Practice As Research: Recent Episodes
Nicole Brown
Practice As Research aims to bring together the many different strands of practice-led/based research across all disciplines so as to not be limited by disciplinary conventions, but instead to benefit from cross-disciplinary fertilisation. In the wider academic communities, there are many terms in use to describe the research-practice nexus. For the sake of consistency we adopt the term 'practice as research'. Fundamentally, we consider practice as research any practice that is underpinned by scholarship and academic rigour. The primary aim of Practice As Research is sharing practices, providing constructive feedback and thus enabling the mutual development of understanding around practice as research.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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 global educational setting, it is impossible to ignore the applicability and relevance of creativity as educational tool, philosophical framework, and pedagogical approach.
Through case studies of creativity in varying settings and diverse contexts, this collection explores the ground-breaking work undertaken internationally to support, develop and future-proof learners with, and for, creativity. The chapters are centred around a practice-based enquiry or other forms of empirical research. This provides the scholarly basis upon which creativity is continuously reconceptualised and redefined in the educational and country-specific context of each study. Contributors from different countries then provide critical, reflective, and analytical responses to each chapter. Creativity in Education provides practical insights for application in a wide range of educational settings and contexts, such as the use of art exhibitions and object-work, as well as more philosophical approaches to teacher education, leadership for learning and creativity as a universal phenomenon.
For this book launch event, the editors are gathering contributors and discussants to explore the role creativity plays in educational settings across the world.
You can download a free PDF copy of the book Creativity in Education: International Perspectives by clicking on the following link: https://www.uclpress.co.uk/Creativity
Schedule
Overview of the session
Tom Doust: The Role of Creativity and Imagination
Nicole Brown: Editors’ introduction to book
Sofia Eriksson Bergström, Roxana Balbontin Alvarado, Carolyn Swanson and Jung Duk Ohn: Contributors’ chapters
Panel discussion and Q&A
The panellists:
Tom Doust is Associate Director of the Institute of Imagination.
Nicole Brown is Associate Professor at UCL.
Amanda Ince is Associate Professor at UCL.
Karen Ramlackhan is Assistant Professor of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies at the University of South Florida.
Sofia Eriksson Bergström works as a senior lecturer at the department of education at Mid Sweden University.
Roxana Balbontín‑Alvarado holds a PhD in education from the University of Nottingham and works as an academic for the School of Education and Humanities at Universidad del Bío-Bío, Chile.
Carolyn Swanson (DMLS, GDipT, PGDEd, (Dis), PhD) is a senior lecturer in initial teacher education at Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand.
Jung Duk Ohn is a professor at Gyeongin National University of Education, Korea.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 may be high. In this seminar, we draw on experiences in research projects from diverse contexts, mainly in the global south, with varying designs, methodologies, and partnerships. We will explore issues relating to research relationships as ‘safe spaces’ for young people; child protection and safeguarding; researcher safety; and who benefits. Informed by feminist and decolonial critical inquiry, our reflections engage with questions about power, silencing and violence.
Jenny Parkes is a Professor in Education, Gender and International Development in the Centre for Education and International Development (CEID), at IOE, UCL’s Faculty of Education and Society. Her work on young people and violence has involved multiple collaborations, including most recently the Contexts of Violence in Adolescence Cohort Study (CoVAC), a research partnership with the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and a violence prevention NGO, Raising Voices, in Uganda.
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-knowing objective observer we are encouraged to mitigate for bias, minimise variables, and account for distractions. However, when we ignore the non-human participants always-already involved in our projects (the bee at the window; the wind in our hair; the cat on our lap) we miss the opportunity to create new meaning and consider research as ‘event’, as human participants entangle with the naturalised others that necessarily shape their experience and understanding.
In this session we will think about the implications of inquiry in a world of multiplicity, which does not situate humans as discrete containers but bodies with the capacity to be affected and affect others. We will also explore what the implications are for considering the role of more-than-humans in our ethical practices. In a world where ethics is often a human-centred, initial tick-box exercise, what might a more expansive and inclusive approach mean for the process of our enquiries?
