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In conversation 3: Prof Haidy Geismar

Cover of Prof Geismar's book "Impermanence"

Source: UCL Press

The “In conversation” series aims to demonstrate the wealth, breadth and depth of what constitutes Practice As Research.

In this episode, Dr Nicole Brown talks to Prof Haidy Geismar.

Prof Haidy Geismar is a social anthropologist with research interests in intellectual and cultural property, indigenous rights and colonial histories and legacies, new forms of cultural representation, the affects and effect of digitisation, the anthropology of art, critical museology and the South Pacific (especially Vanuatu and New Zealand).Current research projects include Finding Photography – a collaboration with collections care researchers to explore the social networks and materials underpinning contemporary digital art photography, and Collecting in Context – a project exploring the applicability of new digital collecting platforms in diverse cultural settings. Prof Geismar is committed to museum practice, with long-term affiliations to a number of different museums, including the Tate and Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and she has curated a number of exhibitions, including Port Vila Mi Lavem Yu (Port Vila, I love you) in Honolulu, Hawaii, in May 2011, and part of which then travelled to the United Nations Headquarters in New York. Prof Geismar’s work is available on the website https://www.haidygeismar.com/index.html and her two books Impermanence: Exploring continuous change across cultures and Museum object lessons for the digital age are free to download from the UCL Press website. 

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Video hosted on the PAR YouTube channel.
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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!

1.6. Explorations in film-making as a form of practice-based research

Image showing two children holding hands and one person with an iPad filming. One further person looks on.

Source: TBryer

Seminar cancelled due to strike action in UK Higher Education Institutions.

In this session Dr Theo Bryer and Prof Andrew Burn will share some of the films they have made as aspects of the research projects that they have engaged in. They will reflect on the questions raised by this approach related to possibilities and limitations associated with: representation and ethical concerns; editing as a form of analysis; viewing or sharing as a means of opening up dialogue about research findings; the academic status of these artefacts and skills, technology and support.

Dr Theo Bryer is currently joint Programme Leader for the MA in English Education and tutor on the English with Drama PGCE at UCL IOE. Theo joined the IOE part-time to teach on the English with Drama PGCE, around ten years ago, while still teaching in school and having taught Drama (mostly) for over twenty years in schools and colleges in Birmingham and London. Theo was also involved in Theatre in Education, youth theatre and projects involving young people who were newly arrived in South London schools. Theo has received Arts Council funding for some of these projects and experimented with media production alongside improvisational drama. These activities informed on-going research interests.

Dr Andrew Burn is Professor of English, Media and Drama, and director of the DARE centre (Digital | Arts | Research | Education), a research collaboration with the British Film Institute. Visit the DARE website  – www.darecollaborative.net – for information about events and projects, and links to people and partners. He is also director of MAGiCAL projects, an enterprise developing game-based software for education, in particular the game-authoring tool Missionmaker which features in several of his research projects. Andrew has published work on many aspects of the media, including media literacy in schools, the semiotics of the moving image and computer games, and young people’s production of digital animation, film and computer games. He has conducted a wide range of research project over many years, funded by, among others, the AHRC, the European Commission, the ESRC and the EPSRC. Visit his personal website for more information about projects, publications and interests: www.andrewburn.org. He is interested in the study of popular culture, especially as it relates to play, the arts and education. Methodologically, he has adapted theories of multimodality to describe and analyse media texts, relating them to them to to the Cultural Studies research tradition. He has previously taught English, Drama and Media Studies in comprehensive schools for over twenty years. He has been a Head of English and an Assistant Principal at his last school, Parkside Community College in Cambridge, where his main role was to direct the school’s media arts specialism: it was the first specialist Media Arts College in the country.

 

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!

In conversation 2: Dr Sara Young

Image of the logo for the Practice As Research PAR networkThe “In conversation” series aims to demonstrate the wealth, breadth and depth of what constitutes Practice As Research.

In this episode, Dr Nicole Brown talks to Dr Sara Young.

 

Dr Sara Young is a lecturer at UCL Institute of Education. Sara’s research focuses on the relationship between language and identity, especially in the context of contemporary Britain, pre- and post-Brexit. Her current projects investigate bi/multilingual practices and identity construction amongst adolescents, and how these various practices may be at play in different spaces. Sara is also involved in Polish migration work, and has recently completed a Covid-19 related project which explored the impact of the lockdown on Polish Saturday schools in the UK, and the subsequent impact on heritage language learning. Sara specialises in narrative inquiry, exploring how narrative can be a means to construct identity, both for the individual and for nation states, and is also involved with the ethical nature of research, including the questions that arise when working with adolescents and young people; and the ethics of data translation and transcription in multilingual research.

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!

In conversation 1: Dr Jasmine Shadrack

Image of book cover of Black Metal, Trauma, Subjectivity and Sound: Screaming the Abyss by Dr Jasmine Shadrack. Black book with picture of antlers and red lettering

Source: Emerald

The “In conversation” series aims to demonstrate the wealth, breadth and depth of what constitutes Practice As Research.

In this episode, Dr Nicole Brown talks to Dr Jasmine Shadrack.

Dr Jasmine Shadrack is a composer, musician, and scholar. She has been an extreme metal guitarist for the last twenty years and a black metal vocalist for the last five. Her research areas include trauma studies, disability studies, feminism, performance, extreme metal, autoethnography and psychoanalysis. She sits on the editorial board for the Metal Music Studies journal and is currently working on two co-edited collections, Music and Death vol. 2 (through Progressive Connexions and Emerald) and Metal and Dis/Ability with Professor Amber Clifford of the University of Missouri, USA, also through Emerald. She is currently composing a Requiem Mass and working on a dark folk collaboration with Francesca Stevens, entitled Dōlǒur. Her website is available at http://www.nacht-hexe.com. Jasmine’s book “Black Metal, Trauma, Subjectivity and Sound: Screaming the Abyss” is available from Emerald.

