Kip Jones’ Ten ‘Rules’ for Being Creative in Producing Research

Since the end of the year seems to be the time for lists, top ten lists, etc., I decided to compile mine about being creative whist producing cutting-edge research. Not for the faint-hearted! Here goes:

1.      Be curious. Be a detective. Be ready to be surprised by answers you never expected. It should, in the end, be a good story that you can tell.
2.      Insure that the method fits the question(s). This can often take some time. Be willing to investigate until you find the right method. This will save you a lot of grief later.
3.      Explore methods. Combine them, expand them, reinvented them, but be prepared to then follow them.
4.     If your research question is about people, find a way to really involve them in the process, not just answer some stupid questions.
5.      Don’t panic if you method produces a lot of data. Swim in it. It’s fun and it is here that the surprises bubble up. Whatever you do, try to avoid reducing the amount of data by ‘categorising’ it. (I detest little boxes.)
6.      Think hard and long about how you want to share the results of your efforts. Text is only one of many possibilities. Really try to get your personal interests out of the way in this process and let the data lead you in selecting a format or art form.
7.      Research is about discovery; Dissemination is about putting your findings into action. Ideally, we can be creative at both.
8.      About half of your effort (and time) should be on producing the research, the other half on creating the outputs.
9.      Creative outputs produce unexpected outcomes. Be willing to experiment, ‘go it alone’. ‘Doing’ and ‘making’ produce additional findings. Use them, they are rich and you’ve earned them.
10.   Be willing to make 100 versions, then one more (Sister Corita Kent). It’s that last one that you will use.

Note: Remember, oh ye serious social scientists, that in Big Science, some of the greatest discoveries were made through mistakes and acknowledging the unexpected. Some famous Scientists also slept with their lab assistants and even a few later married, but we won’t go there, at least not now. Therefore:

Rule 11: Be curious about the history of your craft. Soak up as much as you can. It will both inspire and lead you.

Kip Jones to Advise on Springer's Arts-based Educational Research Book Series

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Charles Voysey’s inscription on a handcrafted chest, 

which became the motto for the Society of Designers in 1896

Kip Jones is please to announce that Springer Publications has invited him to act as an Adviser on their new Arts-Based Educational Research Book Series. With more than 200 Nobel Prize winners among the authors of its books and journal articles, Springer’s editors discover the best authors and help to disseminate their research, while delivering the next big thing in scholarly communications.

Arts-Based Educational Research is increasingly employed across the disciplines of social science, education, humanities, health, media, communications, the creative arts, design, and trans-disciplinary and interdisciplinary research.

The hinge connecting the arts and research in this Arts-Based Educational Research book series is education. Education is understood in its broadest sense as learning/transformation/change that takes place in diverse formal and informal spaces, places and moments.

Kip is fond of reminding others that the concept of “Head, Heart and Hand” has a long history, including in the Arts. Charles Voysey, an artist/craftsman, utilized the phrase in his participation in the Arts & Crafts movement in 19^th Century Britain.

Call for Submissions: Springer Publications announces its arts-based educational research book series. Queries and submissions should be sent via email in a word doc. format to Barbara Bickel at editor.aber.springer@gmail.com

 

This book series offers both edited collections and monographs that survey and exemplify Arts-Based Educational Research. The series will take up questions relevant to the diverse range of Arts-Based Educational Research. These questions might include: What can arts-based methodologies (such as arts based research, arts informed research, a/r/tography, poetic inquiry, performative inquiry, art practice based research etc.) do? How do the arts (such as literary, visual and performing arts) enable research? What is the purpose of Arts-based Educational Research? What counts as Arts-Based? What counts as Educational? What counts as Research? How can Arts-Based Educational Research be responsibly performed in communities and institutions, individually or collaboratively? Must Arts-Based Educational Research be public? What ways of knowing and being can be explored with Arts-Based Educational Research? How can Arts-Based Educational Research build upon diverse philosophical, theoretical, historical, political, aesthetic and spiritual approaches to living life? What is not Arts-Based Educational Research? 