Dr Kay Sidebottom is a Lecturer in Education, and Programme Director for a new MSc Education at the University of Stirling. Her current research explores how teachers can work with posthuman ideas to facilitate meaningful and disruptive education spaces for our complex times. With a background in community and adult education, her pedagogical specialisms include critical, radical and anarchist education, arts-based practice and community philosophy.
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 contributed texts to a database by uploading personal photos, anecdotes, jokes, comments, film clips and drawings, and more. Even as experienced researchers in a variety of disciplines, we were faced with constant ethical dilemmas relating to: safe-guarding and privacy, copyright, contributors’ rights and ownership of the donated materials, and the subsequent archiving and dissemination of the data. With multiple research partners and stake holders involved, the moving parts were many and constant. John and Michelle will present some of the ways in which ethical procedures were meticulously problematised and in most cases, resolved.
John Potter is Professor of Media in Education at University College London Institute of Education. His research, teaching and publications are in the field of: new literacies, media education, play on and offscreen, curation and agency in social media, and the changing nature of teaching and learning in the context of digital media. He is co-editor of the journal ‘Learning, Media and Technology’. He is a founder member and director of ReMAP (Researching Education, Media, Arts and Play) a research collaborative based at the UCL Knowledge Lab. He has recently directed the ESRC funded ‘National Observatory of Children’s Play Experiences during COVID-19’, a collaboration with colleagues in the School of Education at Sheffield University and the UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis.
Dr Michelle Cannon is Programme Leader of the MA in Digital Media: Education, at the UCL Institute in Education. Her research focusses on film, moving image and creative media production as they relate to new literacies and the media arts in primary and early secondary education. She has worked extensively with the British Film Institute on national and international projects and is interested in the creative and critical learning that occurs in the processes of digital making, through film production, editing and digital animation.
Drawing on her experience in the recent BERA guidelines review, Dr Alison Fox explores how changes in the world affect ethical guidance in educational research.
In 2021/2022 Dr Alison Fox brought together a diverse group of colleagues to reflect on the question What is changing in the world which should affect our ethical guidance for educational research? as a mechanism for reviewing the 2018, 4th edition, of the British Educational Research Association ethical guidelines for educational research. This session will highlight the key issues considered topical by the group which are now being used to guide the development of a 2024 edition of the BERA guidance. This will be a space to reflect on how these issues are affecting your research and practice, as well as thinking about the how to keep ethical guidance responsive to contemporary times and the unknown challenges for enquiring educators into the future.
Dr Alison Fox moved into educational research after starting off as an environmental scientist and then secondary and further education science teacher. Since her Masters in Education in 2000 she has been supporting other researchers through Masters and Doctoral study alongside educational research into professional learning and research ethics. She is currently Associate Head of School for Research and Knowledge Exchange in the School of Education, Childhood, Youth and Sport and Chair of the Human Research Ethics Committee at The Open University and holds a number of roles with BERA (on Council, on the Publications Committee, as a member of the blog editorial team and for 9 years as a special interest group convenor).
As Practice As Research takes many forms, the practicalities of engaging in research ethically also vary greatly. In this online seminar, the panelists draw on their personal research practices to discuss how to engage with research ethically. Dr Jo Collins focuses on the context of research in counselling and coaching practice, Dr Alison Finch explores participatory, egalitarian research with young adults, and Áine McAllister highlights ethics in the context of Poetic Inquiry with refugees.
Dr Jo Collins is a practicing coach and Senior Lecturer in counselling, coaching and mentoring at the Christ Church Canterbury University.
Dr Alison Finch is a registered nurse and nurse-research-practitioner. She is a cancer nurse, assistant chief nurse at UCLH and a National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Academy member.
Áine McAllister is a Lecturer at UCL working in the context of Languages in Education and in Refugee Education. Find Áine on LinkedIn.
In this online seminar Professor Sarah Banks reflects on ethical challenges arising in participatory research.
