Practice As Research

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

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

In this session Olivia Maurer presents her experience using practice as research working with participatory theatre in a traditional policy and social science context. Drawing on her ongoing doctoral research, Olivia shares 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...

In this session Jill Pluquailec presents her use of Social Fiction when researching disabled children. 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’...

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.  Cynthia Kinnunen is a music educator, community musician, and doctoral researcher based in Guelph, Ontario, Canada and at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontar...

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

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

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 ill...

 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.  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 in...

This presentation explores photography as method in creative practice research, demonstrating how lens-based methodologies create unique opportunities for expression, reflection, and knowledge creation beyond traditional research approaches. The research illustrates how photography’s accessibility and immediacy make it particularly effective for fostering understanding and accessing embodied knowl...

In this seminar, Dr Louise Todd will discuss her visual arts practice-based research to understand the visual culture of tourism and the tourist gaze thesis (Urry & Larsen, 2011). Here, it is suggested that tourists’ and others’ visual practices and performances, such as photography and sightseeing, form an intersection of gazes (Crang, 1997; Lutz & Collins, 1991). Although tourism’s visua...

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 engagement. Our work was part of an attempt...

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 Brighto...

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 ensuri...

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, ref...

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 chall...

Celebrating the publication of the new edited volume by Nicole Brown and Amanda Ince from UCL Institute of Education and Karen Ramlackhan from University of South Florida St. Petersburg. Creativity has become a buzzword across all disciplines in education and across all phases, from early years through to tertiary education. Although the meaning of creativity can change vastly depending on the glo...

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...

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-wi...

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 n...

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 interp...

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 PG...

In this seminar, Professor Jenny Parkes shares reflections on some of the ethical challenges and dilemmas encountered when researching violence with young people. While there has been a huge growth in research on violence against children and violence against women, few publications report on the ways in which research teams have addressed ethical issues, though the risks of harm to participants m...

In this seminar, Dr Kay Sidebottom discusses how to ethically account for environment, atmosphere and presence of non/human others in research. As qualitative researchers, we know (but perhaps don’t always acknowledge) how much the environment, atmosphere and presence of non/human others can affect our enquiries. In our attempts to apply the ‘God-trick’ (Haraway, 1988) of the all-seeing, all-knowi...

In this seminar, John Potter and Michelle Cannon discuss how the complex and unprecedented ethical challenges associated with The Play Observatory project were negotiated. In the middle of the pandemic, a project was conceived to collect and archive instances of children and young people’s play at that particular time of crisis. By means of a carefully designed online survey, members of the public...