The hinge connecting the arts and research in this Arts-Based Educational Research book series is education. Education is understood in its broadest sense as learning/transformation/change that takes place in diverse formal and informal spaces, places and moments. As such, books in this series might take up questions such as: How do perspectives on education, curriculum and pedagogy (such as critical, participatory, liberatory, intercultural and historical) inform arts based inquiries? How do teachers become artists, and how do artists become teachers? How can one be both? What does this look like, in and beyond school environments? 

Arts-Based Educational Research will be deeply and broadly explored, represented, questioned and developed in this vital and digitally augmented international publication series. The aesthetic reach of this series will be expanded by a digital on-line repository where all media pertaining to publications will be held.

RUFUS STONE goes LIVE and FREE on the Internet

Bournemouth University is pleased to announce that the research-based, award-winning short film, RUFUS STONE, is now live and can be viewed for FREE on the Internet. 

View RUFUS STONE here:  https://vimeo.com/109360805

The University has championed the film as ‘an outstanding example of public engagement at BU’ and as ‘inspirational’ in the University’s Annual Report.

RUFUS STONE is based on three years of a Research Council UK funded study of the lives of older lesbians and gay men in south west England and Wales, a part of the national New Dynamics of Ageing Programme of research.

Winner of two awards at the prestigious Rhode Island International Film Festival in 2012, the film has gone on to be screened at film festivals, other universities in the UK, USA and Canada and by organisations such as Alzheimer’s Society UK, LGBT groups, and health, social and ageing support networks.

The film has been reported in the press widely, including in the New York Times, Times Higher Education, The Independent, BBC Radio 4 and local media.

RUFUS STONE was directed by Josh Appignanesi (The Infidel) and produced by Parkville Pictures, London. The film stars William Gaunt and Harry Kershaw, sharing the title role of “Rufus”. Niall Buggy and Tom Kane take on the part of Rufus’ love interest, “Flip”. Tattletale “Abigail”, a role shared by Lin Blakley and Martha Myers-Lowe, completes the triangle. The film cleverly interweaves each of the three main characters’ younger selves with their older selves. Gaunt commented: “It’s a sad and touching story, but also one about age and what it’s like to fall in love when you’re very young, and how that remains with you.”

 

Award-winning author and educator, Patricia Leavy, describes the plot in her review of the film for The Qualitative Report:

The film tells the story of a young man in rural England who, while developing an attraction to another young man, is viciously outed by small-minded village people. He flees to London and returns home 50 years later and is forced confront the people from his past and larger issues of identity and time. 

Leavy sums up: “This film is as good as most Oscar-nominated shorts, and vastly superior to many. In my opinion, it is just about as good as a short film gets.”

Author and Executive Producer of RUFUS STONE, Dr, Kip Jones, has written widely in the academic press and elsewhere on the process of collecting the biographic material and subsequently his writing the story for the film. He has presented the film with follow-up Question and Answer sessions at prestigious institutions such as Cambridge, Birkbeck, Durham and Keele Universities in the UK.

Jones explains the process of creating composite characters based in the research and, indeed, in his own experience:

The naïveté of same-sex attraction and young love, too often forbidden and misunderstood love, was a story reported over and over again in our study and. therefore, became central to the plot of the film. By compositing these stories in RUFUS STONE, at last we remember them together, finally gaining strength in each other for something misunderstood and condemned from our isolated youthful experiences.

Jones is available by arrangement for Q&A discussions by Skype following screenings for larger audiences. Contact: Kip Jones mailto:kipworld@gmail.com

Trailer for the film: https://vimeo.com/43395306

Background on the research and making of the film: http://microsites.bournemouth.ac.uk/rufus-stone/

Screenings of the film would be appropriate for a wide variety of audiences, including in undergraduate and graduate teaching, community groups, and LGBT and ageing support organisations. Length: 30 minutes.

Intrigued?   
View RUFUS STONE here:  https://vimeo.com/109360805

Sage Publications’ Social Science Space features KIPWORLD article

Sage Publications disseminates important research across the social science disciplines around the world. For the second time, Sage’s on line presence, Social Science Space, features an article by Bournemouth University’s Kip Jones.
 