Participatory research is becoming increasingly popular amongst academics, community organisations and research funders. This is research that involves people with direct experience of the issue being studied (e.g. homelessness, domestic violence, asylum seeking) in designing and carrying out the research, often in partnership with academics or other professionals, with the aim of influencing change in policy or practice. This type of research raises distinctive ethical challenges, particularly relating to power dynamics, partnership-working and social activism, and may not always be fully understood by institutional research ethics committees. This presentation will outline some of the main ethical challenges arising in participatory research, arguing for the importance of ‘everyday ethics’ focusing on human relationships and reflexivity as a counter-balance to the ‘regulatory ethics’ of institutional review processes, which emphasise rule-following and impartiality. It will also introduce the revised guidelines for community-based participatory research recently published by the Centre for Social Justice and Community Action, Durham University and the National Coordinating Centre for Public Engagement, www.durham.ac.uk/research/institutes-and-centres/social-justice-community-action/research-areas/ethics-consultation/
Sarah Banks is Professor in the Department of Sociology and co-founder of the Centre for Social Justice and Community Action at Durham University, UK. The Centre promotes participatory action research for social justice in partnership with community-based organisations. With the Centre and members of the International Collaboration for Participatory Health Research (ICPHR), she has developed ethical guidelines for participatory research and offers training/events for academic and community-based researchers. She has coordinated several participatory research projects, including research on debt, poverty and community development, and leads the Ethics Working Group of the ICPHR. She is co-editor of Ethics in Participatory Research for Health and Social Well-Being (Routledge, 2019) and Co-Producing Research: A Community Development Approach (Policy Press, 2019), and co-author of Participatory Research for Health and Social Well-Being (Springer, 2019).
In this online seminar Federica Manfredi reflects on various ethical dilemmas relating to practice-based research on body suspensions.
Body suspensions are a challenging fieldwork of investigation because, according to research partners, “words are not enough” to express such intense experiences.
A body suspension consists in the elevation of a protagonists inserting hooks in the skin as temporary piercings; hooks are connected to an above scaffolding with ropes and pulling the main one, the suspendee leaves the floor for a variable amount of time. Body suspensions are realized in contemporary Europe during festivals and private events by a trans-spatial community of practitioners, that often privilege privacy and online invisibility to prevent stigmatization. Suspension experiences are delegitimized by non-suspendees because of the voluntary pain: it is elected as evidence of mental deviancy, even by a pathologizing bibliography, delegitimating the voices of practitioners.
The anthropological research “Learning to Fly” investigated meanings associated to suspensions by regular practitioners through a tailor-designed experimental methodology to overpass logo-centric logics. In a creative laboratory, participants co-created symbolic objects with metaphorical meanings to express one or more aspects of their hook-experiences. Handcrafts became referents of oral narrative during interviews, being able to express more than what the suspendee (or the ethnographer) pre-established to investigate, and exploring more than what words were allowed to share before. Ethical concerns emerged in several moments of the ethnography, especially concerning the desire to circulate the handcrafts to support the spread of a restored image of body suspension. Illustrating exhibition contexts and the consequences of the handcraft circulation, this presentation aims to discuss the militant use of the ethnography, the limits of the outsider positioning of the ethnographer, and the use of research’s results by epistemic partners.
In this online seminar Dr Sonia York-Pryce reflects on ethical considerations within embodied practice and dance research.
To reflect on ethical considerations in her work, Sonia will begin with outlining the context of her work and what inspired her research. She will then explore the taboo of ageing and aesthetics and highlight the difference of the older dancer’s body. She will draw 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.
Sonia York-Pryce, Dr Visual Arts, (Griffith University, Australia), Ba. Digital Media, (Honours; (Griffith University), Ba. Visual Arts (Southern Cross University, Australia), dancer, photographer, videographer, and interdisciplinary artist. From the 1960s to the present-day Sonia has trained and danced extensively in ballet and contemporary dance, initially in the UK then settling in Australia in 1994. She studied classical ballet at Elmhurst Ballet School, the Royal Ballet School, the London School of Contemporary Dance, and the Laban Centre, in London, UK. Sonia’s doctoral research, “Ageism and the Mature Dancer” examined how senior professional dancers, aged over 40, still performing, navigate the dance-by-date perpetuated within Western dance and consumer culture’s obsession with youth. Across a survey conducted through interviews and by email to over 35 participants, based nationally and internationally, York-Pryce discovered what drives these dancers to continue, and how they maintain their bodies.
