Practice As Research

• Intersecting the tourist gaze with visual arts practice-based research

  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 visual culture, and the tourist gaze, are of interest on interdisciplinary bases, much research in this area is written. The discussion is frequently captured and framed through considering photographic practices: particularly those undertaken by tourists, and within tourism settings (Ekici Cilkin & Cizel, 2021). Nevertheless, there has been little attention directed to tourism through visual arts practice-based research. As an interdisciplinary approach which entwines creative arts with non-arts research contexts, visual arts practice-based research uses artistic process and practice as a way of understanding (Leavy 2020; McNiff, 2008).Louise's presentation will introduce her own visual arts practice-based research through drawing and painting. She will discuss using this method to reflect upon the intersection of my own others’ gazes, as she shifts identities of being an artist, a researcher, a tourist, and a viewer. She will then consider a recent series of paintings. In this work, past, present, and future, interplay with figures performing tourism and leisure in spaces. Concrete and intangible imaginaries, memories, artefacts, experiences, and hauntologies evoke the ‘not yet’, and ‘never was’ (Fisher, 2014) through visual associations and memories. She will conclude my presentation by reflecting on the potential of visual arts practice-based research in interdisciplinary settings such as tourism.Dr Louise Todd is an Associate Professor and interim Head of the Tourism and Intercultural Business Communications Subject Group at Edinburgh Napier University. Louise leads the University’s Visual Methods and Ethnography Interdisciplinary Research Group and Public Engagement with research in the Business School. Louise’s background is in visual art and her practice and research are complementary. Her interests are in arts, cultural tourism and public engagement. She is concerned with visual culture, creative and visual research methods, alongside the potential of festivals and tourism to engage with community stakeholders. 

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  58:47
• Sonic postcards as an arts-based approach to encourage collaboration

  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 to find ways to use creative and co-produced materials more systematically within policy engagement. We co-produced a short sonic documentary called Fishing for Life, which is currently being hosted at the Wells Maltings Arts Centre.‘Fishing for Life’ is a sound work called a ‘sonic postcard’ co-created with stakeholders, fishers, researchers and a sound artist for a UKRI project called Sounding Coastal Change. Fishing for Life explores the social, economic, and environmental challenges facing fishing communities and the strategies that fishers use to cope with them.Sonic postcards are co-produced pieces made by publics, researchers and sound artists working together in ways which creatively assemble and voice otherwise ‘unheard’ human and non-human voices. They work with sound, voice, music and different kinds of listening. They do not tell or instruct but are instead intended to raise awareness to enhance sensitivity and attentiveness to issues that might otherwise be unnoticed. A primary aim is to stimulate better-informed discussion around the issues concerned in order to generate productive dialogue and learning.We would like to reflect upon the social and political roles that arts-based methods and creative practices might perform and, in particular, how they can encourage and enable engagement, collaboration, and learning around environmental challenges: processes that are all central to successful planning.Liza Griffin is an Associate Professor of Urban Health and Environmental Politics at UCL’s Development Planning Unit, Bartlett. Liza’s research on urban health and spatial politics includes projects on community responses to urban flooding, relationships between greenspaces and wellbeing, and placemaking for people with dementia. Her work on ‘Creative Practice and the Anthropocene’ explores how publicly engaged arts-based thinking and practice can intervene productively in the current environmental crisis. George Revill is Professor of Cultural Historical Geography at The Open University. His work is concerned with landscape as a way of understanding past and contemporary experience and understanding of place, environment, and nature. Research projects involving creative practice include the AHRC funded “Earth in Vision,” focusing on digital broadcast archives and environmental history,  “Sounding Coastal Change” and “Sounding Out Wells” which used sound and music to explore environmental and social changes on the North Norfolk coast.

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  58:47
• Practice As Research in the studio

  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 Brighton, Andy works out of his studio at the Red Herring artist cooperative in Portslade and serves as an Associate Professor at University College London (UCL).Andy Ash is an artist, researcher and educator. His practice is primarily sculpture, but an expansive notion of a sculpture, and therefore includes film, performance, objects, sound, drawing, print, and text in an installation or site-specific contexts. Collaboration and dialogue play a big role in his creative process, making his work socially engaged and interdisciplinary.

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  48:19
• Discomfort and vulnerability as a research process.

  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 ensuring that they answer their own needs? And how far can, or should, discomfort be a part of this process?During this seminar, Leri Price reflects on various encounters that occurred during fieldwork with Syrian women in Scotland on the subject of “home”, including instances where participants renegotiated the inclusion of objects in the research, and examples of avoiding engagement with the research topic. Although all parties continued to be warm, open, and engaged, the research process was subverted and/or redefined by the participants. These refusals led to what might be deemed “failed” fieldwork as Leri did not obtain the data she had anticipated gathering using creative and arts-based methods. Furthermore, Leri reflects on the implications of working in Arabic rather than her first language, English.The presentation considers how these encounters affected the research. Vulnerability, while uncomfortable and exposing, was a key part of this reflective process and continues to be integral to her research practice. Leri takes the opportunity to reflect on what “radical openness” (Gilroy, 2004) and “staying with the trouble” (Haraway, 2016) look like in this context, how discomfort and how an openness to perceived challenges ultimately opened up new avenues of exploration and more ethically engaged research.Leri Price is a doctoral researcher in the Intercultural Research Centre at Heriot-Watt University and her research works with Syrian women living in Scotland to explore meanings of home. She is particularly interested in exploring embodied and affective methodologies. Outside academia, Leri is a translator of Arabic literature. Her translation of “Where the Wind Calls Home” by Samar Yazbek is currently a Finalist for the 2024 National Book Award.

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  58:31
• Pedagogy, practice, play, and participation: Mutual learning in a co-created youth wellbeing project.

  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.

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  51:35

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