Academic literature on the topic 'Expanding Knowledge through Studies of the Creative Arts and Writing'

At the beginning of the pandemic, discussions in the Screenwriting Research Network questioned the validity of educating students for limited career opportunities as future screenwriters. Research into graduate pathways suggests employment opportunities for creative practitioners are far more complex with many creative practitioners embedded in diverse industries such as marketing, information technology and, primarily, the education sector. The rapid growth of online education presents a key opportunity for screenwriters to apply their craft skills and knowledge to an alternative disciplinary context. Storytelling, as a means of engaging learners or an audience, is a major area of overlap for screenwriters and designers of instructional resources. Stories that emotionally engage an audience have greater impact on the learner and assist in memory retention. A key tool for emotional engagement is the use of humour which has also been shown to facilitate learning. Writers of narrative comedy possess skills in creating humorous situations that can present challenging or serious topics through a comic perspective. This article argues that the growth in online education presents screenwriting graduates with unique opportunities to apply their skills to an alternative discipline that can streamline their transition to a career in writing for screens beyond traditional film and television.

This article presents Laban/Bartenieff movement studies (LBMS) experiments through pedagogical procedures and creative processes. It comprises artistic and performative perspectives in choreography and dance education from a nineteen years’ research within master and doctorate studies. Laban’s Motif writing shifts its main function to act as a trigger for creative processes. Besides, somatic serenities, as an important body state for the production of presence, are encouraged in somatic‐performative practices that include LBMS into dance programme courses in Rio Grande do Sul. The concept of somatic serenities is introduced to develop an inner‐outer body connection state as an intimate experience with dance, which produces knowledge. This text considers performative dance practices and practice as research as an LBMS teaching methodology in dance courses in the south of Brazil.

The article is a reply to Ilya T. Kasavin’s “Creativity as a social phenomenon” and is devoted to the phenomenon of the scientific precariat. A systematic analysis of the relations between the scientific precariat and the academic community as a dialectical opposition of the individual and the collective is undertaken. The method of critical analysis is aimed at rethinking the stable ideas that have developed in science about the collectivity of scientific work. The concepts of labor and employment in science are considered. It is concluded that the global development of digital technologies has led to the disappearance of the boundaries between physical and intellectual labor, against which there is an elevation of creative activity. The availability of information on the Internet, opening up incredible opportunities for research, destroys the monopoly of professional scientific communities on the possession of scientific knowledge. Scientific precarious loudly declare themselves in the public space, demonstrating the boldness and unusual nature of the ideas expressed. Inspired seekers of scientific truth embark on a free voyage through the vastness of the unknown. Traditional scientific communications, while retaining their significance, are enriched with new, non-standard ideas of precarious scientists who, ignoring rules and hierarchies, bring the creative spirit of freedom into modern science. However, the activities of such scientists may have an ambiguous assessment: a precarious scientist completely loses touch with the existing methods and approaches of classical science, and flight from work standards instead of expanding the horizons of scientific creativity turns into new problems caused by “multi-task” and instability of the labor activity of a “free” scientist. Despite the fact that in the conditions of the development of modern society and technology, the opposition of the pair of individual and collective is leveled, many scientists need common structures that determine the development of science, which at the present stage of the development of scientific knowledge are rather represented not by a social organization, but by an intellectual, linguistic and methodological unity focused on the creative development of the world.

Writing in Urban History in the spring of 1991, Peter Borsay considered how the gap between the ‘popular presentations of the urban past’ produced by the growing heritage industry and ‘the booming academic study of urban history’ might be bridged. Heritage, he argued, was ‘deeply bound up with the meanings and functions of towns’ and urban historians should play a crucial role within communities ‘engaged in a complex discourse with the past . . . that for many was fundamental to their livelihood and identity’. Borsay's concerns 27 years later continue to be mirrored in academic discussions surrounding heritage and materiality, echoing wider questions that surround the relevance of urban history beyond the academy. Recent conferences have also demonstrated the continued salience of Borsay's argument, considering the potential of the study of cities to shape approaches to their management through work with local communities, heritage partners, cultural institutions and professional groups. This emphasis on knowledge exchange and partnership has also attracted the support of funding bodies through collaborative doctoral awards that have sought to ‘increase opportunities for all researchers to develop their work in collaboration with public, private and third sector partners that increase the flow, value and impact of world-class arts and humanities research from academia to the UK's wider creative economy and beyond’. This has included the author's own work on the heritage of Middlesbrough's iron and steel industries, which has involved working collaboratively with local archives and heritage partners.