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!

1.5. Jan Blommaert’s powerful voice

Seminar on the 2nd February 2022: Two packs of cigarettes and a working paper: Jan Blommaert’s powerful voice.

In this short 30-minute monologue, Jan Blommaert’s long-time collaborator in different roles (student, colleague and friend) Jenny Van der Aa reflects on the intricacies of mentor-mentee relationships in academia. She crafts a space in which trust, intimacy, role play and generosity are carefully examined. She ultimately wants to lay bare structures of power that enhance and parachute, but that at the same time also restrict and stigmatize.

 

Download Dr Van der Aa’s slides and presentation text.

Dr Jenny Van der Aa is Senior Researcher and linguistic anthropologist at the Universities of Kampen (NL) and Leuven (Belgium), where she is involved with projects covering topics such as informal learning, church practice and the poetics of ‘integration’. Her most recent work deals with ethnographies of poverty and integration and will be published by Palgrave-MacMillan in the Spring.

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!

1.4. Positionality in PAR Research

Image of presentation slide with name and title of the presentationSeminar on the 5th January 2022: Positionality in PAR Research.

In this presentation, Dr Sara Young explores the question of researcher positionality when working with participants. The talk draws on her interdisciplinary research on identity; moving away from the insider/outsider paradigm, she draws on the theory of positioning (Davies & Harré 1990; Harré & van Langenhove 1991) to examine how her work with Polish migrant teenagers highlights the disconnect between the way the researcher positions herself and how she is positioned by participants. Arguing that this conflict informs and enhances the research, she also problematises the extent to which a researcher is ethically obligated to discuss their own positionality with participants.

Download:
Dr Young’s slides in PDF.

Dr Sara Young is a researcher working within Applied Linguistics and Polish Migration, and teaches primarily on the MA Education and MA Applied Linguistics & TESOL. She is interested in the construction of linguistic and ethnic identity, with a particular interest in young people. Her research work often employs a narrative approach, whereby identity is constructed through story telling. She is also interested in the ethical nature of research, especially in multilingual research.

 

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!

 

1.3. Taming Your Inner Artist

Seminar on the 1st December 2021: Taming Your Inner Artist: challenges of creative practice-based research.

In this presentation, Dr Agata Lulkowska looks at the challenges of applying creative and artistic training for research purposes. She assesses aims and objectives which drive creative artistic practice and traditional research. Finally, she explores the variety of interdisciplinary methodologies which make the creative practice research successful.

Dr Agata Lulkowska is Senior Lecturer in Film Production in the Department of Film, Media and Journalism. Agata’s background is in film practice, installations and photography. She is also a prolific interdisciplinary researcher with the main interest in practice-based research, intercultural communication, ethnographic film, experimental film, short fiction, politics of representation and world cinema. Most recently, she has been shortlisted for the for the AHRC Research in Film Award and has taken on the role of Head of the Practice as Research Group at the University of Staffordshire.

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!

1.2. Voice, Authority and Truth

Seminar on the 3rd November 2021: Voice, Authority and Truth.

Áine McAllister presents a poetic output from a recent poetic inquiry project to frame a discussion on applied ethnopoetic analysis as a means of revealing voice, the ethical considerations of representation and ‘ownership’ and share reflections on the intersection between ethnopoetics as a linguistic analysis technique and the researcher’s poetic representation. She discusses poetry as a viable method of presenting research findings because of its capacity as a form to remain close to or ‘true’ to the voice of research participants and their perspectives.

Download Áine McAllister’s slides and check out the “Seeking Access” pamphlet and  video.

Áine McAllister is a Lecturer at UCL Institute of Education. Her research interests include critical poetic inquiry as a dialogic pedagogical approach, applied ethnopoetic analysis (linguistic ethnography) of conversational narrative to uncover voice and dialogue as a means to elicit poetry to amplify voice. Her work is situated at the intersection of applied linguistics and poetry as research.

 

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!

1.1. Reflexivity within Practice As Research

Image of presentation slide with name and title of the presentationSeminar on the 6th October 2021: Reflexivity within Practice As Research.

In their presentations Dr Marquard Smith and Dr Bruno de Paula explore what it means to be reflexive within Practice As Research and how reflexivity may be attended to differently, depending on disciplinary conventions and perceptions of what constitutes Practice As Research.

Download Dr Smith’s slides and the case study resource he talks about in his presentation.
Download Dr de Paula’s slides.

Dr Marquard Smith collaborates with cultural organizations as a curator and programmer. He thinks of curating and programming as critical pedagogical practices, and opportunities for “learning in public”, to extend academia’s responsibilities into the public domain, in order to engage publics beyond higher education, and expand the places in which (and thus the ways in which) learning might take place. He is committed to curating/programming as a praxis that’s generative of new ways of thinking, seeing, knowing, and doing.

Dr Bruno de Paula’s work delves into questions of representation, identities and meaning-making in and through digital games. In this talk, he will reflect on his experiences as game designer and facilitator of game-making within cultural organisations and schools, discussing how a reflexive approach to participatory research can support a more critical and less homogenising engagement with these kinds of practices.

Subscribe to all 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!