathering and analysis approaches which move beyond documentation and (re)presentation, to instead evoke complex, multi-sensorial, subjective positions and experiences. To do this, we will explore the visual, sonic and sensory affordances of data gathered from body-mounted cameras as a means to get close to research participants’ embodied experiences. There will also be time to reflect on whether such data can be analysed without an over-reliance on reductive written and linguistic documentation, to question whether embodied knowledge can ever adequately capture and reflect its ontological position when it is disseminated.

Sheets Johnstone, M. (1999). The primacy of movement. John Benjamin Publishing.

Dr Elsa Urmston is a UK-based dance educator and researcher with interests in vocational education, community practice, dance science, and the impact of arts participation. Her PhD in Education focussed on the implications of periodisation for dance education. Elsa is artist-in-residence at Copperdot Studio, Norwich and works at numerous Higher Education Institutions including London Contemporary Dance School (LCDS). She consults on educational change, having written several UK dance degree programmes, and recently supported LCDS’s curriculum development. She co-leads the institution’s health and wellbeing research, and co-facilitates the institution’s Learning Exchange Programme for teaching artists. Elsa is also an evaluator, exploring dance participation and its impact on people’s lives from social, psychological and health perspectives with companies such as Dance Umbrella, Royal Ballet and Opera and East London Dance. Elsa is Editor-in-Chief of the Bulletin for Dancers and Teachers published by the International Association of Dance Medicine and Science (IADMS). She is also Chair of Dance Network Association, a dance for health organisation based in Essex. Elsa was the winner of the IADMS Dance Educator Award in 2025.

Subscribe to the recordings:
Video hosted on the PAR YouTube channel.
Audio hosted on the PAR Buzzsprout channel and can be listened to on Spotify, Apple podcasts or on other RSS podcast apps.

5.1. Major crisis, no easy exit: Ways to research and sowing seeds

Seminar on the 8 October 2025

Major crisis, no easy exit: Ways to research and sowing seeds.

In this session Dr Mayara Floss reports on her work using creative methods to explore the entangled crises of our time.

Mayara Floss proposes a shift in how we approach the entangled crises of our time, arguing for methods that are generative rather than extractive. Moving beyond the traditional binaries of in/out or academic/subject, as the Möbius strip model of continuous engagement. This is illustrated through the idea of working with (not for or about) communities, as demonstrated by the quilombola experience of the Ilha de Maré, where research becomes a collaborative act of sowing seeds. The talk will explore how writing fiction can bypass scientific communication to through storytelling to convey the realities of climate change.

The link to the cultural centre on Instagram.
News about the school at the primary healthcare centre with subtitles in English.
The link to Mayara’s thesis.
Preprint of the article with the community of Maré island.

Mayara Floss is a Brazilian Family Doctor, writer, and filmmaker. She holds a PhD in Pathology from the University of São Paulo (USP). She is one of the creators of the Rural Seeds initiative and a former ambassador for it. Her work is deeply interdisciplinary, focusing on activism and planetary health. She is a member of both the WONCA Working Party on Rural Practice and the WONCA Environment group. At the University of São Paulo, she is a member of the Planetary Health group at the Institute of Advanced Studies (IEA/USP). She is also the creator and coordinator of the MOOCs Planetary Health and Planetary Health for Primary Care.

Subscribe to the recordings:
Video hosted on the PAR YouTube channel.
Audio hosted on the PAR Buzzsprout channel and can be listened to on Spotify, Apple podcasts or on other RSS podcast apps.

4.6. Challenges and opportunities for practice researchers: the PRAG-UK reports

Seminar on the 16 June 2025

Challenges and opportunities for practice researchers: the PRAG-UK reports.

In this session practice researchers and PAR network members Scott McLaughlin and Tim Stephens will discuss the 2021 PRAG-UK reports on practice research in the UK.

Source: SMcLaughlin. Credit: Sam Walton

This ‘found image’ from the internet - bio-photo - is a non-representative image for Tim Stephens. Indicating anattā (Sanskrit; nonself), it is one of hundreds of versions of this image found online; see also Photographic Nonself. This strategy evokes Penelope Umbrico’s work on internet images – Sunsets from Flikr (2006-2016); Thich Nhat Hahn’s term interbeing (English,1966, or Vietnamese Tiếp Hiện) and other formulations of interdependent co-arising or dependent origination (Sanskrit/ Pali pratītyasamutpāda/paṭiccasamuppāda).

Source: Internet, Author unknown

The reports were written as a way to gather current thinking across the breadth of arts disciplines, but also to try and offer some core principles and discourses as a way to help anchor a field whose vibrancy and experimentalism inevitably also comes with fragmentation of approaches and issues of communication both internally and to those outside the field (e.g. the dizzying profusion of terms for what we do: practice-led/based/as-research, artistic research, etc.)

In the words of the report’s supervision team: “[they] provide a way to articulate and advocate for the concerns of the practice research community. […] to look at how we might move from a sense that ‘sharing practice research is just for REF’ to a clear and open stance where ‘practice research is for life’. In this view, outputs from practice research projects remain accessible in perpetuity to diverse audiences, are discoverable in the public domain, and practice research operates as a critical component of an open, contemporary and thriving research ecology.”

As we approach another REF cycle, the lessons and insights of these reports are more important than ever. Frequently practice researchers find themselves alone or poorly-served in institutions and systems that struggle to understand non-textual outputs. The PRAG-UK reports offer an excellent advocacy position to support practice researchers in articulating and sharing their work, and also to develop communities of good practice in valuing the FAIR approach to research to make all of our work Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable.

To reflect the complexity of positions within practice research two very different academics will enact a conversation. Scott and Tim who have only just been introduced, co-investigate, with the facilitation of Nicole, their own practices as academics. Tim offers a perspective from education as embodied practice, Scott as practice researcher in music composition and PRAG-UK steering-group member. Whilst we share an understanding of the value of these reports, we will consider what, within a milieu of sectoral conservatism and funding challenges, practice researchers might do for our institutions and their publics and if and how we need to acknowledge the constraints within which practice operates; a fluctuating economy, where generosity is essential and competitive systems appear wasteful.

Conversations are a form of improvisation; and we hope such conversations, on milestone Reports such as this, nurture ongoing efforts to enrich dialogue both within and outside the community of practice researchers, echoing the concerns of authors James Bulley and Özden Sahin.

Dr Scott McLaughlin (b.1975) is an Irish composer/improviser based in Huddersfield (UK). He is associate professor in composition and music technology at the University of Leeds and directs CePRA (Centre for Practice Research in the Arts), as well as convening the RMA Practice Research Study Group. He is a steering group member for PRAG-UK. Scott was Co-I on the AHRC SPARKLE project (Sustaining Practice Assets for Research, Knowledge, Learning and Engagement [2022]), and PI on an AHRC Leadership Fellowship (2019–21), the ‘Garden of Forking Paths’, on composing with contingent materialities. His current research uses different methods to excite resonance in sounding bodies to exploit physical non-linearities and generate musical patterns/structures.

Tim Stephens is an education developer, with a specialism in curriculum, at the University of the Arts London, a writer and photographic artist. He has 30+ years’ experience of working in education, with learners, artists, teachers and organisations and his areas of interest are: the inter-play between art and writing practices, embodiment, the relationship between cognitive and non-cognitive experience, equality, western and non-western ethics, organisational and social change.

Subscribe to the recordings:
Video hosted on the PAR YouTube channel.
Audio hosted on the PAR Buzzsprout channel and can be listened to on Spotify, Apple podcasts or on other RSS podcast apps.