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 or on other RSS podcast apps.

4.3. Sonic postcards as an arts-based approach to encourage collaboration

Source: LGriffin

Seminar on the 26 February 2025

Sonic postcards as an arts-based approach to encourage collaboration.

Click here to register.

In this session, we would like to discuss a recent project that explores some of the ways in which arts-based thinking and practice might intervene productively to support transformative action and environmental planning at the local level. A project with George Revill from the Open University used arts-based practice to find ways of opening up spaces of

Source: GReville

engagement. Our work was part of an attempt to find ways to use creative and co-produced materials more systematically within policy engagement. We co-produced a short sonic documentary called Fishing for Life, which is currently being hosted at the Wells Maltings Arts Centre.

‘Fishing for Life’ is a sound work called a ‘sonic postcard’ co-created with stakeholders, fishers, researchers and a sound artist for a UKRI project called Sounding Coastal Change. Fishing for Life explores the social, economic, and environmental challenges facing fishing communities and the strategies that fishers use to cope with them.
Sonic postcards are co-produced pieces made by publics, researchers and sound artists working together in ways which creatively assemble and voice otherwise ‘unheard’ human and non-human voices. They work with sound, voice, music and different kinds of listening. They do not tell or instruct but are instead intended to raise awareness to enhance sensitivity and attentiveness to issues that might otherwise be unnoticed. A primary aim is to stimulate better-informed discussion around the issues concerned in order to generate productive dialogue and learning.
We would like to reflect upon the social and political roles that arts-based methods and creative practices might perform and, in particular, how they can encourage and enable engagement, collaboration, and learning around environmental challenges: processes that are all central to successful planning.

Liza Griffin is an Associate Professor of Urban Health and Environmental Politics at UCL’s Development Planning Unit, Bartlett. Liza’s research on urban health and spatial politics includes projects on community responses to urban flooding, relationships between greenspaces and wellbeing, and placemaking for people with dementia. Her work on ‘Creative Practice and the Anthropocene’ explores how publicly engaged arts-based thinking and practice can intervene productively in the current environmental crisis. 

George Revill is Professor of Cultural Historical Geography at The Open University. His work is concerned with landscape as a way of understanding past and contemporary experience and understanding of place, environment, and nature. Research projects involving creative practice include the AHRC funded “Earth in Vision,” focusing on digital broadcast archives and environmental history,  “Sounding Coastal Change” and “Sounding Out Wells” which used sound and music to explore environmental and social changes on the North Norfolk coast.

Click here to register.

 

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!

 

 

4.2. Practice As Research in the studio

Source: AAsh

Seminar on the 23 January 2025

Practice As Research in the studio.

Click here to register.

Andy will use this presentation to discuss aspects of his practice and inquiry. He will use the gallery space and the presentation to explore how he is progressing in the latest commission for the Winter Sculpture Park at the Thamesmead estate with Gallery No32.

He has shown his art both in the UK and internationally, including exhibitions in Japan, Singapore, Finland, and Canada. Based in Brighton, Andy works out of his studio at the Red Herring artist cooperative in Portslade and serves as an Associate Professor at University College London (UCL).

Andy Ash is an artist, researcher and educator. His practice is primarily sculpture, but an expansive notion of a sculpture, and therefore includes film, performance, objects, sound, drawing, print, and text in an installation or site-specific contexts. Collaboration and dialogue play a big role in his creative process, making his work socially engaged and interdisciplinary.

Click here to register.

 

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!

 

 

4.1. Discomfort and vulnerability as a research process

Source: LPrice

Seminar on the 7 November 2024

Discomfort and vulnerability as a research process.

In this seminar, Leri Price discusses discomfort and vulnerability within the context of her research with Syrian women living in Scotland.

Creative methods are often embraced as a means of addressing the power imbalance between participant and researcher. Committing to this does involve risk on the part of the researcher, however. How can researchers respect participants’ agency while also ensuring that they answer their own needs? And how far can, or should, discomfort be a part of this process?

