Creating Together explores an emerging approach to research that combines arts practices and scholarship in participatory, community-based, and collaborative contexts in Canada across multiple disciplines. Looking at a variety of art forms, from photography and mural painting to performance art and poetry, the contributors explore how the process of creating together generates and disseminates collective knowledge.
The artistic processes and works in an arts-based approach to scholarship make use of aesthetic, experiential, embodied, and emotional ways of knowing and creating knowledge in addition to traditional intellectual ways. The anthology also addresses the growing trend in arts-based research that takes a participatory, community-based, or collaborative focus, and encourages scholars to work together, with other professionals, and with community groups to explore questions, create knowledge, and express shared understandings. The collection highlights three forms of research: participatory arts-based research that engages participants in all stages of the inquiry and aims to produce practical knowing to benefit the community; community-based arts research that has community/public space at the heart of practice; and collaborative arts approaches involving multi-levelled, multi-layered, and interdisciplinary collaboration from diverse perspectives.
To illustrate how such innovative work is being accomplished in Canada, the collection includes examples from British Columbia to Newfoundland and across disciplines, including the fine arts, education, the health sciences, and social work.
Sharing the Talking Stones: Theatre of the Oppressed Workshops as Collaborative Arts-Research with Indigenous Youth
Warren Linds, Linda Goulet, Jo-Ann Episkenew, Karen Schmidt, Heather Ritenburg and Allison Whiteman
Discusses a participatory project with File Hills Qu’Appelle Tribal Council Health Services, Saskatchewan involving workshops for Indigenous youth using theatre games to create a space where they can critically examine how the choices they make affect their health.
Uncensored: Participatory Arts-Based Research with Youth
Diane Conrad, Peter Smyth and Wallis Kendal
Describes a project with iHuman Youth Society, Edmonton to develop arts-based workshops to educate service providers about youth experiences, using interactive theatre and other popular arts forms created by the youth as opportunities to express their experiences and dialogue with service providers.
Young People’s Visual Representations of Seeking Help for Psychosis: The Co-Creation Process
Katherine Boydell, Brenda Gladstone, Elaione Stasiulis, Tiziana Volpe, Bramilee Dhayanandhan, and Ardra Cole
Documents an arts-informed inquiry as an alternative form of data collection and representation to illuminate the pathway to mental health care for youth experiencing psychosis. Young people who experienced psychosis worked collaboratively with researchers, clinicians and artists, in the creation of a mural installation.
Participatory Action-Based Design Research: Designing Digital Stories Together with New Iimmigrant/Refugee Communities for Health and Well-Being
Naureen Mumtaz
Summarises a thesis project using visual communication and participatory design with the aim of influencing social change for new immigrant and refugee community health, mobilizing multicultural health brokers for advocacy and information sharing about the health of their communities.
The Use of Staged Photography in Participatory Action Research with Homeless Women: Reflections on Methodology and Collaboration
Izumi Sakamoto, Matthew Chin, Natalie Wood and Josie Ricciardi
Describes a project engaging the arts – staged photography and arts dissemination activities, with women and transwomen who have experienced homelessness in Toronto, exploring how they build support networks with each other in order to survive.
The Living Histories Ensemble: Sharing Authority Through Play, Storytelling, and Performance in the Aftermath of Collective Violence
Nisha Sajnani, Warren Linds, Alan Wong, Lisa Ndejuru, Lucy Lu, Paul Gareau and David Ward
Discusses, in the form of a dialogue between ensemble members, a playback theatre ensemble’s practices at the intersection of oral history, trauma, community dialogue, and arts-based research as part of a major community-university oral history project in Montreal.
Co-activating Beauty, Co-narrating Home: Dialogic Live Art Performance and the Practice of Inclusiveness
Devora Neumark
Presents the author’s most recent cycle of research-creation describing a series of live art events that took shape around several historical factors: the establishment of the State of Israel and concomitant oppression of the Palestinians, and a theatrical production Jewish Home Beautiful.
Using Drama to Build Community in Canadian Schools
George Belliveau
Presents case studies of two schools, one in Halifax, Nova Scotia and one in Vancouver, British Columbia where teaching artists are integrating participatory forms of theatre and drama to develop artistic and community engagement, detailing the benefits of collaborative learning through/with/from the arts for the community.
Witnessing Transformations: Art with a Capital ‘C’ — Community and Cross-Cultural Collaboration
Nancy Bleck
Relates the author’s experience as co-founder, artist and researcher from inside the Uts’am Witness project, through story, photography and bringing in the voices of her collaborators, to consider how the arts can support participation in creating understanding in sites of tension and times of conflict.
Wombwalks: Re-Attuning with the M/Other
Barbara Bickel, Medwyn McConachy & Nané Jordan
Explores the art practice of the The Gestare Art Collective that evolved within a framework of women’s spirituality and honours the Divine Feminine. Their Wombwalks project, a long distance collaborative practice linked by digital technologies, is set alongside walking the ancient geomantic architecture of the labyrinth.
Seeing Through Artistic Practices: Collaborations Between an Artist and Researcher
Vera Caine and Michelle Lavoi
Documents the collaboration between a printmaker/photographer and a narrative inquirer in Edmonton, Alberta, which began in the face of mourning the difficult stories around the disappearance of a research participant and evolved into an inquiry into storied and lived experiences to see the tactile traces of memory.
Soot and Subjectivity: Uncertain Collaboration
Patti Pente and Pat Beaton
Charts the journey of two visual artists/researchers exploring their sense of place, informed by uncertain and irregular rhythms of fire. As an experiment in landscape art and sense of place, the exploration involved burning a piece of fabric in an artistic performance. It asks how uncertainty influences the subject as becoming.
Arts-Based Representation of Collaboration: Explorations of a Faculty Writing Group
Heather McLeod, Sharon Penney, Rhonda Joy, Cecile Badenhorst, Dorothy Vaandering, Sarah Pickett, Xuemei Li and Jacqueline Hesson
Describes a self-study project using writing as inquiry demonstrating alternate ways of knowing, examining how the arts support participatory practices, contributing to creating new understandings. The eight-member-all-woman writing group question how they make sense of the complexity of knowledge construction, identity and representation through the arts.
A Poetic Inquiry on Passive Reflection: A Summer Day Breeze
Sean Wiebe, Lynn Fels, Celeste Snowber, Indrani Margolin and John J. Guiney Yallop
Unveils how the authors’ community of poetic practice collaborated to examine their experiences as educators in post-secondary learning environments; how their coming together through writing contributes to mindful attendance to in-between-relational-spaces of tensions, absences, learning and curiosities revealed through reflection over time.
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