Location: Room 406, Dalhousie Arts Centre
Co-convenors: Natalie Alvarez and Kim Solga
Panelists: Yasmine Agocs, Thea Fitz-James, Kelsey Jacobson, Cyrus Sundar Singh
RATIONALE:
Our roundtable is organized around two questions:
- What are the creative ways in which performance practitioner-researchers are making their work legible and visible within post-secondary research contexts;
- How is the ethics review process impacting, or even shaping, the way that work is born out in practice?
Many researchers in our community identify as practice-based. In the course of our work, we routinely experience the need to communicate that work’s value to those familiar with more traditional, positivist, scholarly modes. We also often struggle to justify our work’s logic, goals, and methods to our institutional research ethics boards (REBs) as we navigate their social science-driven protocols to be allowed to begin our work.
Neither of these issues is new; PbR (or PaR) has been a part of theatre and performance research for decades now. What is, perhaps, new is an increasingly institutional drive toward equity, inclusion, and decolonization. Could such a turn, perhaps, make space for practice-based researchers to begin to shift the dial on what kind of work is seen, heard, measured, enabled, and institutionally recognized?
The goal of this roundtable is to gather current perspectives on the ways in which scholar-artist and other practice-based researchers communicate the nature, value, and impact of their work to university administrators and where and how they find creative ways to navigate the research ethics process. Our hope for this session is to share ideas and resources and take practical tactics and potential strategies back to our home institutions. Therefore, we intend to circulate a CFP (below) that expressly welcomes practitioner-researchers and scholars with administrative appointments so that we might think together toward productive change.
Natalie Alvarez, Professor of Theatre and Performance Studies and Associate Dean, Scholarly, Research, and Creative Activities, Toronto Metropolitan University
Bio: Her current research interests centre on creative impact in post-secondary institutions and the cultural sector and using performance as a nexus for research across the humanities and social sciences.
Kim Solga, Professor of Theatre Studies and Arts and Humanities Teaching, Western University
Bio: Her current research involves performance ethnography with trans, racialized, and Deaf women theatre makers and research into the links between creativity and wellness on Canadian university campuses. She is a member of Western’s Non-Medical Research Ethics Board.