Lynn Fels

Collecting Data Through Performative Inquiry: A Tug on the Sleeve

Performative inquiry offers practitioners and researchers a way of engaging in research that attends to critical moments that emerge through creative action. A tug on the sleeve introduces the reader to how we might engage in performative inquiry and how individual moments may be understood as embodied data that through reflection inform our practices and learning in the arts and education.

Ethics in Community-University-Artist Partnered Research: Tensions, Contradictions and Gaps Identified in an ‘Arts for Social Change’ Project

Academics from diverse disciplines are recognizing not only the procedural ethical issues involved in research, but also the complexity of everyday “micro” ethical issues that arise. While ethical guidelines are being developed for research in aboriginal populations and low-and-middle-income countries, multi-partnered research initiatives examining arts-based interventions to promote social change pose a unique set of ethical dilemmas not yet fully explored. Our research team, comprising health, education, and social scientists, critical theorists, artists and community-activists launched a five-year research partnership on arts-for-social change. Funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council in Canada and based in six universities, including over 40 community-based collaborators, and informed by five main field projects (circus with street youth, theatre by people with disabilities, dance for people with Parkinson’s disease, participatory theatre with refugees and artsinfused dialogue), we set out to synthesize existing knowledge and lessons we learned. We summarized these learnings into 12 key points for reflection, grouped into three categories: community-university partnership concerns (n = 3), dilemmas related to the arts (n = 5), and team issues (n = 4). In addition to addressing previous concerns outlined in the literature (e.g., related to consent, anonymity, dangerous emotional terrain, etc.), we identified power dynamics (visible and hidden) hindering meaningful participation of community partners and university-based teams that need to be addressed within a reflective critical framework of ethical practice. We present how our team has been addressing these issues, as examples of how such concerns could be approached in community-university partnerships in arts for social change.

Arresting hope: Women taking action in prison health inside out

Abstract In 2014, we published the book Arresting Hope: Women Taking Action in Prison Health Inside Out, which narrates a story about women in a provincial prison in Canada, about how creative leadership fostered opportunities for transformation and hope, and about how engaging in research and writing contributed to healing. Arresting Hope reminds us that prisons are not only places of punishment, marginalization, and trauma. They can also be places of hope, where people with difficult lived experiences can begin to compose stories full of healing, anticipation, communication, education, connection, and community. Since the publication of Arresting Hope, we have been engaged with further research, and we are now editing a second book tentatively titled Releasing Hope. We have been reflecting on our personal and professional commitments to research with women with incarceration experience, as well as the many ways that this research journey together as a collaborative team of four editors working with many others has informed and influenced our ways of being in the world. In this article, we offer four reflections on our collaboration as we continue to bring our academic and activist commitments together in order to promote education, awareness, and change. In our collaboration, we have discovered the value of researching, conceptualizing, and writing in creative ways in order to understand how the stories of individuals are always connected to social and institutional dynamics of policy and practice.

A Dead Man’s Sweater

I am in the heat of a performative moment, literally, sweating under the fisherman’s white wool sweater, rain coveralls, life jacket, and sea cap, imagining the return of my dead grandfather and his crew all lost at sea years ago, off the coast of Newfoundland.

Embodied Theater Ecology: Illuminating the Gap through Bridging Depth Psychology's Encounter with Performative Inquiry.

ABSTRACT This article presents a new approach to psychological practice that dwells within the somatic, expressive, imaginal, poetic, narrative, and performative. Embodied Theater Ecology (ETE) as a form of Performative Inquiry is introduced and presented. This approach involves the performative unfolding of unlanguaged stories that lie at the heart of our clients’ experiences of themselves and their worlds. The origins of this creative method are offered along with six principles and practices: Body as Ear; Undoing; Image & Central Metaphor; Living Artifacts & Evocative Objects; The Natural World; and Witnessing as Attending. The authors end with a call for practitioners to engage in the principles and practices of ETE as a means of calling into presence the hidden, the forgotten, the yet-to-be known stories embodied within us.

Factors that support successful transition to the community among women leaving prison in British Columbia: a prospective cohort study using participatory action research

BACKGROUND In Canada, the number of women sentenced to prison has almost doubled since 1995. In British Columbia, the rate of reincarceration is 70% within 2 years. Our aim was to identify factors associated with recidivism among women in British Columbia. METHODS We prospectively followed women after discharge from provincial corrections centres in British Columbia. We defined recidivism as participation in criminal activity disclosed by participants during the year following release. To identify predictive factors, we carried out a repeated-measures analysis using a logistic mixed-effect model. RESULTS Four hundred women completed a baseline interview, of whom 207 completed additional interviews during the subsequent year, contributing 395 interviews in total. Factors significantly associated in univariate analysis with recidivism included not having a family doctor or dentist, depression, not having children, less than high school education, index charge of drug offense or theft under

Complexity, Teacher Education and the Restless Jury: Pedagogical Moments of Performance

5000, poor general health, hepatitis C treatment, poor nutritional or spiritual health, and use of cannabis or cocaine. In multivariate analysis, good nutritional health (odds ratio [OR] 0.52 [95% confidence interval (CI) 0.35-0.76]), good spiritual health (OR 0.61 [95% CI 0.44-0.83]), high school education (OR 0.44 [95% CI 0.22-0.87]) and incarceration for a drug offence versus other crimes (OR 0.30 [95% CI 0.12-0.79]) were protective against recidivism. INTERPRETATION Our findings emphasize the relevance of health-related strategies as drivers of recidivism among women released from prison. Health assessment on admission followed by treatment for trauma and associated psychiatric disorders and for chronic medical and dental problems deserve consideration as priority approaches to reduce rates of reincarceration.