Creativity has been traditionally associated and even identified with artistry. However, it is being perceived as an impetus for the development of leadership and technologies innovation, and is characteristic of activities that for long have not been recognized creative. The current article presents results of the quantitative content analysis of the Business News (in Lithuanian Verslo žinios) daily business newspaper of Lithuania. The instances of the creativity concept and its synonyms use, i.e. novelty, modernity and originality, in the Lithuanian daily newspaper texts, published in 1994–2017, were calculated. The context in which these words were mentioned has been analyzed. The research results demonstrate the consistent increase in the use of the creativity concept and the related notions in texts from the chosen period. At the beginning of the period under examination, the analyzed concepts were employed in the fields traditionally related to creation and arts, such as fine arts, fashion, interior design, and advertising. Later, these concepts have entered the fields of civil engineering and information technology, i.e. the fields that had been based on knowledge and skills. Moreover, creativity notions have been used to describe inter-sectoral areas that are often initiated by project based activities. Creativity has linked entrepreneurship, information technology, innovations, and culture, and has gradually become important in texts, describing politics, education and science. The fields that had traditionally been perceived creative, have now been transformed and changed the concept of creativity, expanding the diversity of creative activities by merging them. It was found that the importance of the perception of creativity in the society, analyzed through the media content, changed in 2003, 2007, and 2014, when creativity became crucial not only in activities traditionally related with arts, but also in business, leadership, information technology, and technology sectors, and has promoted interdisciplinarity, collaboration among sectors, as well as the pursuit of novelty, utility, and applicability. Santrauka Viena vertus, kūrybiškumas tradiciškai siejamas ar netgi tapatinamas su meniškumu, kita vertus, suvokiamas kaip inovacijų, lyderystės, technologijų raidos stimulas, būdingas veiklos rūšims, ilgą laiką nesuvoktoms kaip kūrybiškoms. Straipsnyje pateikiami verslo dienraščio kiekybinės turinio analizės rezultatai. 1994–2017 metų Lietuvos dienraščio tekstuose buvo suskaičiuotos kūrybiškumo sąvokos ir jo sinonimai – naujumas, modernumas ir originalumas. Lietuviškas dienraštis Verslo žinios buvo pasirinktas medijų turinio analizei, kiekviename jo numeryje buvo suskaičiuotos visos kūrybiškumo ir jo sinonimų sąvokos. Tyrimo rezultatai rodo nuoseklų kūrybiškumo ir su juo susijusių sąvokų vartojimo augimą tekstuose visu tiriamuoju laikotarpiu. Laikotarpio pradžioje sąvokos buvo vartojamos tik su kūryba ir menu tradiciškai siejamose srityse, tokiose kaip dailė, mada, interjeras, reklama. Vėliau sąvokų vartojimas paplito srityse, kuriose anksčiau reikėjo tik žinių ir įgūdžių – statyboje, informacijos technologijose. Kūrybiškumas pradėtas įžvelgti aprašant tarpsektorines sritis, kurios neretai startavo pasitelkiant projektinę veiklą. Kūrybiškumas susiejo verslumą, informacijos technologijas, inovacijas ir kultūrą. Palaipsniui kūrybiškumas tapo svarbus politiką, švietimą ir mokslą aprašančiuose tekstuose. Sritys, kurios tradiciškai buvo suvokiamos kaip kūrybiškos, ėmė transformuotis, keisdamos ne tik kūrybiškumo sampratą, bet ir didindamos kūrybiškos veiklos rūšių spektrą bei jų susivienijimą / suliejimą tarpusavyje. Kūrybiškumo svarbos visuomenėje suvokimas, analizuotas per medijų turinį, pakito 2003, 2007 ir 2014 metais, kūrybiškumui tampant esminiu ne tik tradiciškai su menu siejamoje veikloje, bet ir versle, lyderystėje, informacijos ir kitų technologijų srityse, skatinant tarpdiscipliniškumą, tarpsektorinį bendradarbiavimą bei naujumo, naudingumo ir pritaikomumo siekimą.