“(The Grand Theory of) Neo Emotivism” is Jones’ take on the current state of mind of many researchers globally wishing to connect to their research “subjects” as well as to their own emotions. The article first appeared on Jones’ blog, KIPWORLD, where it has been viewed nearly 900 times in less than a month. The article went live today as the lead article on Social Science Space.

“’Neo-emotivism’ is a concept Kip Jones describes as intentionally using emotional responses for academic ends in large part by drawing from non-traditional sources like art and literature for inspiration and even vocabulary”. Fashioned in a tongue-in-cheek way after 19th and 20th Century art manifestos, the article makes it’s case by highlighting examples from a range of resources, including singer Jeff Buckley, composer Max Richter, artist Kazimir Malevich and architect Zada Hadid.

Thoughts for the article initially emerged from Jones’ interactions with fellow BU academics at a recent ARTS in Research (AiR) two-day workshop at Bournemouth University. Jones was surprised and encouraged by faculty and students, not only from Health & Social Care, but also from Media, Design, Engineering and Computing and Tourism with a similar ache to connect emotionally with their subjects and to acknowledge the “first person” in their dialogues. His concept of the “Pre-REFaelites” materialised from that encounter.

The ARTS in Research (AiR) cross-Schools collaborative will hold an additional two days of workshops at the Lighthouse in Poole led by artist-in-residence, Hazel Evans, on 20th and 21st November. Faculty and students from across schools and from outside of the University are encouraged to join us for the two days of creative engagement. More info

"(The Grand Theory of) Neo Emotivism" 

(The Grand Theory of) Neo Emotivism

 Malevich, “Black Suprematic Square”, 1915, oil on linen, 79.5 x 79.5 cm,

Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow

“The things that I want to communicate are simply self-evident, emotional things. And the gifts of those things are that they bring both intellectual and emotional gifts — understanding”. Jeff Buckley, singer (Interview with Luisa Cortado, 1995) 

[Download the entire paper here] 

The paper also appeared in Social Science Space

Neo Emotivism. You heard it here first. If I am ever going to come up with a Grand Theory, (in spite of years of denying the possibility of that very construct in a post-modern world), this is it!

•     There is a New Emotivity emergent in academia worth exploring.

•     Time and time again, when given the opportunity, scholars long to connect emotionally with the people about whom they are writing.

•     The difficulty encountered for academics wishing to write creatively is that we are programmed to repeat (endlessly) what we've read to establish “validity”.

•     When you write to provoke (arouse) readers emotionally, don't mimic words you've read to do it. Instead, chose unique words that equal your experience.

•     Scholars realising the soundness of their emotional connectivity need to find their own language to express feeling—a new language not simply justified by the idiom preceding them.

 

Can we move on?
My thinking around the concept of Neo Emotivism began to solidify recently, brought on by two things: a short descriptive phrase about Max Richter's music and an ARTS in Research workshop at Bournemouth University. Allow me to elaborate.

When I read that Max Richter’s minimalist composition for the TV series, The Leftovers, was tagged as ‘Neo-Romantic’ in a promo, I was startled. “Neo-Romantic? How is minimalist music romantic?”  And then I started to realise that it is the same emotional response that I have to Richter’s music that I have to Chopin or Mendelssohn. 

“What is ‘Romanticism’ in music composition?” I wondered. ‘Characteristics often attributed to Romanticism … are:

•        a new preoccupation with and surrender to Nature
•        a fascination with the past…
•        a turn towards the mystic and supernatural  …
•        a longing for the infinite
•        mysterious connotations of remoteness, the unusual and fabulous, the strange and surprising
•        a focus on the nocturnal, the ghostly, the frightful, and terrifying
•        fantastic seeing and spiritual experiences
•        a new attention given to national identity
•        emphasis on extreme subjectivism
•        interest in the autobiographical
•        discontent with … formulas and conventions’

(Kravitt 1992, 93–94, 107 cited in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romantic_music)

These qualities resonate with the characteristics we might look for in Neo Emotivism. There! A checklist.

Can we move on?
The penny began to drop when the Bournemouth University ARTS in Research collaborative met up recently for those two days of experimentation. I am familiar with health and social care academics having a proclivity towards sensitivity to the often-emotional stories of others gleaned through their investigative encounters. What surprised and encouraged me were faculty and students from Media, Design, Engineering and Computing and Tourism with the same ache to connect emotionally with their subjects and to acknowledge the “first person” in their dialogues.