During this seminar, Leri Price reflects on various encounters that occurred during fieldwork with Syrian women in Scotland on the subject of “home”, including instances where participants renegotiated the inclusion of objects in the research, and examples of avoiding engagement with the research topic. Although all parties continued to be warm, open, and engaged, the research process was subverted and/or redefined by the participants. These refusals led to what might be deemed “failed” fieldwork as Leri did not obtain the data she had anticipated gathering using creative and arts-based methods. Furthermore, Leri reflects on the implications of working in Arabic rather than her first language, English.

The presentation considers how these encounters affected the research. Vulnerability, while uncomfortable and exposing, was a key part of this reflective process and continues to be integral to her research practice. Leri takes the opportunity to reflect on what “radical openness” (Gilroy, 2004) and “staying with the trouble” (Haraway, 2016) look like in this context, how discomfort and how an openness to perceived challenges ultimately opened up new avenues of exploration and more ethically engaged research.

Leri Price is a doctoral researcher in the Intercultural Research Centre at Heriot-Watt University and her research works with Syrian women living in Scotland to explore meanings of home. She is particularly interested in exploring embodied and affective methodologies. Outside academia, Leri is a translator of Arabic literature. Her translation of “Where the Wind Calls Home” by Samar Yazbek is currently a Finalist for the 2024 National Book Award.

 

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!

 

 

3.7. Pedagogy, practice, play, and participation: Mutual learning in a co-created youth wellbeing project

Source: JPFortier

Seminar on the 8 July 2024

Pedagogy, practice, play, and participation: Mutual learning in a co-created youth wellbeing project.

In this seminar, Dr Julia Puebla Fortier discusses co-production between an academically trained researcher, artists, and young people.

One of the exciting possibilities for practice as research is gathering and acting on insight at all stages of a project’s evolution. Using principles of co-production and reflective learning, researchers, delivery partners and participants can actively shape, refine and assess intentions and outcomes.

Source: JPFortier

The Reach In Reach Out (RIRO) programme was co-created with young people to support their creativity and wellbeing and offer pathways to community engagement and volunteering in the cultural sector. The project targeted young people in the west of England living with physical or psychosocial challenges, at risk of social isolation, or transitioning to further education or employment. Through RIRO, the young people made extraordinary personal gains in creative skills, wellbeing and cultural management, and the project partner institutions strengthened their ability to engage with and co-create with youth.

Source: JPFortier

From the outset, we collaboratively designed a process to build understanding of our practice as it evolved. This presentation will explore how an academically trained researcher, artists, and young people can co-produce a reflective learning and evaluation process to improve practice in real time, collecting a variety of rich data to assess impact, produce guidance for replication, and build the creative research skills of young people and artists.

 

 

 

Dr Julia Puebla Fortier was the project co-lead of the RIRO project for Arts & Health South West. Her policy and academic experience, honed through work with multiple stakeholders and doctoral study at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, has been transformed by using participatory, creative, and relational approaches in research, evaluation, and programme management. She has a particular interest in cross-sectoral collaboration for arts and health, the emotion work of creative health practitioners, training community researchers, and improving health and wellbeing of culturally diverse communities. She is currently an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Bristol Medical School and does independent consulting.

 

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!

 

 

3.6. Exploring local cultural forms, engaging stakeholders, and informing policy and curriculum through arts-based research methods

Source: ABreed

Seminar on the 14 May 2024

Exploring local cultural forms, engaging stakeholders, and informing policy and curriculum through arts-based research methods.

In this seminar, Professor Ananda Breed discusses using arts-based research methods at scale.

In this talk, Professor Ananda Breed will provide case study examples regarding the use of arts-based methods for a four-year Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) project entitled Mobile Arts for Peace: Informing the National Curriculum and Youth Policy for Peacebuilding in Kyrgyzstan, Rwanda, Indonesia, and Nepal. In Rwanda, drumming was used to challenge gender inequality. In Kyrgyzstan, performance was used to create a platform for dialogue between young people and decision makers. In Nepal, Mithala Arts and Deuda were used to integrate marginalised cultural forms and communities into local and national curriculum. In Indonesia, bamboo Angklung  and Lenong folk theatre were used to represent youth issues and to create a platform for youth representation at the national level. Breed will provide an overview of the varied opportunities and challenges of using arts-based research methods across the project that engaged over 194 partner organisations, 828 engagement activities, and 279 artistic outputs, serving over 28,000 beneficiaries between 2020-24.