Lorri Neilsen, whose feature article appears in this edition of M/C Journal, is Professor of Education at Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. Neilsen has been teaching and researching in literacy studies for more than four decades. She is internationally recognised as a poet and as an arts-based research methodologist specialising in lyric inquiry. In the latter half of this last decade she was appointed for a five year term to be the Poet Laureate for Nova Scotia. As an academic, she has published widely under the name of Lorri Neilsen; as a poet, she uses Lorri Neilsen Glenn. In this article I refer to her as Neilsen. This article reflects specifically on the poetics and the politics of the work of poet-scholar Lorri Neilsen. In doing so, it explores the theme of catastrophe in several senses. Firstly, it introduces the reader to the poetic articulations of the everyday catastrophes of grief and loss found in Neilsen’s recent work. Secondly, it uses Neilsen’s work on grief and loss to draw attention to a rarely recognised scholarly catastrophe: the catastrophe of the methodological divide between the humanities and the social sciences that runs the risk of creating, for the social sciences, a limiting and limited approach to research project design, knowledge production, and relationships between researchers and subjects, to which Lorri Neilsen’s ground-breaking use of lyric inquiry is a response. And thirdly, it alerts us to the need to fight to retain the arts and humanities within universities, in order to avoid a scholarly catastrophe of a different order. In undertaking this exploration, the article uses several terms with which some readers of M/C Journal might not be familiar. Research literacies is a term used to signal capacity and fluency in the understanding and use of research methodologies. Arts-based inquiry is the umbrella term used by researchers using their creative practice in the arts—in writing, theatre performance, visual arts, music, dance, movement—to lead them into new insights into the topic under investigation. This work is frequently embodied and sensuous. So, for example, the understanding of anorexia might be deepened by a dance performance or a series of paintings or a musical score devised in response to work with research participants; or, as I argue here, understandings of the everyday catastrophes of grief and loss might be deepened by the writing of poetry or expressive prose that uncovers nuance and sheds light in ways not possible using the more traditional research methodologies available to social scientists. Lyric inquiry, a sub-set of arts-based inquiry, is Neilsen’s own term for a research methodology that uses writing itself as the research tool, and whose hallmark is embodied language expressed as poem, song, or poetic prose, to “create the possibility of a resonant, ethical, engaged relationship between the knower and the known” (Handbook 94).This article, then, reflects on the research work of Lorri Neilsen. In this article I use Neilsen’s responses to grief and loss as the starting point to follow her journey from the early days of her involvement in literacy research to her present enchantment with arts-based inquiry in literacy and social science research. I outline her writing on research literacies, explore her notion of lyric inquiry as a crucial facet of arts-based research, and conclude with examples of her poetry born of creative reflection on what we might call everyday catastrophes. Ultimately I argue the need to avoid a scholarly catastrophe of a different order from those Neilsen explores, through the continued recognition of the crucial place of the arts in academic institutions.I open with excerpts from a piece in Lorri Neilsen’s collection, Threading Light, published in 2011. This piece, The Sea, written out of the grief of losing her aged mother, is one I find most moving. It begins: Days later—a week, a month, hard to tell—sun comes out of drizzle and ice and fog and snow showers, ripping open a bright day. Snow-mounded. If you were a kid, you’d look for your sled. He is sure the box of wrenches is in the cabin, and you know a drive to the country is better than another day in bed with Kleenex and a hacking cough, hiding a flayed heart, and pouring CBC into your ears around the clock. (104) The two figures in the piece, he and she, head south to their seaside cabin. They take a walk beside an ice-covered seashore.Today, you step carefully because of ice, and what you find catches your breath. For a brief moment you have escaped the grizzly claws of grief ripping at your chest. You are kneeling on the ice, touching the frosted edges of kelp and weeds, slimy umber and sienna, and putrid green growths that slurp in and out most of the year, but here, now, are stunned, immobile, impaled