Practice As Research

• 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
• Exploring local cultural forms, engaging stakeholders, and informing policy and curriculum through arts-based research methods

  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).

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  58:38

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