Download Ananda’s presentation in PDF.
Download Ananda’s slides in PPTX.
More information on Ananda’s MAP project.
More information about the MAP conference.

Ananda Breed is Professor of Theatre and Principal Investigator of AHRC GCRF Network Plus project Mobile Arts for Peace (MAP): Informing the National Curriculum and Youth Policy for Peacebuilding in Kyrgyzstan, Rwanda, Indonesia and Nepal (2020-24) and GCRF Newton Fund project Mobile Arts for Peace (MAP) at Home: online psychosocial support through the arts in Rwanda (2020-22). Breed is author of Performing the Nation: Genocide, Justice and Reconciliation (Seagull Books, 2014), co-editor of Performance and Civic Engagement (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), co-editor of Creating Culture in (Post) Socialist Central Asia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), and co-editor of The Routledge Companion to Applied Performance (Routledge, 2022). Former research fellow of the International Research Centre Interweaving Performance Cultures at Freie Universität (2013-214).

Further information shared in the session:
Access Charlie Ingram’s introductory document exploring practice. Using Theatre practice as a way to engage in evaluation processes and more specifically policy feedback processes, and here is the link to a research article that explores the same.

Access Ranjita Dhital’s article on her research in Nepal.

Julia Puebla Fortier and team used arts-based and participatory evaluation approaches in their UK programme to support the well-being of young people through cultural engagement and volunteering. Access their toolkit on lessons learned and tips for practice.

Here is an example of a project using theatre methods to engage young people around the issues of climate change, through giving them agency to create what they want. Its a flexible, responsive and non-linear learning, drawing inspiration from young people’s local contexts.

 

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!

 

 

3.5. Practice as research in counselling: The development of a model of counselling for sight loss.

Source: MThurston

Seminar on the 13 March 2024

Practice As Research in counselling: The development of a model of counselling for sight loss.

In this seminar, Dr Mhairi Thurston discusses Practice As Research in counselling.

“You feel as though someone’s chipped a bit out of your heart and your soul”. Practice as research in counselling: The development of a model of counselling for sight loss.
This talk outlines the mental health impacts of sight loss, through lived experience and through research. It charts the development of a model of counselling for people with sight loss, using practice as research in counselling. A quasi-judicial, hermeneutic, single-case efficacy design methodology will be explained.

Dr. Mhairi Thurston is an accredited and registered Pluralistic counsellor, as well as a Senior Lecturer in Counselling at Abertay University in Dundee. She served on the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP) Board of Governors from 2011 to 2020 and chaired the BACP Research Committee from 2018 to 2020. She currently chairs the BACP Good Practice Committee. Her primary research interest focuses on the social and emotional impact of acquired sight loss. Additionally, she is interested in broader issues surrounding disability, equality, and inclusion. She developed a pluralistic practice model for counselling individuals with vision impairment.  She won the British Association of Counselling and Psychotherapy New Researcher Prize in 2009. Describing herself as an ‘academic activist,’ she employs research and collaboration to effect real-world change for people with vision impairment. She has worked collaboratively with RNIB to produce an award-winning training course for counsellors working with individuals who have vision impairment. She has also collaborated with Retina UK to create a free online resource that supports mental well-being in the visually impaired community. Furthermore, she founded the Sight Loss Research Network (SLRN) in collaboration with Dr. Hazel McFarlane of Alliance Scotland, aiming to bring academics and charities together to foster opportunities for collaboration. She has previously been an associate editor for the International Journal of Disability, Development, and Education, and she is a member of the editorial board of Disability and Society. She also serves as a Lay Advisor for the Royal College of Ophthalmologists. Mhairi is severely sight-impaired and has a guide dog called Meadow.

 

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!

 

 

3.4. Entanglements: Practice As Research and “thinking-with” in prison education research

A weaved off-white fabric with black stitches

Source: LHarding

Seminar on the 9 January 2024

Entanglements: Practice As Research and “thinking-with” in prison education research.

In this seminar, Lucy Harding discusses her material, creative, activist research of prison education spaces.