on the rocks by the cold. Desire is a feral animal; let it loose, it will seek beauty. You point out to each other tableaus: rimming white, translucent blues and greens, coppered plants flash-frozen, fringed by crystalline tatters. A Burtynsky, you think, but not man-made. This is life’s ebb, as Tu Fu wrote. The ocean’s winter verge. Death’s magnificent intaglio. Your fingers follow the lines of kelp: these things once lived, and moved. Take the long view, maybe they still do. You pause to sit on a cold rock and look at the sky; for a moment you are back beside her body, that last morning, your fingers on cooling flesh. Then, water, the sound of waves. Presence. You look up. He has found one periwinkle fused to a rock, then another. Several more. He places them in your hand, one by one, each dark brown ball with its own scurf of ice that gives off the smallest breath of mist as it touches the heat of your palm. Each a small jolt. This is what the sea creates while you are busy with your own tides: precise cups of glossy perfection with curves like a blues howl that open your heart, craning for light. (Threading Light 104–5)One of the things I appreciate most about Lorri Neilsen’s lyric work is her capacity to hold the miniscule simultaneously with the universal; a flash of insight under the arc of a timeless sky. “Smaller than small; larger than large,” write the Hindu prophets (Upanishads). “This is what the sea creates while you are busy with your own tides,” she writes, and in that moment of reading I am jolted into an awareness of the contours of grief that no amount of social scientific observation could provide: an awareness of the nature of self-absorption and inward focus so intense that even the most inevitable of natural rhythms—the ocean’s tides—are forgotten: forgotten, that is, until the protagonist is shaken awake again, by exquisite beauty, into a new kind of response-ability to the world. Lorri Neilsen’s feature article in this edition of M/C creates layer upon layer of insights exploring the notion that loss, an everyday catastrophe, involves a turning inside-out, a jolting into a new sense of self, or a propulsion out of an old, restrictive one; and that inevitably it propels us headlong into a state of living in the moment, of being present to what is, rather than distantly taking stock of what we have. As I ponder this experience, as a reader of her work, I re-experience that moment of stasis:physiologically we all know that experience of time suspended after shock, time inexplicably, irrationally, standing still. But what Neilsen has done so successfully as a poet-scholar, in my view, is not simply find words to express this turning inside out as poetry. Additionally, she has claimed the moment of poetic insight as a crucial form of knowledge-making that has a central and necessary place in illuminating our social worlds. This claim has far-reaching political significance for social science researchers, introducing, as it does, a re-invigorated understanding of the very concept of research:Research [she tells us] is not only the creation of products to market at the academic fair; research is the process of learning through the words, actions and revisionings of our daily life. […] Research is the attuned mind/body working purposefully to explore, to listen, to support, to transgress, to gather with care, to create, to disrupt, to offer back, to contribute, sometimes all at once […] Inquiry is praxis that cannot be boxed up and delivered: it is a story with no ending. (Knowing 264) Neilsen’s particular fascination is with lyric inquiry which she claims as political, poetic, and sustaining of the individual and the larger world: It has the capacity to develop voice and agency in both researcher and participant; it foregrounds conceptual and philosophical processes marked by metaphor, resonance and liminality; and it reunites us with the vivifying effects of imagination and beauty – those long-forgotten qualities that add grace and wisdom to public discourse. (Knowing 101)So what has led her here, to that place where lyric inquiry forms the basis of her engagement with the knowledge-making endeavour in the academy and beyond? As a feminist scholar fascinated by biography, by life writing and story, I find myself drawn as much towards the story of Neilsen’s evolution as a poet-scholar as to the work itself. How has she come to an awareness of the need to create new ways of doing research? What has she uncovered here about the ethics and the politics of doing research in the social world? As I read her work I become aware that her current desire to dance at the edge of the conventional research world has been driven as much by a series of professional catastrophes as by an underpinning desire for methodological innovation. Neilsen