Karen Barbour

Standing Center: Autoethnographic Writing and Solo Dance Performance

In this article, I demonstrate an approach to fusing autoethnographic writing and solo dance performance, advocating for a place for the female performer to stand as creative practitioner and researcher. While contemporary ethnographers and autoethnographers have actively engaged with issues of methodology and representational forms, and have gained some recognition within qualitative research communities, artists engaged in contemporary performance research still struggle for acknowledgement of the methodological rigor and representational innovation in their work. As in other art forms, dance artists have distinct bodies of knowledge, unique methods specific to dance, and diverse embodied and representational options for sharing knowledge. Referring to creative processes utilized in developing a particular solo dance performance, I weave together descriptions of movement activities undertaken to enhance awareness, literature on human developmental movement and on performance ethnography and excerpts of creative writing. To represent my dancing in this article, I include images from the solo performance. In this weaving I offer a partial representation of embodied ways of knowing and make a call to qualitative researchers to reconnect with their own beginnings – to return home.

Place-responsive choreography and activism

Sensory encounters with place, site and landscape have the potential to stimulate new and deeply felt engagements with local places, and to prompt discussion about the relationships between place, culture and identity. Such sensory encounters may also offer opportunities for critical, reflexive theorising and practice (Pink, 2008, 2009; Stevenson, 2014; Warren, 2012).

Acts of Representation: A Labour of Love

Exploring the relationships between performing and representing performing on the page has been and remains a labour of love for me (Barbour, 2011a, 2012a). This labour of love has led me to explore, articulate – and sometimes contribute to – emerging methods in qualitative, feminist, autoethnographic and performance research.

Embodied Ways of Knowing: Revisiting Feminist Epistemology

Feminist scholarship has developed a focus on articulating alternative women’s ways of knowing and validating women’s experiences. The focus of my feminist interest in epistemology began with my attempt to understand my role as knower, and to contribute to the development of multiple and alternative “knowledges”. Key critiques of Western epistemology and dualistic ontology informed the development of feminist and phenomenological understandings of embodiment and embodied ways of knowing. Feminist writing about women’s movement experiences, considering the examples of throwing a ball, climbing, long-distance running and rowing, all offered contributions to alternative knowledges. In particular, through embodied ways of knowing as a dancer, I hope to offer insights relevant to other embodied practitioners in sport, leisure and physical activity.

Dark Clouds on the Horizon Neoliberalism in Higher Education

In the face of our current political and economic environment, particularly in the context of education, community, and arts, dark clouds on our horizon have fast become storms, storms raining down on us in the South Pacific with a force and subsequent devastation that is soul destroying. Some days I feel we might be in the eye of the storm and other days a glimmer of light sparkles off the rain from the aspirational agendas of UNESCO. But most days, it is dark clouds and storms. Thundering requests for more evidence, gales of economic cuts poorly disguised as enhancement projects, and rain that no arts educator can withstand alone. Where is the sheltering umbrella for an arts academic in the university? This article is a critical autoethnography of hope embodied, a practice of withdrawing to the shelter in my own skin to survive this storm. Or at least, this article is an attempt to find hope.1

Dance on Campus

In this chapter I discuss the development of partnerships in education with reference to a specific example of community dance on a university campus. As dance education practices in tertiary institutions are diverse, I will briefly introduce the particular educational context in which I operate and my approach as critical feminist pedagogue.

Proem: Engaging Contemporary Ethnography Across the Disciplines

This proem to the book Ethnographic Worldviews: Transformations and Social Justice serves to locate the collection in contemporary spaces of involved and committed practitioners of the ethnographic craft. While discussing the cutting-edge exemplars within this book, the co-editors present a global picture of the ethnographic craft—and art—that sweeps across a wide range of situated fields and areas of study. Additionally, the co-editors discuss the emphasis on authors from indigenous and southern hemisphere sensibilities, and what this may mean for forward-thinking ethnographic practice.