Approaches to social transformation through the arts: Positioning arts and humanities researchers as change agents
10th Mar 2023 9:30am-5:00pm
This event has been rescheduled due to UCU strike action taking place on the original date - it will now take place on 10th March.
Where: in person at Kingston University London, Penrhyn Road Campus, room JG2006 (postcode: KT1 2EE) - with an option to join the morning sessions online
Organiser: Dr Daniela Perazzo, Kingston University London
This training and development day aims at equipping postgraduate researchers across the arts and humanities with tools that will help them identify the potential their research projects hold to drive social transformation. The event positions researchers as change agents, illuminating the capacity of arts and humanities research to speak to social, political, economic or environmental issues.
Providing attendees with critical and experiential understanding of how change happens, it will enable them to reflect on the transformative (impact) potential of their own research projects. Insights acquired through the day’s activities will enable PhD students to better articulate the significance of their research in their doctoral theses and will also equip them with greater awareness of how their research can shape their careers post-PhD, both inside and outside academia.
Context:
The value of academic research is increasingly linked to its potential for impact, i.e. its ability to demonstrate how it can lead to advances in ways of thinking and doing within and beyond the academy, resulting in broader social changes and generating benefits to our lives and the world we live in. In the arts and humanities, often impact agendas are perceived as limiting the experimental and speculative nature of research and imposing the need for “applied” or quantifiable outcomes. But what if creative and speculative practice and research were in themselves seen as capable of catalysing change, through their intrinsic subversive potential, their ability to question, interrupt and transform dominant social and economic narratives and systems?
Who is the training day for?
This development day is open to Techne-funded PhD students working across the Arts and Humanities and will be of particular interest to researchers looking to situate their research in relation to social issues raised by the contemporary world. A small number of places is available for other postgraduate researchers and early career researchers.
Students who already have a sense of their projects’ potential for societal impact will sharpen their understanding of how they may employ their knowledge and skills to become change makers. Students who are unclear about the social relevance of their projects will be given tools to identify the correlation between their research and social transformation.
Attendance, Access and Registration
Attendance is in person for the whole day, with an option to join the morning sessions online. Attendance to the afternoon workshop is in-person only.
The venue for in-person attendance is Room JG2006 on the Penrhyn Road Campus of Kingston University (KT1 2EE). Access to the John Galsworthy (JG) building is via the main entrance to the Main Building on Penrhyn Road. The room is on the second floor (a lift is available).
For information on how to get there, please see this link: https://www.kingston.ac.uk/aboutkingstonuniversity/location/penrhyn-road/
A link for online attendance (morning only) will be shared with registered attendees nearer the time.
Registration is required: please select the relevant category on the Eventbrite page.
Event schedule
9:30-9:50am: Organiser’s welcome and introductions (Dr Daniela Perazzo)
Welcome remarks and refreshments.
9:50-11:05am: Talk by Season Butler and Q&A
A talk by Season Butler (artist, writer, activist and academic working in literary fiction, performance, collage and installation) on her creative practice and its centring around intersectionality and narratives of otherness, isolation and the end of the world as a contemporary ontological dilemma.
11:10-12:30pm: Roundtable discussion
Professor Meg Jensen (English Literature and Creative Writing, Kingston University)
Julia Pond (PhD student, Dance, Kingston University)
Dr Almiro Andrade (Dramaturgy and Performance, University of the Arts London)
Paul Paschal (PhD student, Dance, University of Roehampton and Sadler’s Wells)
12:30-1:30pm: Lunch break
Light lunch and refreshments.
