Practice As Research

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.