herself explores these issues in her 1998 collection of academic essays, called Knowing Her Place: Research Literacies and Feminist Occasions. There are several threads weaving their way through this account of a young academic researcher and scholar finding her way into a larger, wiser, more resonant space: there’s the story of the young graduate student learning the language of and experiencing the perpetual isolation of disembodied fact-finding statistically resonant research into literacy; there’s the story of the young mother juggling academic life and research and parenting, wanting to make sense to the teaching research participants she is working with, wanting to close the gap between the public and the private worlds, wanting to spend time with her partner and her two sons, especially her second son whose birth could have been a catastrophe but whose gentle ways of being in the world gifted them all with the desire to slow down, to see afresh; and, later, there’s the story of the mature woman whose impulse is to community and to solitude, to living with a generosity of spirit that takes seriously the intertwining of her poetic life and her academic and everyday worlds. Interwoven with these stories is the story of writing itself: here we find the formal disembodied writing of Western scientific research practices; here now is collectivist writing generated at kitchen tables, in community centres, in schools; here now is every mode of writing that evokes nuance and explores the senses; and here now too is the research writing that privileges response-ability, scholartistry, bodily sensation, reciprocity, engagement with the world.Neilsen’s account of this journey begins when, as a young postgraduate student doing research into literacy, she learned the language of statistical significance to measure syntactic complexity, noting, as she wrote up her MA, the distance between the language she had learned and the everyday language of the classroom teachers the research was meant to inform. The emphasis of this early research was on removing language from its context, isolating components of language for scrutiny, making findings that were replicable. In time she came to see this kind of knowledge-making as dry, limited, rule-bound, androcentric. From this disengaged, disembodied place she moved, over decades, into a space where compassion, wisdom, humility, and wonder combine to locate her as researcher who understands, alongside researcher David Smith, that “writing is a holy act, an articulation of limited understanding” (qtd. in Neilsen, Knowing 119). In an echo of Luce Irigaray’s insistence that the research and writing we do as fully alive feminist scholars will link the celestial and the terrestrial, the horizontal, and the vertical, and in a further echo of Helene Cixous’ claim that when writing from the body, “an opera inhabits me” (Cixous 53), Neilsen writes unabashedly of the metaphysical nature of her research world: Artful living, artful writing, connecting with a purpose to help each other transcend and grow through inquiry. Connection, embodiment, transformation, transcendence. All these expressions tap spiritual chords […] But if inquiry is to transcend the destructive circumstances of our lifeworlds, if its purpose is to make a difference, not a career, we cannot avoid using words such as vision, spirit, humanity, soul. Interest in metaphysical perspectives is not new in feminist circles, but is IS new in conventional research communities where the intangible, the deeply disturbing and consciousness-awakening dimensions of life are compartmentalized, reserved […] for a walk by the ocean, for the rare meditative times of our lives, if we find them at all […] But (she concludes) the awareness that we know when we live in the eternal present […] is an awareness full of tremendous power, and, ultimately, hope. (Knowing 280)In the final chapter of this 1998 text outlining her journey into research literacies, called Notes on Painting Ghosts and Writing the Poetry Report: Some Things I know But Not For Certain, Lorri Neilsen writes confidently against the grain of what she sees as the limits of androcentric research practices: Everything we know is at once out there and in here […] My place is to apprentice myself to the world, to paraphrase Merleau-Ponty, not in subservience and compliance, as the androcentric practices we have followed would keep me, but in reciprocity, curiosity and response-ability. What we must seek are the transgressive experiences and the fresh words which reveal us, in Annie Dillard’s words, ‘startlingly to ourselves as creatures set down bewildered’. (qtd. in Neilsen, Knowing 261)And in a gesture that I find heartwarming, she writes of the impact of being scooped up into a collective research-making endeavour, of