Practice As Research

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.

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 inevitably also comes with fragmentation of approaches and issues of communication both internally and to those outside the field (e.g. the dizzying profusion of terms for what we do: practice-led/based/as-research, artistic research, etc.)
In the words of the report's supervision team: "[they] provide a way to articulate and advocate for the concerns of the practice research community. [...] to look at how we might move from a sense that ‘sharing practice research is just for REF’ to a clear and open stance where ‘practice research is for life’. In this view, outputs from practice research projects remain accessible in perpetuity to diverse audiences, are discoverable in the public domain, and practice research operates as a critical component of an open, contemporary and thriving research ecology."
As we approach another REF cycle, the lessons and insights of these reports are more important than ever. Frequently practice researchers find themselves alone or poorly-served in institutions and systems that struggle to understand non-textual outputs. The PRAG-UK reports offer an excellent advocacy position to support practice researchers in articulating and sharing their work, and also to develop communities of good practice in valuing the FAIR approach to research to make all of our work Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable.
To reflect the complexity of positions within practice research two very different academics will enact a  conversation: Scott and Tim.
Dr Scott McLaughlin (b.1975) is an Irish composer/improviser based in Huddersfield (UK). He is associate professor in composition and music technology at the University of Leeds and directs CePRA (Centre for Practice Research in the Arts), as well as convening the RMA Practice Research Study Group. He is a steering group member for PRAG-UK. Scott was Co-I on the AHRC SPARKLE project (Sustaining Practice Assets for Research, Knowledge, Learning and Engagement [2022]), and PI on an AHRC Leadership Fellowship (2019–21), the ‘Garden of Forking Paths’, on composing with contingent materialities. His current research uses different methods to excite resonance in sounding bodies to exploit physical non-linearities and generate musical patterns/structures. 
Tim Stephens is an education developer, with a specialism in curriculum, at the University of the Arts London, a writer and photographic artist. He has 30+ years’ experience of working in education, with learners, artists, teachers and organisations and his areas of interest are: the inter-play between art and writing practices, embodiment, the relationship between cognitive and non-cognitive experience, equality, western and non-western ethics, organisational and social change.