Lucy Harding has used several creative methods throughout her research of prison education spaces. This includes informally thinking-with drawing, weave, and stitch and more formally researching with walking interviews, a ‘visual matrix’ method (Froggett, Manley & Roy, 2015) together with diffractive analysis. Each time she has chosen these methods, it has also been a conscious choice to be-with the data and ideas materially, where she takes inspiration from Erin Manning and calls on her intuition as a craft of research (Bell & Wilmott, 2020). But it has also been due to an innate ‘feeling’ to explore new ways, to delve deeper into affective responses, in an activist stance against the ‘academicwritingmachine’ (Henderson, Honan and Loch, 2016).

There is joy in being creative but there is angst and fear in the sharing this activism with others, especially when working with political bodies such as the prison service. This is when the discomfort hits. She then goes through a process of questioning the methodology, the material choices, the philosophy behind and in between the outcomes. In this seminar she will share how it felt to push past these feelings of discomfort and ‘stay with the trouble’ (Haraway, 2016).

 

Lucy Harding holds the position of Senior Educationalist at the Royal College of Physicians whilst also pursuing her doctoral studies at the University of Central Lancashire. With a career in education for over two decades, she initially specialised in creative disciplines such as textiles and fashion. Her professional journey led her to be a programme leader of teacher education followed by an educational management role in a male prison.

Working within the confines of prison environments has profoundly influenced her perspective of challenging teaching in the periphery of the education sector. Her research focus centres on understanding the affective experiences of teachers working in demanding and often traumatic settings. In her research methodology, she employs innovative approaches, incorporating creative elements such as drawing, weaving and stitchwork as integral components of data collection and postqualitative inquiry. This unique approach allows her to perceive phenomena in new and different ways.

 

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!

 

 

3.3. Sticky, Sick, Stuck: Researching equity in the Canadian public arts

Source: SBernicky

Seminar on the 4 December 2023

Sticky, Sick, Stuck: Researching equity in the Canadian public arts

In this seminar, Shanice Bernicky discusses her work as a researcher-in-residence with Mass Culture, a Canadian national arts support organization.

How do we balance funder expectations and our ethical commitments to our research collaborators? In this session, PhD student Shanice Bernicky (Carleton University, Canada) discusses her work as a researcher-in-residence with Mass Culture, a Canadian national arts support organization. As part of her residency, she developed a qualitative impact measurement framework to disrupt the current equity, diversity, and inclusion policy landscape in public arts. In order to do so, Shanice facilitated conversations with arts organization representatives from myriad intersections, many experiencing marginalization in their fields. As researchers, we sometimes feel sticky, sick, and stuck but feel there is no venue to discuss these feelings. Join Shanice as she thinks through the complexities of using creative research methods such as reverse maker-space gatherings, photo elicitation, feminist manifesto and the anti-colonial methodological framework of research-creation to honour the contributions of the folks who work on the ground day in and day out.

Download Shanice’s presentation script in PDF.
Download Shanice’s slides in PPTX.
Download Shanice’s slides and integrated script in PDF.


Shanice Bernicky (she/her, elle) is a media maker and fourth-year PhD student at Carleton University’s School of Journalism & Communication. She completed a Master’s research-creation thesis in Media Studies at Concordia University, as a non-linear documentary exploring themes of domestic violence, heritage, and multi-racial identity from the axis point of natural Black hair. As a freelance video editor, she has worked on a myriad of projects on rich topics such as Indigenous laws and practices outside the settler-Canadian legal framework, feminist commentary on science and technology studies, and environmental issues connecting the East and the West. At Carleton, Shanice researches equity practices in the settler-Canadian public arts institutions. When she’s not working, she can be found knitting or with her hands in earth.

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!

 

 

3.2. Teacher-researcher-playwright: Navigating practice as research

A Venn diagram highlighting the three versions of self: teacher, researcher, playwright and how these three areas interact and overlap, with the T-R-P position in the centre. Seminar on the 17 November 2023

Teacher-researcher-playwright: Navigating practice as research

In this seminar, Dr Beth Curtis discusses the use of playwriting as a form of inquiry within qualitative research, and explains how the interweaving of her teacher-researcher-playwright identity informed her practice.