Perhaps we should look for inspiration to the New Romantics of the late 1970s, with their shoulder pads and quiffed hair?  Ziggie Stardust and synthpop? There is a sweet nostalgia often present in my informal biographic encounters with fellow academics, wistful for the days of David Bowie and Kate Bush. Their recollections are often about how we used to be before we were led to believe that we needed to behave (differently). It’s life pre-RAE and REF—the “preREFaelites”, to coin a phrase.  It is often reminiscence about a time in our shared lives of both emotional conflict and emotional connect.

Indeed, scholars often find their own narratives in the stories that people tell them for their research. A big part of Neo Emotivism is embracing this phenomenon instead of backing away from it. The relationships that can be established through such connections are potent and comprised of more than the sum of their parts.

Changing hearts and minds was central to my reasons for making the short film RUFUS STONE and I have written about this elsewhere. I realised quite early in the research process for the film that debate, argument, or evidence—none of these by itself was going to change the opinions of some of the hardheaded bigots in our midst. Should we attempt an emotional appeal, even attempt to provoke an emotive disturbance? Would we then have a chance at changing hearts and minds?

I recently watched a BBC 4 programme with architect Zada Hadid in which she explained how her work has roots in an art movement that is 100 years old. She has long cited the Russian abstract artist Kazimir Malevich as one of her greatest inspirations. Her experience offers a clue to the very way in which arts-based researchers might explore outside their own turf to enrich their present efforts. Hadid found her inspiration from painting in another era, not by simply replicating what was au courant at the moment in her chosen field of architecture. If we continue to only imitate what has directly preceded us in our creative academic endeavours, we will never produce the forward movements in scholarship necessary for change and innovation.  As a student, Hadid bravely embraced Malevich as inspiration and flew with it.  Actually, much of her architecture today looks like it is floating or flying. Studying Malevich opened up vast possibilities for her creative explorations and still influences the way in which she works today.

The early waves of renewed interest in qualitative and narrative approaches (or the qualitative and narrative “turns” in research as they were called in the early 1990s) established protocols, procedures, and a language that, by now, are repeated habitually. Perhaps it time now to look elsewhere, (to culture, to the arts, to literature, etc. both past and present), to find fresh inspiration and vocabulary to support our new emotive efforts. For example, I often recommend that academics read the contemporary fiction of conceptual novelists such as Michael Kimball in order to unleash creativity and a new, uncluttered way of using language in their academic writing. Should we continue to routinely repeat what are by now shop-worn words in our academic out-pourings such as ‘rigour’, ‘robust’, ‘thick’, ‘embodied’ and ‘evocative’ to support (or deny?) our emotive tendencies? Most of those words have been repeated ad infinitum for more than 20 years now, degenerating into no more than code words signalling membership in a particular scholarly community. They have become words without force.

Can we move on?
The first step in reporting emotive encounters in research, therefore, is moving away from concepts that have evolved from measurement—terms like ‘empathic validity’,  'reliability', etc. Rejecting the use of statistical language to describe the emotional components of our labours is key to communicating an understanding of the How’s and Why’s of the human condition. The second step is to find our own individual language (a descriptive and poetic one?) that does not mimic the status quo language of a specific scholarship simply because of our insecurities or longing to fit in with a particular club or movement. 

Acknowledging the emotive connections in our work doesn’t mean simply producing wishy-washy, touchy-feely texts either. In fact, Neo Emotivism insists upon tougher, more resilient, profoundly compassionate yet hard-hitting, productions. This is accomplished through the creative use of language—textural/visual/physical—or some new mode of communication that we haven’t even attempted yet. 

An emotional response by a scholar need not be validated like a parking ticket. 

Feelings aren’t the same as facts.
As Jeff Buckley said, ‘The gifts of those things are that they bring both intellectual and emotional gifts — understanding.’

Neo Emotivism may very well cause a riot … or a revolution!