1:30-5pm: Workshop with Charles O’Malley
An experiential workshop facilitated by Charles O’Malley (systemic constellations facilitator and Senior Systems Change Advisor, United Nations Development Programme). The workshop will use embodied approaches drawn from systemic constellations to create “living maps” to examine the students’ own research projects. This powerful diagnostic tool can help participants explore different possible avenues for their work and sense into their potential for social impact. (For more information about systemic constellations: https://www.charlesomalley.com/about)
Contributors’ biographies
Season Butler is a writer, artist and dramaturg. Her recent artwork has appeared in the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art (Gateshead), Tate Exchange (London), the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art (Riga) and Hotel Maria Kapel (Netherlands). Her debut novel, Cygnet, was published in 2019 and won the 2020 Writers’ Guild Award for Best First Novel. She is currently a fellow of the Berlin Artistic Research Grant Programme, Berliner Förderprogramm Künstlerische Forschung. https://www.seasonbutler.com/
Charles O’Malley is Senior Systems Change Advisor for the United Nations Development Programme, where he focuses on how to accelerate transformation in global food and agricultural systems. He works at the intersection of personal, organisational and societal transformation. He has two decades of experience working on social and environmental issues across a variety of sectors, with everyone from start-ups to charities, large corporations and governments. Throughout this time, he has also been a practitioner of Family and Organisational Constellations, a therapeutic approach for addressing impasse in personal lives, family systems, organisations and wider social systems. https://www.charlesomalley.com
Prof Meg Jensen is Professor of English Literature and Creative Writing at Kingston University London. Her research focuses on representations of human rights violation and/or traumatic experience in narrative form, and the social, cultural, gendered and familial contexts in which such works are produced. Recent applied projects, funded by the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the UNDP, assessed the effectiveness of Expressive Writing methodologies in supporting the well-being of women victims of sexual violence in conflict in Iraq and AHRC funded work with communities in crisis across Lebanon. Her most recent publications, including the monograph The Art and Science of Trauma and the Autobiographical: Negotiated Truths (Palgrave 2019), evaluate a range of life narrative forms that represent traumatic experience (memoir, testimony, poetry, graphic novels, monuments, autobiographical novels etc.) and consider the relationship between such works and current behavioural, psychological, and neurochemical approaches to diagnosing and treating traumatic disorders. Her practice-based research takes the form of creative non-fiction and autobiographical novels concerned with representations of traumatic experience. https://www.kingston.ac.uk/staff/profile/dr-meg-jensen-107/
Julia Pond is a Techne-funded PhD student at Kingston University london. Her project “Dance and the re-articulation of value: Embodied pathways to sustainability” asks how embodied knowledge might help us re-articulate value in ways that support a sustainable society, through a dialogic approach that imagines intersections between dance, philosophy, economics and politics. Pond is an independent dance artist with over twenty years of experience as a choreographer, somatic practitioner, teacher, facilitator and performer, whose research interests and performance are at the intersection of dance and politics. Her recent work explores value and productivity through a durational installation of a fictional company called BRED; which has been presented recently at festivals such as Calm Down Dear and TripSpace's Make Movement Matter. Julia is also a co-initiator of the podcast DanceOutsideDance which features interdisciplinary conversations within and beyond dance. https://juliapond.com
Dr Almiro Andrade is a Black Queer Latinx actor, director, playwright, dramaturg, educationist and theatre translator. Their approach sees all stages of theatre-making as acts of translation and their practice champions the production of international pieces in the most diverse settings across the globe since 2000. Lecturer in Contemporary Acting and Associate Lecturer in Dramaturgy and Performance for Film and Television at University of the Arts London, their latest works include: Namibia, Não! by Aldri Anunciação at Soho Theatre; The Trial - tour with StoneCrabs Theatre; The Blind One and The Mad One by Cláudia Barral (IntiPress, 2021) produced by Foreign Affairs Theatre; Nelson Rodrigues: Selected Plays (Bloomsbury/Oberon, 2019). Currently working in association with the Royal Court Theatre on their first Call Out for Lusophone Playwrights. https://www.arts.ac.uk/colleges/wimbledon-college-of-arts/people/almiro-andrade
Paul Paschal is an artist, writer and dramaturg living in Nottingham UK. He is currently undertaking a Techne-funded PhD at the University of Roehampton and Sadler’s Wells Theatre, studying choreographic-curatorial practices to rethink institutional ambivalence. His current research interests include: belonging, demons, hosting, intimacy, memorialisation, moral rhetoric, note-taking, overcare and trans-generational contracts. The majority of his artistic work is undertaken in collaboration with Rohanne Udall, currently under the name Cha cha cha cha cha. They have been making performances, exhibitions and curatorial projects since 2013. They try to work with what they don’t fully understand, and try to have fun. www.chachachachacha.info; https://paulhughes.substack.com/
Organiser’s biography
Dr Daniela Perazzo is Senior Lecturer in Dance at Kingston University London and Postgraduate Research Coordinator for the Department of Performing Arts and the School of Arts. Her research interrogates the intersections of the aesthetic and the political in contemporary choreography. She writes on the po(i)etic, critical and ethical potentialities of experimental and collaborative dance practices. Her publications include articles in Performance Philosophy, Performance Research, Dance Research Journal,Choreographic Practices and Contemporary Theatre Review. Her monograph Jonathan Burrows: Towards a Minor Dance was published by Palgrave in 2019. She is co-convenor of the Theatre, Performance and Philosophy working group of the Theatre and Performance Research Association (TaPRA), an active member of the Performance Philosophy network, and a long-time collaborator of Triennale Milano Teatro, which supports socially-engaged performance practice. https://www.kingston.ac.uk/staff/profile/dr-daniela-perazzo-179/