In this online seminar Professor Kate Wall from the University of Strathclyde explores ethical considerations in practitioner research.
Professor Wall’s work focuses on the development of pedagogies and research methodologies that facilitate effective talk about learning (metacognition). She has worked extensively in partnership with teachers of all ages and stages, using practitioner enquiry approaches and has a growing interest in how tools with pedagogic and methodological origins can be used to support theorised practice.
In this seminar Prof Kate Wall from University of Strathclyde offers a brief introduction into concerns around ethical practitioner research. Professor Wall comments on the relationship and tensions between research ethics, approval committees on the one hand, and professional ethics, standards and responsibilities on the other. In this context, she further explores the researcher’s ethical duty to not only listen to, but to adhere to children’s rights, thus to fully include and involve children in research processes. She argues that “pedagogical appropriateness” drives good practitioner-research, thus shows how practice informs methodological and practical choices in research.
In this online seminar Dr Ross Purves reflects on various ethical dilemmas relating to research projects into aspects of twentieth-century British music education history.
Dr Ross Purves will explore the benefits and creative possibilities of technology-mediated research practice in this area, but also some of the potential blunders and ethical dilemmas. Technology has enriched both research projects, enabling rich sensory engagement and fresh analytical insight. Yet the ease, immediacy and sheer power of contemporary technology may also entice the researcher towards rash, inaccurate or in some cases ethically-complex actions. For instance, the vast resources of the British Newspaper Archive have been used to trace the lives and careers of those within projects’ scope, but careful manual cross-referencing has still been necessary to avoid misconnecting reports of multiple individuals whose details matched the search terms. Without such checks there could be serious implications for an individual’s reputation and legacy, not to mention the quality of the research. Moreover, there are some who argue that such individuals – even though possibly deceased for some time – have a ‘right to be forgotten’. Yet by triangulating rich online resources with those held in offline archives and paper documents, Ross potentially casts ‘‘a shaft of brilliant light’ over what had been ‘in historical darkness’ (Crossen-White, 2015). What are the implications of these kinds of activities for living descendants and their own ‘life narratives’? In another example, how should the researcher make appropriate use of resources such as Ancestry.com, which combine access to digitized official archives with amateur genealogical projects created and shared within families. Since both research projects explore the twentieth-century, some individuals who are referenced might still be alive, invoking data protection regulation. Their immediate descendants will certainly be alive, and might inadvertently come to learn of project outputs published online. How should the researcher react if contact is made, or should the researcher set out to proactively make contact? These are historical projects, then, but not that historical – and technology can serve to warp this relatively small passage of time still further, bringing forgotten events to the fore and linking past lives to the present in potentially unexpected ways.
Dr Ross Purves is Associate Professor for Music Education at the UCL Institute of Education and a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. He was previously Senior Lecturer in Education at De Montfort University, Leicester, where he led modules in music and arts education, computing and educational technology. Ross has presented research at various UK and European education and music conferences and is an experienced performing musician and arranger. Between 2016 and 2018 he was a member of the Musicians’ Union Teachers’ Section National Committee. He currently serves on the Music Education Committee of the London Music Fund and is a school governor of Bedford Road Primary School. Ross received De Montfort University Vice-Chancellor’s Distinguished Teaching Award in both 2017 and 2018. Ross’s research interests include: various aspects of music education and instrumental learning; the application of GIS and geospatial analysis to education research; children’s computer programming; the educational and creative applications of Lego and making; the history of education; teachers’ initial education, early career transition and professional development.
In this online seminar Dr Elena Tragou, a systemic psychologist-psychotherapist the relationship between ethics, research and practice.