“Let a thousand flowers bloom …”

Download the paper here

Update on ARTS in Research (AiR) Collaborative: Two days of creative scholarship

“I can’t remember ever attending such an inspiring ‘in house’ event ”.

Shared objects/stories of a past

The newly formed ARTS in Research Collaborative recently held two days of exploration of biography and ways and means of expressing the stories of others creatively and ethically. The workshop was entitled, “A Past/A Present” ARTS in Research (AiR) Workshop.

Using shared objects representing a time or event in each participant’s life, a ‘partner’ then created a five minute presentation of and from the storied materials. Participants in the two-days of exploration came from HSC, the Media School and DEC. Both faculty and postgrad students took part.

The brief was kept simple and instruction to a minimum. Organiser Kip Jones shared examples from his own work of finding ways and means of responding creatively to detailed data as well as time and material constraints. Other than that, participants engaged in a learning process through participation itself and the sharing of their experiences.

• “Thank you all for the incredible willingness to be inventive, creative and think/be  outside ‘the box’”.
• “An illuminating two days of deep sharing. I was honoured to be there and look forward to more creative adventures together”.
• “Inspiring. An artful and generative suspension of ‘normal’ activity”.

Telling stories

The ARTS in Research Collaborative’s next workshop is planned for November at The Lighthouse in Poole. Details to follow. It will be open to a wider audience and there will be a charge to attend.

ARTS in Research (AiR) still accepting new members!

“I can’t remember ever attending such an inspiring event ‘in house’”.

The newly formed ARTS in Research Collaborative recently held two days of exploration of biography and ways and means of expressing the stories of others creatively and ethically. The workshop was entitled, “A Past/A Present” ARTS in Research (AiR) Workshop.
Using shared objects representing a time or event in each participant’s life, a ‘partner’ then created a five minute presentation of and from the storied materials. Participants in the two-days of exploration came from HSC, the Media School and DEC. Both faculty and postgrad students took part.
The brief was kept simple and instruction to a minimum. Organiser Kip Jones shared examples from his own work of finding ways and means of responding creatively to detailed data as well as time and material constraints. Other than that, participants engaged in a learning process through participation itself and the sharing of their experiences. The group has agreed to write up the encounter for a journal article.

• “Thank you all for the incredible willingness to be inventive, creative and think/be  outside ‘the box’”.

• “An illuminating two days of deep sharing. I was honoured to be there and look forward to more creative adventures together”.

• “Inspiring. An artful and generative suspension of ‘normal’ activity”.

The ARTS in Research Collaborative’s next workshop is planned for November at The Lighthouse in Poole. Details to follow. It will be open to a wider audience and there will be a charge to attend, but BU faculty and students are encouraged to apply for training and/or development funding within their Schools.

ARTS in Research (AiR) still accepting new members!

- See more at: http://blogs.bournemouth.ac.uk/research/2014/09/07/arts-in-research-air-collaborative-two-days-of-creative-scholarship/#sthash.BZJnmzp9.dpuf

“I can’t remember ever attending such an inspiring event ‘in house’”.

The newly formed ARTS in Research Collaborative recently held two days of exploration of biography and ways and means of expressing the stories of others creatively and ethically. The workshop was entitled, “A Past/A Present” ARTS in Research (AiR) Workshop.
Using shared objects representing a time or event in each participant’s life, a ‘partner’ then created a five minute presentation of and from the storied materials. Participants in the two-days of exploration came from HSC, the Media School and DEC. Both faculty and postgrad students took part.
The brief was kept simple and instruction to a minimum. Organiser Kip Jones shared examples from his own work of finding ways and means of responding creatively to detailed data as well as time and material constraints. Other than that, participants engaged in a learning process through participation itself and the sharing of their experiences. The group has agreed to write up the encounter for a journal article.

• “Thank you all for the incredible willingness to be inventive, creative and think/be  outside ‘the box’”.

• “An illuminating two days of deep sharing. I was honoured to be there and look forward to more creative adventures together”.

• “Inspiring. An artful and generative suspension of ‘normal’ activity”.

The ARTS in Research Collaborative’s next workshop is planned for November at The Lighthouse in Poole. Details to follow. It will be open to a wider audience and there will be a charge to attend, but BU faculty and students are encouraged to apply for training and/or development funding within their Schools.