belonging to a community of scholars (including poet-sociologists Laurel Richardson and Trinh T. Minh-ha) whose research agenda is to expand the ways we might know, to reflect the fullness and richness and complexity of the research endeavour itself, and, in so doing, of human experience: Time and enculturation have combined to make inquiry a terrain where I live, rather than a place I visit on occasion.Inquiry is less a stance and more an intentional gesture, a re-bodied approach to working with people, particularly women, on projects which matter to them locally and globally. Inquiry is a conspiracy, a breathing together, for which we need the conditions of being together and sharing a climate, or air, for breathing. Inquiry values difference, rather than fearing it, sees contiguity or complementarity as necessary for working together without suppressing our diversity. (Knowing 262) Hers is no airy-fairy disengaged mood-making endeavour. It is decidedly political: the inclination is to openness and growth, to take risks, to create critical spaces[…] When we make the assumptions of the norms of research problematic, we make the assumptions and the norms of life together on this planet problematic as well. We begin to dismantle the Western knowledge project, and we begin to learn a fundamental humility. Expanding our research literacies keeps us full of wonder, in spite of the shakey ground and the shadows. We can learn more when our pen is a tool of discovery, not domination.And her focus is ever on the artistry of research practices: The ontological and epistemological waters in which these [research] literacies continue to develop are social, political, ecological [...] Re-imagining inquiry is re-imagining ways to work with people and ideas which keep us, like the painter, the dancer, and the performance artist, watchfully poised, momentarily still, and yet fluidly in motion. (Knowing 263)In summary, then, the kind of writing that accompanies the research methodology that Lorri Neilsen has created cuts across the notion of knowledge as product, commodity, trump card. Knowing [for Neilsen] is an experience of immersion and expression rather than one of gathering data only to advance an argument […] A reader does not take away three key points or five examples. A reader comes away with the resonance of another’s world…our senses stimulated, our spirit and emotions affected. (Knowing 96) This kind of writing emerges from her desires to create a resonant, embodied, ethical, activist, feminist-honouring, and collaborative way to grapple with the nuance of human experience. This she calls lyric inquiry. Lyric inquiry sits on the margins, inhabits the liminal spaces, “places where we perceive patterns in new ways, find sensuous openings into new understandings, fresh concepts, wild possibilities” (Knowing 98). In her chapter on lyric inquiry in the 2008 Sage Handbook of the Arts in Qualitative Research, Neilsen argues that lyric inquiry leans on no other mode of enquiry: it stands on its own, resonant and expressive, inviting fresh ways to see, read, consider experience. Unlike the narrative enquiry that currently popularly accompanies much social science research in order to bolster an argument, or illustrate a point being made in policy formulation or discussion (Hopkins), lyric inquiry adopts its own mode, its own performative spaces. It’s a heady concept and, I would argue, a brave contribution to the repertoire of qualitative arts-based research methodologies.For me Lorri Neilsen’s stance as poet, writer, researcher, woman, is beautifully captured in her piece from Threading Light which she has titled Writing has always felt like praying. Here we glimpse the lives of four figures: the Buddha, Muhammad, Jesus Christ, and the poet herself, each responding to catastrophe of sorts: Gotama saw the face of his infant son and sleeping wife,shaved his head and beard, put on his yellow robe, andleft without saying good-bye. Duties, possessions,ties of the heart: all dustweighing down his soul. He walked and walked,seeking a life wide open, complete and pure as polished shell.In a cave away from the fray of Mecca, vendettas,and a world soured by commerce, Muhammadshook as the words of a new scripturecame to him. Surrendered himselfto its beauty, singing and weeping verse by verse, year by yearfor twenty-one years.Of course you remember the man from Galileewho carried on his back the very wood on whichhis blood was spilled. How he pushed back the rockfrom the front of the cave and – this is gospel –ascended, emptied of self and full of god, returningnow in offerings of bread and wine.I pace back and forth on a cliff above the unknowable, luredby slippery and maverick tales that call forth terror, crackthe earth, shatter my bones with light. I have no needto verify old brown