How can we understand the three from a systemic point of view? How does “Aesthetics” clarify (if it does) the intertwining relationship of the three? A tour de force has been unfolding during the last four decades where professionals of mental health, researchers and educators have been opening up the dialogue on ethics, practice and research from an epistemic and ontological point of view. It seems that unless we contextualize the meaning of these ideas in a systemic epistemology we, as professionals, will be losing the great significance of their connections by focusing on the divided, Cartesian way of understanding them. May the tour go on…
Dr Elena Tragou is a systemic psychologist-psychotherapist, researcher, educator and a writer. She has published two books on clinical assessment, numerous research articles and has been participating in European and International conferences presenting her work on systemic research and therapy, human communication, and supervision and therapy. She is a clinical member of APA and AAMFT, Registered MHT, and a member of ELESYTH.
In the last decade, the field of second language acquisition has witnessed an increase in the number of studies using eye-tracking to examine the cognitive processes involved in language learning. Eye-tracking allows researchers to record learners’ eye movements while completing a task on a computer screen and provides a very rich record of online processing behaviour. It is increasingly used in the field as a measure of cognitive effort. In this presentation I will provide an introduction to the eye-tracking technique, as well as a brief overview of some of its applications in language learning research, with a particular focus on vocabulary learning. The last part of the presentation will discuss the ethical considerations in this type of research.
Dr Ana Pellicer-Sánchez is Associate Professor of Applied Linguistics and TESOL at the IOE, UCL’s Faculty of Education and Society, UK. Her research focuses on the teaching and learning of vocabulary in a second/foreign language. Her recent research has used eye tracking to examine cognitive processes involved in vocabulary learning, with a particular focus on learning from reading. She is co-author of An Introduction to Eye-tracking: A Guide for Applied Linguistics Research (CUP) and co-editor of Understanding Formulaic Language (Routledge).
After briefly outlining what participatory activist research is, this talk explores what it means to become intimately involved in activist projects as an academic researcher. Jenny reflects on the need for transparency, accountability and a pragmatism in navigating the multiple demands of a neoliberal academy, activist temporalities, and personal emotions and politics in her work in community environmentalism.
Jenny Pickerill is a Professor of Environmental Geography and Head of Department of Geography at Sheffield University, England. Her research focuses on inspiring grassroots solutions to environmental problems and in hopeful and positive ways in which we can change social practices. She has published 3 books (Cyberprotest; Anti-war Activism; Eco-Homes) and over 30 articles on themes around eco-housing, eco-communities, social justice and environmentalism. She is currently completing her book Eco-communities: Living Together Differently.
Drawing has had a place in social research for a long time, especially in anthropology as field note taking, but also more specifically and recently in arts-based research and visual studies. Social research on drawings is a well-established method in a variety of related areas from psycho-social research with children to market research. Research with drawings however, where both the artefact and the practice of drawing are a constitutive part of the production of knowledge being sought, often in collaboration with research participants, is rarer. In this talk Dr Monica Sassatelli looks into the latter, with particular focus on the affordances of narrative drawing.
There is some drawing involved in this presentation: please have some paper and a pencil or pen ready.
Dr Monica Sassatelli is Associate Professor at the University of Bologna, Italy. She is a cultural sociologist with research expertise on on cultural events and institutions, cultural policies and creative industries. Among her publications are the monograph Becoming Europeans. Cultural Identity and Cultural Policies and the edited collection Arts Festivals and the Cultural Public Sphere. Recent articles include: “‘Europe in your Pocket’: narratives of identity in euro iconography” (Journal of Contemporary European Studies) and “Symbolic Production in the Art Biennial: Making Worlds” (Theory, Culture and Society).
In this podcast, Dr Nicole Brown talks to Dr Hakan Ergül about Practice As Research.
Dr Hakan Ergül is a Lecturer in Media Studies in the UCL Knowledge Lab of the Department of Culture, Communication & Media at IOE, UCL's Faculty of Education and Society. Hakan received his PhD in 2006 from the Graduate School of International Cultural Studies, Tohoku University, Japan, with my 5-years ethnographic inquiry on Japanese television production.
Hakan's short stories have appeared in a number of literary journals, and he is the author of Dedicated to Chrysanthemum (in TR: Krizanteme Adanmis, 2003) and Where Do the Noises Come From? (TR: Sesler Nereden Geliyor? 2009), anthology of short stories. His most recent books include Popularizing Japanese TV (author, Routledge 2019) and Universities in the Neoliberal Era (co-editor, Palgrave 2017).