ARTS in Research (AiR) still accepting new members!

AiR Workshop: telling stories (click on photo to enlarge)

- See more at: http://blogs.bournemouth.ac.uk/research/2014/09/07/arts-in-research-air-collaborative-two-days-of-creative-scholarship/#sthash.BZJnmzp9.dpuf

“I can’t remember ever attending such an inspiring event ‘in house’”.

The newly formed ARTS in Research Collaborative recently held two days of exploration of biography and ways and means of expressing the stories of others creatively and ethically. The workshop was entitled, “A Past/A Present” ARTS in Research (AiR) Workshop.
Using shared objects representing a time or event in each participant’s life, a ‘partner’ then created a five minute presentation of and from the storied materials. Participants in the two-days of exploration came from HSC, the Media School and DEC. Both faculty and postgrad students took part.
The brief was kept simple and instruction to a minimum. Organiser Kip Jones shared examples from his own work of finding ways and means of responding creatively to detailed data as well as time and material constraints. Other than that, participants engaged in a learning process through participation itself and the sharing of their experiences. The group has agreed to write up the encounter for a journal article.

• “Thank you all for the incredible willingness to be inventive, creative and think/be  outside ‘the box’”.

• “An illuminating two days of deep sharing. I was honoured to be there and look forward to more creative adventures together”.

• “Inspiring. An artful and generative suspension of ‘normal’ activity”.

The ARTS in Research Collaborative’s next workshop is planned for November at The Lighthouse in Poole. Details to follow. It will be open to a wider audience and there will be a charge to attend, but BU faculty and students are encouraged to apply for training and/or development funding within their Schools.

ARTS in Research (AiR) still accepting new members!

AiR Workshop: telling stories (click on photo to enlarge)

- See more at: http://blogs.bournemouth.ac.uk/research/2014/09/07/arts-in-research-air-collaborative-two-days-of-creative-scholarship/#sthash.BZJnmzp9.dpuf

“I can’t remember ever attending such an inspiring event ‘in house’”.

The newly formed ARTS in Research Collaborative recently held two days of exploration of biography and ways and means of expressing the stories of others creatively and ethically. The workshop was entitled, “A Past/A Present” ARTS in Research (AiR) Workshop.
Using shared objects representing a time or event in each participant’s life, a ‘partner’ then created a five minute presentation of and from the storied materials. Participants in the two-days of exploration came from HSC, the Media School and DEC. Both faculty and postgrad students took part.
The brief was kept simple and instruction to a minimum. Organiser Kip Jones shared examples from his own work of finding ways and means of responding creatively to detailed data as well as time and material constraints. Other than that, participants engaged in a learning process through participation itself and the sharing of their experiences. The group has agreed to write up the encounter for a journal article.

• “Thank you all for the incredible willingness to be inventive, creative and think/be  outside ‘the box’”.

• “An illuminating two days of deep sharing. I was honoured to be there and look forward to more creative adventures together”.

• “Inspiring. An artful and generative suspension of ‘normal’ activity”.

The ARTS in Research Collaborative’s next workshop is planned for November at The Lighthouse in Poole. Details to follow. It will be open to a wider audience and there will be a charge to attend, but BU faculty and students are encouraged to apply for training and/or development funding within their Schools.

ARTS in Research (AiR) still accepting new members!

AiR Workshop: telling stories (click on photo to enlarge)

- See more at: http://blogs.bournemouth.ac.uk/research/2014/09/07/arts-in-research-air-collaborative-two-days-of-creative-scholarship/#sthash.BZJnmzp9.dpuf

“I can’t remember ever attending such an inspiring event ‘in house’”.

The newly formed ARTS in Research Collaborative recently held two days of exploration of biography and ways and means of expressing the stories of others creatively and ethically. The workshop was entitled, “A Past/A Present” ARTS in Research (AiR) Workshop.
Using shared objects representing a time or event in each participant’s life, a ‘partner’ then created a five minute presentation of and from the storied materials. Participants in the two-days of exploration came from HSC, the Media School and DEC. Both faculty and postgrad students took part.
The brief was kept simple and instruction to a minimum. Organiser Kip Jones shared examples from his own work of finding ways and means of responding creatively to detailed data as well as time and material constraints. Other than that, participants engaged in a learning process through participation itself and the sharing of their experiences. The group has agreed to write up the encounter for a journal article.

