Practice As Research

Nicole Brown

Practice As Research aims to bring together the many different strands of practice-led/based research across all disciplines so as to not be limited by disciplinary conventions, but instead to benefit from cross-disciplinary fertilisation. In the wider academic communities, there are many terms in use to describe the research-practice nexus. For the sake of consistency we adopt the term 'practice as research'. Fundamentally, we consider practice as research any practice that is underpinned by scholarship and academic rigour. The primary aim of Practice As Research is sharing practices, providing constructive feedback and thus enabling the mutual development of understanding around practice as research.

  1. 5D AGO

    Creative writing as analysis in research with children: putting a light in the window

    In this session Luci Gorell Barnes presents on how she has used creative writing within analysis in her doctoral research. Luci presents a creative writing method that she developed as part of her PhD analysis, in which she produced ‘portraits’ of individual children. Arundhati Roy (2009, p.134) reminds us to ‘never simplify what is complicated’ and this creative analysis process came out of her desire to deepen her understanding of what she had learned from her encounters with each child rather than homogenising her data into broad themes. She discusses how being immersed in her data informed her writing as she considered the issues the children had explored, drew on metaphors and images they used, and remembered how they had interacted with her and each other. She saw each ‘portrait’ as a ‘light in the window’, guiding her through ‘the woods’ of her analysis and findings, and supporting her to write embodied interpretive accounts that foregrounded the relational nature of the study. Couceiro (2024, p. 304) challenges the idea that being creative is ‘antithetical to being systematic or structured’ and she found that engaging with her data in this highly subjective and ‘interruptive’ way (Clark, 2024, p. 3) meant she brought a level of accuracy and relationality to her analysis that she might not have otherwise found. Luci Gorell Barnes is a socially engaged artist and artist-researcher. Her practice is concerned with developing creative participatory inquiries with people who find themselves on the margins for one reason or another, and issues of inclusion and access are central concerns in her work. She is interested in finding flexible and responsive processes that allow us to think imaginatively with each other and ourselves and her practice contributes to a community of disciplines that embraces academic research, family support, community development, health services, and education. She is currently a full-time PhD student on the Postgraduate Research Programme in the School of Education and Childhood at UWE Bristol. Her study explores how relationally engaged arts-based methods can support minoritised children to express, reflect on, and amplify their lived experiences and perceptions.

    49 min

  2. MAR 27

    Theatre of the Oppressed: Reflections and Provocations from an Artist/Researcher

    In this session Olivia Maurer presents her experience using practice as research working with participatory theatre in a traditional policy and social science context. Drawing on her ongoing doctoral research, Olivia shares insights on conducting practice as research and how the duality of the artist/researcher identity has impacted her positionality, duty of care, and outcomes of the project. The challenges and potentialities of engaging in PAR within a PhD process are also evaluated.  This session also discusses how practice as research is not just a “nice to have” in an urban studies and cultural geography research landscape, but a needed contribution to the field. We consider how the body is a vital source of knowledge of place and a crucial lens through which we can gain a better understanding of place-based experiences. We also examine how creative practice facilitates a space where this embodied knowledge is able to be teased out and reflected upon. Olivia Maurer is a postgraduate researcher in Urban Studies and Social Policy at the University of Glasgow, with a background in public policy and arts-based community engagement. Her PhD works in partnership with the AHRC Place-Based Research Programme to build an evidence base of methodologies that are able to surface the “felt experience of place,” specifically focused on using Theatre of the Oppressed as both a research method and a policy engagement tool. Olivia is also a community theatre practitioner, with her work recently being showcased at the UK Parliament as one of 100 Creative Agents of Climate Change.

    51 min

  3. FEB 16

    Social Fiction as a means of ‘unflattening’ disabled children’s educational childhoods.

    In this session Jill Pluquailec presents her use of Social Fiction when researching disabled children. This seminar presents a methodological reflection on the use of social fiction as a means of ‘unflattening’ disabled children’s educational childhoods. Jill argues there is a critical need for new ways of exploring the lived experiences of neurodivergent and disabled children to complicate ‘flat’ understandings that deny the embodied, affective, socio-spatially mediated experience of school life. She does this by making a case for social fictions as an ethical methodology and reflecting on techniques she used in developing a short story social fiction. She makes the case for why and how fiction-based methods destabilise dominant ways of knowing, seeing, teaching, and intervening with disabled children. Jill concludes by offering a series of ‘what if’ questions about the future development of social fiction as a methodology in Disability Studies and Education, one which brings greater nuance and a sense of three-dimensionality to understandings of neurodivergent bodies and minds in school spaces. Dr Jill Pluquailec, Senior Lecturer in Autism, Sheffield Institute of Education, Sheffield Hallam University. Jill’s teaching and research is concerned with social justice for disabled children and families with a particular interest in the ways bodies and spaces in education are both produced and reproduced within matrices of power and surveillance. Her work sits within Critical Disability Studies, Disabled Children’s Childhood Studies, and Critical Autism Studies centring on destabilising dominant knowledges in relation to what it means to be, and be understood, as marginalised. Jill has a specific commitment to social justice and ethics for groups that have been historically excluded or oppressed in both research design and practice.

    50 min

  4. JAN 15

    Weaving and untangling: using craft and creative process as a researcher-practitioner across the doctoral journey

    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.

    51 min

  5. 12/04/2025

    Stitches of Self: Restorative textile-based approaches to define the lived experience

    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.

    52 min

  6. 11/14/2025

    Embodied knowing: Foregrounding the multi-sensoriality of the body as epistemological site

    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.

    50 min

  7. 10/13/2025

    Major crisis, no easy exit: Ways to research and sowing seeds.

    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.

    54 min

  8. 06/24/2025

    Challenges and opportunities for practice researchers: the PRAG-UK reports

    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.

    57 min
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About

Practice As Research aims to bring together the many different strands of practice-led/based research across all disciplines so as to not be limited by disciplinary conventions, but instead to benefit from cross-disciplinary fertilisation. In the wider academic communities, there are many terms in use to describe the research-practice nexus. For the sake of consistency we adopt the term 'practice as research'. Fundamentally, we consider practice as research any practice that is underpinned by scholarship and academic rigour. The primary aim of Practice As Research is sharing practices, providing constructive feedback and thus enabling the mutual development of understanding around practice as research.

Information

  • Creator
    Nicole Brown
  • Years Active
    2022 - 2026
  • Episodes
    49
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Practice As Research
  • Show Website
    Practice As Research