Practice As Research

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’ understandings that deny the embodied, affective, socio-spatially mediated experience of school life. She does this by making a case for social fictions as an ethical methodology and reflecting on techniques she used in developing a short story social fiction. She makes the case for why and how fiction-based methods destabilise dominant ways of knowing, seeing, teaching, and intervening with disabled children. Jill concludes by offering a series of ‘what if’ questions about the future development of social fiction as a methodology in Disability Studies and Education, one which brings greater nuance and a sense of three-dimensionality to understandings of neurodivergent bodies and minds in school spaces.
Dr Jill Pluquailec, Senior Lecturer in Autism, Sheffield Institute of Education, Sheffield Hallam University. Jill’s teaching and research is concerned with social justice for disabled children and families with a particular interest in the ways bodies and spaces in education are both produced and reproduced within matrices of power and surveillance. Her work sits within Critical Disability Studies, Disabled Children’s Childhood Studies, and Critical Autism Studies centring on destabilising dominant knowledges in relation to what it means to be, and be understood, as marginalised. Jill has a specific commitment to social justice and ethics for groups that have been historically excluded or oppressed in both research design and practice.

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

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 with forced migration experiences, using art-engaged, non-verbal activities to prompt hidden stories of resilience and identity. By creating safe, listening-friendly spaces, the project explored how textile methods can support healing, amplify voices, and open dialogue where words may falter. Developed in acknowledgement of Refugee Education UK’s work, Stitches of Self highlights the power of creative research to foster dignity, hope and collective understanding.
Dr Suzy Tutchell is Associate Professor in Art Education at the Institute of Education, University of Reading. As an artist-researcher-teacher, she explores diverse, sensory and creative methods at the intersection of art and social justice. Suzy leads the art specialism on the BA Primary Education programme and the creativity pathway on the master’s in education, whilst also serving as School Director for Racial Equity and Justice. With a background as an art subject leader and consultant in London schools, she brings over fifteen years’ experience in higher education to her work in shaping inclusive and imaginative practices in education.

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 phenomenological understandings of embodiment where the body is proposed as an epistemological site, and movement, alone and with others is the “originating ground of our sense-makings” (Sheets-Johnstone, 1999), this presentation is grounded in research exploring students’ and teachers’ embodied pedagogical experiences in vocational dance education. In this session, participants will be invited to consider filmic data gathering and analysis approaches which move beyond documentation and (re)presentation, to instead evoke complex, multi-sensorial, subjective positions and experiences. To do this, we will explore the visual, sonic and sensory affordances of data gathered from body-mounted cameras as a means to get close to research participants’ embodied experiences. There will also be time to reflect on whether such data can be analysed without an over-reliance on reductive written and linguistic documentation, to question whether embodied knowledge can ever adequately capture and reflect its ontological position when it is disseminated.
Sheets Johnstone, M. (1999). The primacy of movement. John Benjamin Publishing.
 
Dr Elsa Urmston is a UK-based dance educator and researcher with interests in vocational education, community practice, dance science, and the impact of arts participation. Her PhD in Education focussed on the implications of periodisation for dance education. Elsa is artist-in-residence at Copperdot Studio, Norwich and works at numerous Higher Education Institutions including London Contemporary Dance School (LCDS). She consults on educational change, having written several UK dance degree programmes, and recently supported LCDS’s curriculum development. She co-leads the institution’s health and wellbeing research, and co-facilitates the institution’s Learning Exchange Programme for teaching artists. Elsa is also an evaluator, exploring dance participation and its impact on people’s lives from social, psychological and health perspectives with companies such as Dance Umbrella, Royal Ballet and Opera and East London Dance. Elsa is Editor-in-Chief of the Bulletin for Dancers and Teachers published by the International Association of Dance Medicine and Science (IADMS). She is also Chair of Dance Network Association, a dance for health organisation based in Essex. Elsa was the winner of the IADMS Dance Educator Award in 2025.

In this session Dr Mayara Floss reports on her work using creative methods to explore the entangled crises of our time.
Mayara Floss proposes a shift in how we approach the entangled crises of our time, arguing for methods that are generative rather than extractive. Moving beyond the traditional binaries of in/out or academic/subject, as the Möbius strip model of continuous engagement. This is illustrated through the idea of working with (not for or about) communities, as demonstrated by the quilombola experience of the Ilha de Maré, where research becomes a collaborative act of sowing seeds. The talk will explore how writing fiction can bypass scientific communication to through storytelling to convey the realities of climate change.
Mayara Floss is a Brazilian Family Doctor, writer, and filmmaker. She holds a PhD in Pathology from the University of São Paulo (USP). She is one of the creators of the Rural Seeds initiative and a former ambassador for it. Her work is deeply interdisciplinary, focusing on activism and planetary health. She is a member of both the WONCA Working Party on Rural Practice and the WONCA Environment group. At the University of São Paulo, she is a member of the Planetary Health group at the Institute of Advanced Studies (IEA/USP). She is also the creator and coordinator of the MOOCs Planetary Health and Planetary Health for Primary Care.