• “Thank you all for the incredible willingness to be inventive, creative and think/be  outside ‘the box’”.

• “An illuminating two days of deep sharing. I was honoured to be there and look forward to more creative adventures together”.

• “Inspiring. An artful and generative suspension of ‘normal’ activity”.

The ARTS in Research Collaborative’s next workshop is planned for November at The Lighthouse in Poole. Details to follow. It will be open to a wider audience and there will be a charge to attend, but BU faculty and students are encouraged to apply for training and/or development funding within their Schools.

ARTS in Research (AiR) still accepting new members!

AiR Workshop: telling stories (click on photo to enlarge)

- See more at: http://blogs.bournemouth.ac.uk/research/2014/09/07/arts-in-research-air-collaborative-two-days-of-creative-scholarship/#sthash.BZJnmzp9.dpuf

"A Past/A Present" ARTS in Research (AiR) Workshop at Bournemouth

The AiR collaborative at Bournemouth will be gathering in a week to experiment with the stories of others and how to represent them using various media. Participation in the two-day workshop is closed now, but others are welcome to the concept and to experiment with it themselves.

The instructions are simple:
The ARTS in Research (AiR) Collaborative would like you to contribute to an experiment. Please bring your past as a present to the workshop. You will give it to someone else. They get to keep it.

Look through that box at the back of the wardrobe or in the loft—the one with bits and pieces that you have been unable to throw away because they represent you and your past.  You are going to give some of them away now.

Find some of those precious objects to include in a small packet.

Objects might include a paperback novel, pamphlets, railroad tickets, stamps, old letters or
photographs (from when photographs used to be physical things), a mix-tape cassette (still have
any?) or a 45 record, a food stained recipe card, a small piece of clothing, an accessory like a ribbon or a badge, sheet music, keys, post cards, used concert or theatre tickets, a self-penned poem or a song, or a drawing. Select a few of the objects that tell a particular story from a particular time in your life. Finally, find a box or something else to put them in or wrap them in. Wrap them lovingly, using beautiful materials, perhaps ones that you also have collected. No more than could fill a cigar box or a shoebox at most.

Bring your gift to the workshop. You will agree to exchange presents with one person, someone chosen for you by random. You will talk to each other, telling each other stories about the contents. You might make some notes, but be a good listener/observer. After eating lunch with your partner, we will gather to begin to create individual projects around the earlier exchanges.

Day Two: will be ‘Show & Tell’ –more show than tell. You will present your partner’s story in 5 minutes using any media of your choosing that is convenient. You may want to have your phone, your iPad, your laptop with you. These will be ‘narrative postcards’ of the stories that you have experienced.

Purpose
Two-day Workshop on Biography, Narrative and Arts-based approaches to collecting and
disseminating the personal stories of others by using our own.
  Other than listening, how do we gather life stories?
• Other than dry academic reports, how can we retell these stories in a sensitive
and ethical way to wider audiences?
• How do the stories themselves inspire creativity in retelling them?
• How can we involve participants in the retelling of their stories?
• How much of their story is also our story?
• When is the gathering of the story itself, itself the story?
• How willing are we to let go of our selves?
Benefits
• Form new relationships with colleagues across disciplines and Schools.
• Experiment with arts-based methods to represent/disseminate research findings.
• Develop more participatory relationships/collaborations with research participants.
• Develop visual and tactile methods of gathering data using all of the senses.

 “It’s difficult to draw a line between the past
and the present –awfully difficult” –Little Edie,
Maysles Brothers’ documentary, Grey Gardens

Amy Genders Questions Kip about Academic Blogging

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Arts on Television Blog

By Amy Genders

Q&A: Kip Jones on the Art of Academic Blogging

Posted on August 12, 2014

I recently interviewed Jones to find out more about how he uses social media to share his research and his advice for other academics who want to try their hand at blogging.