marks of stigmata, translate Coptic fragments.A burlap robe on display in the cold stone air of the Church of Santa Croceis inscrutable: it tells me only that my body is a ragged garmentand will be discarded too.But here, now, I am ready as a tuned stringto witness what is ravenous, mythic. Here I am holy, misbegotten,gossip on the lips of the gods, forgotten by the time the cupsare washed and put away. So I start as I start every day,cobbling a makeshift pulpit, casting for truths as they are given me:Man, woman, child, sun, moon, breath, tears,Stone, sand, sea. (Threading Light 102–3) It is ironic that the kind of research that Neilsen advocates, research that draws specifically on the arts to create new methodologies for the uncovering of topics traditionally explored by the social sciences, is being developed at precisely that moment when university arts departments around the world are being dismantled, and their value questioned (See Cohen, NY Times; Donoghue, Chronicle of Higher Education; Kitcher, Republic). As I indicated at the beginning of the article, I use this homage to Lorri Neilsen and her work to make the broader point that we lose the arts and the humanities in our universities at our peril. It’s not just that the arts are a pleasant addition, a ruffle on the edge of the serious straight-tailored cut of the research garment: rather, as Neilsen has argued throughout her research and writing career, the arts are central to our survival as a response-able, interactive, creative, thoughtful species. To turn our back on the arts in contemporary research practices is already a dangerous erosion, a research and knowledge-making catastrophe which Neilsen’s lyric inquiry seeks to address: to lose the arts from universities altogether would be a catastrophe of a much higher order. References Cohen, Patricia. “In Tough Times, the Humanities Must Justify Their Worth”. New York Times. 24 Feb. 2009. Cixous, Helene. Coming to Writing and Other Essays. Ed. Deborah Jensen. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991.Dillard, Annie. The Writing Life. New York: Harper & Row, 1993. Donoghue, Frank. “Can the Humanities Survive the 21st Century?” The Chronicle of Higher Education. 5 Sep. 2010. Hopkins, Lekkie. “Why Narrative? Reflections on the Politics and Processes of Using Narrative in Refugee Research.” Tamara Journal for Critical Organisation and Inquiry 8.2 (2009): 135-45.Irigaray, Luce. “Sexual Difference.” The Irigaray Reader. Ed. Margaret Whitford. Oxford: Blackwell, 1987. 165-77. Kitcher, Philip. “The Trouble with Scientism”. New Republic. 4 May 2012.Muller, M. (trans.). The Upanishads. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1879.Neilsen Glenn, Lorri. Threading Light. Explorations in Loss and Poetry. Regina, SK: Hagios Press, 2011. Neilsen, Lorri. “Lyric Inquiry.” Handbook of the Arts in Qualitative Research. Eds. J. Gary Knowles and Ardra Cole. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2008. 88-98. Neilsen, Lorri. Knowing Her Place: Research Literacies and Feminist Occasions. San Francisco: Caddo Gap Press, and Halifax, NS: Backalong Books, 2008. Richardson, Laurel. “The Consequences of Poetic Representation: Writing the Self and Writing the Other.” Investigating Subjectivity: Windows on Lived Experience. Eds. Carolyn Ellis and Michael Flaherty. Newbury Park: Sage, 1992. 125-140. Richardson, Laurel. “Writing: A Method of Inquiry.” Handbook of Qualitative Research. Eds. Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna. S. Lincoln. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1994. 959-978.Trinh, T. Minh-ha. Woman, Native, Other. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989.

Thinking Through Improvisation implies two meanings: 1) carefully examining all that improvisation encompasses including how it is practiced, and 2) using improvisation to generate ideas or performances. Using a First Year Seminar course I taught for 20 years, I illustrate how a general course in improvisation can introduce students to improvisation as a way of thinking in diverse fields and can strengthen liberal arts skills in critical and creative thinking. Interdisciplinary and multicultural approaches are readily incorporated as are a range of activities including writing, critical reading, performance, and creative problem solving. Risk taking, trust, creativity, adaptability, teamwork, respect for knowledge, abstract and practical thinking and the joy of creative discovery are explored through discussion and practice of improvisation. Scientific explanations of improvisation are compared to subjective experiences of improvisational performance. These activities lay a groundwork for creative explorations of the discipline-oriented curriculum in the range of fields subsequently encountered by liberal arts students.

