CANCELLED: Arts-Based Research Praxis and the Role of Theory

THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELLED DUE TO THE SUDDEN ILLNESS OF TWO OF THE THREE PRESENTERS. WE APOLOGISE SINCERELY FOR THE DISAPPOINTMENT.

This Symposium/Workshop offers an opportunity for doctoral and masters students an introduction to and interaction with arts-based methods in research. A trio of facilitators will lead a series of interactive talks which provide an introduction and experience of arts-based methods/tools/encounters and related theory use in educational settings.

Writing with theory on the sensational edge: Storying our educational selves and research

Dr Liz Mackinlay, University of Queensland

If I use the word “story”, what does it mean to you? Perhaps like me, the word story takes you back to a place in your childhood where everything was lived through your imagination. For some of you, the word story might easily be replaced with others such as fairytale, fable, fiction or it might even take on a more cynical twist to mean a fanciful retelling of facts. If Hannah Arendt were here she might say that “storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it” (1968, p. 105) and Virginia Woolf would insist stories are essential for us to begin moving from the “cotton wool of daily life” to “moments of being” (1976, p. 72). Indeed, Holman Jones tells us that “stories are our way in to understanding—to theorizing, and thus to knowing and working to change—our culture and ourselves. Stories also awaken us to the existence and experience of others—especially those others who are different from us” (2016, p. 230). She points to the ethico-onto-epistemological possibilities, urgencies and necessities of storying our educational selves and research in a post-truth world increasingly dominated, controlled and decided by those who would wish our erasure. In this workshop, we will engage in discussion and writing about how we might perform theory as story and story as theory to become “woke” to the embodied, sensational, material, political and ethical dimensions of ourselves and our educational research worlds as words.

Elizabeth (Liz) Mackinlay is an Associate Professor in the School of Education at the University of Queensland where she teaches Research Methods, Gender Studies and Arts Education. She holds a PhD in ethnomusicology from The University of Adelaide and a PhD in education from the University of Queensland. Recent publications include Teaching and learning like a feminist: Storying our experiences in higher education published by Sense Publishers in 2016 and together with Briony Lipton, the co-authored 2017 Palgrave publication, We only talk feminist here: Feminist academics, voice and agency in the neo-liberal university. Liz is currently involved in a number of research projects which include decoloniality and education, critical autoethnography as heartline work, and feminism in higher education.

How can art and theory interact? Art making as the ‘glue’ and ‘scissors’ to research.

Dr Rebecca Heaton, University of Northampton

In this workshop participants will explore how art can connect facets of their research – the theoretical, personal, cultural / identities, voices and stories. Through making they will unpick their own approaches to research and will think about how art can provide a tool to see, access and experience research differently – a request expressed by Ellis and Bochner (2006). Participants will position themselves as an artist to connect with the other and will experience how art can be a research tool to bridge change.

Rebecca Heaton obtained a first class BAEd honours degree from The University of Reading in Educational Studies and Art with Qualified Teacher Status. She then practiced as a primary school teacher for five years taking on the roles of Key stage two teacher, an art specialist and later a Head of Arts managerial position. Rebecca Heaton was appointed to Northampton University as a Senior Lecturer in Education and Curriculum Leader for Art and Design in 2012 in the Initial Teacher Education division. In her second year Rebecca began a Doctorate in Art Education at The University of Cambridge, she is in her third year of study and is using ethnographic methods to research cognition in the practice of art educators.