Hakan's current research examines the role of traditional and digital communication technologies in everyday life of vulnerable groups, including children, refugees, and urban poor from ethnographic perspective.
In this podcast, Dr Nicole Brown talks to Dr Helen Ross about Practice As Research.
Dr Helen Ross is a fully qualified Special Educational Needs Coordinator (SENCo) and alongside providing support to other professionals and undertaking research, she currently works part time as a SEN teacher in a mainstream school. Helen is also Chair of the Wiltshire Dyslexia Association, where she supports the running of events, provides expert advice on pedagogy and contributes to the Association social media networks. She has recently become a Trustee of the British Dyslexia Association.
For more information about her work and her achievements, check out her web site.
In this podcast, Dr Nicole Brown talks to Dr Margaret E. Collins about Practice As Research.
Margaret E. Collins is an award winning composer whose recent focus has been the integration of non-western instruments into ensembles with western orchestral instruments. Meg earned a PhD in Music composition form Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, for her dissertation “Melting the Boundaries: The integration of ethnic instruments into western art music.” She composed eight works featuring seven different ethnic instruments: the Chinese xiao, the Native American flute, the Persian tar, the Persian santoor, the Irish uilleann pipes, and Irish tin whistles. Her song for treble chorus, flute and piano, "maggie and milly and molly and may," was awarded First Prize in the Berkshire Children's Chorus Composition Competition.
For more information about her work and achievements, check out her web site.
After Neumark, Dr Eleanor Dare considers the software and processes through which Immersive Visual Storytelling (IVS) develops and unfolds as a medium and material in which we perceive, rather than ‘an object that we perceive’ (Neumark, 2017, p. 28). The critical and creative strategies Eleanor will discuss in this talk have the intention of surfacing the assumptions, affordances and dissaffordances of the technological and social terrain of IVS, to avert a critical vacuum in which immersion becomes a spell, arguably making us too beguiled to exert political and social agency. Dr Dare will preview scenes from an evolving project, Queer Psycho, part of several long term works which re-envision and re-evaluate aspects of Alfred Hitchcock’s films, often deploying artificially intelligent agents and automated cinematography as a critical practice.
Dr Eleanor Dare will be joining UCL in April as Lecturer in Practice Based Research and Media. Eleanor currently works at the Faculty of Education, Cambridge and was formerly Reader in Digital Media at the RCA and Head of Programme for MA Digital Direction. Some of Eleanor’s work, short stories and academic publications can be found here: https://rejectedshortstories.uk/2021/10/20/academic-publications/
In this 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.
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.
In this video, Dr Nicole Brown talks to Cymbeline Buhler about Practice As Research.
Cymbeline Buhler has been a theatre artist for over twenty years. She has held Artistic Director positions at Western Edge Youth Arts in Melbourne and Backbone Youth Arts companies in Brisbane. She has developed over twenty original theatre productions that have shown in North America, Europe, Asia and Australia. Cymbeline is currently undertaking doctoral research investigating her arts practice within ‘Theatre of Friendship, Sri Lanka’, an ongoing peace-building arts network she founded in 2012. Her work has been located in spaces such youth engagement, disability arts, cross-cultural theatre and cross-generational communication.
In this podcast, Dr Nicole Brown talks to Prof Haidy Geismar about Practice As Research.
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.
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.
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.
In this podcast, Dr Nicole Brown talks to Dr Sara Young about Practice As Research.
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.
In this podcast, Dr Nicole Brown talks to Dr Jasmine Shadrack about Practice As Research.
Dr Jasmine Hazel 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 at https://books.emeraldinsight.com/page/detail/Black-Metal-Trauma-Subjectivity-and-Sound/?k=9781787569263
In this presentation, Dr 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.
In this presentation Áine McAllister shares 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.
Check out "Seeking Access" Poetic Inquiry Pamphlet and the Poetic Inquiry 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.
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.
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.