Research written as fiction can expand the audience pool and reach of knowledge generated in an accessible, familiar and less convoluted format than its more traditional methodological counterparts. Leavy’s (2013) book demonstrates how this is the case. Sh e eases interested researchers into how to plan and execute fiction - based research, and provides examples, useful tips and resources. An issue that is not explored in detail, however, is the advantages for readers of reading texts produced through this met hodology over those produced by fiction writers. This issue aside, Fiction as a research practice: Short stories, novellas, and novels is a compellingly written “how - to” introduction to how researchers can explore the rich layers and meanings of their rese arch in a creative format.

Group musical improvisation represents a profoundly collaborative creative process. The improvised framework demands that musicians collectively and spontaneously negotiate a set of dynamic musical and non-musical challenges. Similarly, in the post-fordist global marketplace, unexpected challenges have become a quotidian part of the business experience. Just as a group of musical improvisers must negotiate sudden musical changes, unanticipated changes in the marketplace demand a collaborative creative response. Since the early 2000s a wide variety of corporations have begun looking to group musical improvisation as a model for corporate design. Corporations ranging from Starbucks to Procter & Gamble to Research In Motion have hired improvising musicians to run seminars and workshops in order to develop more improvisatory – and more profitable – business practices. Complicating this narrative, however, is the ethic that is commonly attached to improvised musical practice: as numerous scholars have suggested, improvised musics frequently emerge from marginalized communities around the world, and often represent kinds of musicking that purposefully challenge the logics of the free market economy, especially in its present neoliberal guise. In this article, I suggest that this species of arts-based consultancy - together with a huge and ever-expanding body of writing on "creativity" - operates to provide an aesthetic aspect to "creative" and "knowledge-based" labour in the postindustrial North American "knowledge economy," and by extension, to neoliberalism itself. I argue that this aestheticization of neoliberal economics threatens to occlude the profoundly socially destructive impact of the laissez-faire neoliberal regulatory regime that has taken hold of economic and social policy on an increasingly global scale over the last three decades. Finally, however, I explore how the lessons of improvisation studies might intervene in the corporate appropriation of improvisation.

In the Covid-19 global crisis, gender-based violence (GBV) has been reshaped and reconfigured, with increases in some places and decreases in others. During our exploration of the changes in GBV through trans/feminist collaborative reflexive storying, we noticed the fragmentary nature of our storied recollections, which both represented and heightened the emotions in the work. With an intention of distilling the words even further, we challenged ourselves, as transdisciplinary researchers, to create a collaborative renga poem, which we titled, “Silent Footsteps.” An ancient Japanese form, the renga is a series of short, linked verses. This article demonstrates that renga offers an accessible, collaborative poetic research method, not only for research teams but also for non-academic groups to connect with each other. It has the ability to convey deep emotion, with an authentic personal voice, while being confined to structure and rules. Along with creating two stanzas each turn in a round of emails, we all wrote a reflection to engage with the process that identifies this method of writing research as holistic and creative, able to further connect the authors, reflect on the new knowledge and meaning that this work has motivated. Based on these reflections, which are woven throughout and on the renga poem, which is presented in full at the end, we argue that (a) renga is a timely poetic form, (b) it enhances transdisciplinary collaboration, and (c) that it offers both resistance and catharsis.

Spanning the countries of South Africa, Swaziland, and Ghana, this collection of work brings into focus child and youth experience together as a collage of anthropology, creative writing, poetry, and the fine arts. Woven together by questions related to the political economy of child and youth well-being, identity formation, and the multiple layers through which children articulate their health-narrative, this volume considers living in and coping with chronic illness, spirit-possession, and death. The growth in critical health humanities and the arts globally, suggests the desire for blended efforts to draw in a wider breadth of knowledge that cuts across the divided worlds of critical social science and the arts. This book, set in an African context, offers myriad possibilities for cross-disciplinary synergies as learning sites. It is a critical contribution to the field of children and childhood studies.