You have created quite a prolific online presence with regular blog updates and use of Facebook and Twitter to share your research. Why is this important to you?

I have always been keen to reach wider audiences with my work, both my academic and creative outputs. It seems a shame to spend months, sometimes years, working on a project, only to have it end up on a library shelf or in an academic repository. I first used a personal website to get my work out there in combination with email newsgroups. When social media came along, I then began to experiment with Facebook and then Twitter as well to build audiences for my work.

A good example is my PhD Thesis, which I uploaded to my website at least ten years ago now with little interest then. In the past year or so it has also been uploaded to Academia.edu where it has now been viewed more than 700 times. This did not happen not only because of the site, but also because I frequently tweet about it and post it on Facebook as well. The fact that an 80,000 word document can generate this kind of attention is, quite frankly, mind boggling and demonstrates the strength of both social media and the impact of open access publication resources more generally.

My watchwords for social media are ‘Repetition, repetition, repetition!’ Don’t expect an audience to necessarily see your post the first time and don’t forget that they live in different global time zones. I have also been experimenting with what are called ‘tag lines’ in film distribution in writing 140 character tweets for Twitter. Creativity helps in getting attention in a very fast moving (and limited attention span) social media audience such as Twitter! And followers: be good to your followers and don’t forget to retweet their posts as well. Retweets build the audience, I have found.

The film based on your research, ‘Rufus Stone’, has been featured in such media outlets as The New York Times and BBC Radio 4’s Thinking Allowed. What role has social media, such as Twitter and Facebook, played in promoting your work and engaging with wider audiences outside of academia?

In terms of the NY Times or Radio 4, I think ‘networking’ more generally was responsible for those successes. It really was a case of who do you know and more importantly who knows about you. I suppose social media helps a bit too and the Radio 4 producer still follows my tweets as does a reporter from Times Higher Education. So I would say it is mix of networking and always keeping up contacts through social media, which is easier and bit less off-putting then barraging reporters with email messages. If you have an idea for a story for a media outlet, a direct message through Twitter or Facebook is many times enough to create interest, without being too ‘self-promoting’.

Your blog KIPWORLD covers a range of topics from advice on writing a PhD thesis, to insight into your creative process. What advice would you give to other academics wanting to start their own blog?

KIPWORLD profoundly changed the way I write academically. I stepped into the waters of blog writing a bit sheepishly at first, trying to find both my style and what I might write about. I definitely did not want to make my blog a daily diary of my life or work (and I don’t have a cat). I tend to painstakingly write and rewrite anyway, so putting something out frequently was never going to work for me. I still write for my blog about once a month, although I now write for other blogs from time to time (LSE Impact blog, LSE Review of Books, Discovery Society, Sociological Imagination, Creative Quarter, The Creativity Post, Bournemouth University Research Blog) as well.

At the same time as I was beginning to write KIPWORLD, I was also turning to contemporary fiction writers (mostly to help with writing RUFUS STONE’s backstory). I particularly was attracted to the ‘Conceptual Novel’ approach of writers like Michael Kimball. His lean style and exquisite choice of phrase attracted me because it is similar to the necessity of brevity in script-writing.

Because I was also writing about my own story in constructing RUFUS STONE, I began to use the blog to write about my past as well. I began to develop what I call a ‘fictive reality’ or fiction based in a remembered past. At one point I realised that I had written creative fiction for the blog 11 times over five years and compiled it as one piece, Creative Writing Eleven (short) Stories from KIPWORLD 2009-2013.

All of this experimentation affected my more academic writing almost by stealth; I was writing more clearly, more simply, even more creatively when writing for academic publication. Probably the best example of this is: Infusing Biography with the Personal: Writing RUFUS STONE first published in the journal, Creative Arts Research.

My advice to others? Find your own voice, even your own subject material. Use your blog to develop your writing and your own style. Don’t just assume that it has to look and sound like a blog to be one. Include at least one picture with every blog article. Let people know about the blog through social media—don’t expect an audience to just find it on its own. Promote it. If the most important thing in your life IS to write about your cat, write about it as creatively as you possibly can. Enjoy the experience!

Reposted by permission from Amy Genders' Arts on Television blog.