 

Beth’s doctoral research positions drama at its onto-epistemological centre. In a study within which drama is both the subject of exploration and the means through which it is interpreted and understood, playwriting is used as a purposeful form of inquiry to critically and creatively analyse and (re)present the data stories. The creative methodology which frames Beth’s research practice is the nexus between three versions of self: the teacher, the researcher, and the playwright. In her position as ‘Teacher-Researcher-Playwright’ (T-R-P), she is inextricably woven into the fabric of words and images presented in and through the pages of the play as her creative practice responds to what Koro-Ljungberg (2016) describes as ‘data-wants and data entanglements’.

This seminar will discuss the development of a four-stage approach to the T-R-P’s process and considers how playwriting can be used as a robust and reflexive research practice which understands meaning-making as embodied, co-constructed, and perpetually in-motion. The tacit and embodied nature of drama education is explored through an a/r/togrpahic lens which resists formulaic systems and methods and instead embraces ‘the simultaneity, multiplicity and complexity’ (Belliveau, 2015:7) of the ‘lived experiences and evolving identities’ (ibid.) of the T-R-P and the research participants. In doing so, the practicalities and messiness of practice-as-research are considered not as obstacles but as opportunities for diffraction, through which the T-R-P is invited to learn, unlearn and (re)learn what has been illuminated of the data as it is (re)presented in dramatic form.

Download Dr Curtis’s presentation slides.
Access Dr Curtis’s thesis, which includes the play in appendix E.

Beth Curtis has recently completed her doctorate in education with the University of Sunderland, beginning her journey to PhD through a bespoke practitioner research programme designed for teachers in Further Education. Originally trained as a primary school teacher, Beth has worked in Further Education since 2008, teaching across level 3 vocational and A Level drama and performing arts courses. Situated in a large FE college in the SouthWest of England, Beth now works within Teacher Education, tutoring and teaching on the PGCE and Award programmes. Beth holds a first class degree in drama from the University of Exeter and is interested in applied uses of drama and theatre within social, community and education contexts. In her thesis, Beth used playwriting as a creative method of data analysis and (re)presentation to illuminate the stories of A Level Drama students and teachers, with a specific focus on experiences of assessment.

 

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!

 

 

3.1. How do we *do* Practice As Research? A panel discussion

Image of the logo for the Practice As Research PAR networkSeminar on the 18th October 2023

How do we *do* Practice As Research? A panel discussion

As Practice As Research takes many forms, the practicalities and pragmatics of doing Practice As Research also vary greatly. In this online seminar, the panelists draw on their personal research practices to discuss how to engage with and in Practice As Research from and in their own disciplinary conventions.

 

Dr Theo Bryer is a Lecturer for the MA in English Education and the English with Drama PGCE at the Institute of Education at UCL. Theo taught Drama in schools and colleges in Birmingham and London for over twenty years as well as doing youth theatre, Theatre in Education and media production with young people, particularly bilingual and refugee learners. She currently leads the English with Drama PGCE and works on the MA English Education programme. For her doctoral studies Theo researched the affordances of role in teaching and learning, encompassing drama and media production in classroom contexts. Her research involves forms of participant observation.

Annie Davey is a Lecturer in Art Culture and Education at the Institute of Education at UCL. Her research is concerned with the politics and aesthetics of art education and recent work uses archival imagery with situated writing and script writing to explore tensions and contradictions of fine art education within the marketized university. Annie is also engaged in collaborative research that draws on John Berger’s (1972) Ways of Seeing to explore the ways in which digital, dispersed and machine generated images shape new ways of seeing, teaching and learning visual culture. She is currently programme leader of the MA in Art Education, Culture and Practice at IOE, UCL’s Faculty of Education and Society.

Chris Rhodes is a Lecturer in Digital Media Production at UCL’s Knowledge Lab and UCL East. With a PhD in Music Composition, his practice-led research delves into the creation of music in both real and virtual spaces, using the human body as an instrument. This innovative approach crafts unique sound experiences for performers, players, and listeners alike. Chris’ compositions have been showcased globally at esteemed venues, including the International Computer Music Conference (ICMC), New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME), and Sound and Music Computing (SMC). Through his research, Chris hopes to develop new artistic methods in musical composition and chart paths for the future of music and arts engagement.

 

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!