Practice Research Project Research Articles

The cyborg scenographer: mother, baby and smartphone in matrescent making

ABSTRACT This article details a series of practice research projects in scenography, with a focus on performance space, and is set within the context of matrescence. The mother, baby and smartphone are presented as a cyborg scenographer, exploring the scenography emerging from their matrescent context via photography and film, via both digital and live performance. Across two years of early matrescence, the cyborg scenographer investigates the interaction of performance design materials with baby paraphernalia, and experiments with live and digital performances of maternal responsibility. The smartphone emerges as an intuitive choice of tool for the matrescent artist, revealing unexpectedly soft qualities and countering cliched perceptions about the ‘hardness’ of technology and the dispassionate nature of digital media. In forming a component of the cyborg scenographer, the smartphone demonstrates a capacity to border human experience and domestic or bodied contexts in matrescence. In its own position between borders, the smartphone reflects an embrace of the state of not-knowing and instability in new parenthood, while mirroring shifting identities in matrescence. Mother, baby and smartphone are ultimately framed as a hybrid artist, making scenography with and without ‘real life’ and digital spaces.

New Professional Approaches for Care Leaver in Foster Care: Training “Coaching to Go!”

Introduction: The number of young people with limited or non-existent social participation is growing. Characteristic is the proportion of young homeless individuals who had previous institutional contact with youth welfare. For this group of Care Leavers, the assistance provided can be considered inadequate and unsuccessful. Their life and health situation can be described as precarious. Research Aim: The practice research project aims improvement in the situation of care leavers with specific courses of development regarding their psychological and physical health, their social participation and overall life condition. (Care leavers grew up in out-of-family placements / foster families (according to §§ 27, 2; 33–34 SGB VIII) and are characterized as young people that are leaving or have left these public youth welfare institutions.) It is funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and carried out in cooperation with various practice institutions inter alia youth welfare, addiction care and homeless assistance facilities, educational institutions and job centers. Research Method: This study employed a mixed-methods approach, combining qualitative and quantitative methods, following a complementary design type, with the results integrated. Results: Care Leavers with specific problems and developmental situations exhibit significant discontinuities in their upbringing, face difficulties, a lack of positive life orientation, and social relationships, and are characterized by unresolved developmental tasks and critical life events. Conclusion: The identified psychosocial developmental disorders and stressors require increased professional care – better assessment, case management, trainings for Resource Activation and Resilience Promotion – both within the framework of youth welfare and other support facilities.

Situated knowledge-making in dynamic collaboration: A reflexive case study of social work practice research in mainland China

In recent decades, vibrant Western scholarship has focused on exploring “practice research” frameworks and approaches, aiming to generate social work knowledge more directly from, by, and for practice. Relatively little is known about the processes and characteristics of practice research in places where the social work profession is a foreign import. This study employed the case study methodology to examine the interactive dynamics of a 5-years practice research project in mainland China, utilizing participant observation, semi-structured interviews, and document analysis to collect empirical evidence primarily from the researchers and social work practitioners involved in the project. Through noncoding-based reflexive thematic analysis, our study reveals that the formation of the practice research project was profoundly shaped by local sociopolitical conditions, where research and practice were not two sides of a binary, but different-yet-interconnected types of actions along one continuum of China’s social work development. Moreover, the interactions between the research and practice teams revealed a pattern of divergent dominance, with the former leading openly while the latter subtly influenced the collaboration. This dynamic was further complicated by the internal hierarchies within each team. This study provides implications for future practice research endeavors in contexts of global social work, and for promoting more social structurally-informed inquiries on practice research.

Relationship Between Original Research Experiences and Evidence-Based Practice Among Undergraduate Dental Hygiene Students.

For the dental hygiene profession, a need exists to engage students in research experiences as undergraduate students to foster interest in research and improve the implementation of evidence-based practice. The purpose was to explore the relationships between original research experiences and evidence-based practice among undergraduate dental hygiene students. This quantitative survey research study of undergraduate dental hygiene students in the USA was conducted in 2021. Original research experience was measured using the Wessex Research Network (WReN) spider instrument and evidence-based practice was measured using the Knowledge, Attitudes, Access and Confidence Evaluation (KACE) instrument. Invitation e-mails were sent to the directors of US entry-level dental hygiene programs to forward the survey e-mail message to students in the last semester of their dental hygiene programs. The data were analysed using descriptive statistics, bivariate analysis and multiple linear regression analysis. A total of 128 responses were analysed. The foundational knowledge domain of research experience was found to be a significant predictor of evidence-based practice and the mediators of evidence-based knowledge, evidence-based attitudes, evidence-based access and evidence-based confidence. Research experience was found to be a significant predictor of Evidence-Based Practice. Engaging undergraduate dental hygiene students in research opportunities may prepare students for the clinical application of evidence-based practice and original research projects.

Boundary obstacles in social innovation: refugees, volunteers, and caseworkers navigating Denmark’s paradoxical borderscape

Abstract Collaborative methods have gained traction in migration studies, policy, and practice, in turn, engendering calls for new collaborations between research and practice. Bringing multiple perspectives to the production of knowledge in refugee research is particularly pertinent in Denmark, where incongruent policy aims of integration and of return creates a paradoxical borderscape that refugees, volunteers, and municipal caseworkers must navigate. This article draws on a practice-research project, co-developed by two large civil society organizations and university researchers that included collaborative ethnography among refugees, volunteers, and caseworkers in and around a social innovation initiative. It investigates how the conflicting expectations of integration and return shape efforts to change social relationships and strengthen the agency of refugees. We approach collaborative efforts from the perspective of boundary work and coin the concept of ‘boundary obstacles’ to describe core challenges to advancing social innovation initiatives with refugees. Building on a thematic analysis of qualitative data comprising fieldnotes and interview transcripts, we identify three boundary obstacles: positionalities, emotionalities, and politicizations. Finally, the article reflects on the prospects and challenges of social innovation and recommends ways to approach those challenges as boundary obstacles that can help set new directions for collaborative research with refugees.

Eroding the Human/Non-Human Binary in Between Two Tides: Site-Specific Eco-Arts Performance as an Exploration of Changing Climate in a Latourian ‘Critical Zone’

ABSTRACT In May 2024, researchers from the University of Hull staged a site-specific performance dealing with the natural histories and human cultures of the South Holderness coast. The performance, entitled Between Two Tides, stressed the entanglement of human history/current human actions with other forms of nature in an area currently coping with the challenging effects of climate change. These shifts include: rapid cliff erosion, ongoing dune destruction threatening the collapse of many rare habitats, frequent tidal surges, and changes to sedimental transportation and deposition systems—all causing a radical reformation of the South Holderness landscape. These climate-induced effects led, in 2023, to the retreat of humans from the Spurn peninsula for only the second time in recorded history (the first being when the city of Ravenser Odd was abandoned after catastrophic storm surges during the winter of 1356–7). Our Eco-Arts performance was created for residents from the villages of Easington and Kilnsea, who are threatened by four-to-ten metre per year erosion of a coastline that is not protected by the UK Environment Agency. Our performance site, immediately adjacent to Beacon Lagoons (home to one of the UK’s few populations of rare migratory birds: little terns, a UK Site of Special Scientific Interest, and an Area of Special Protection under the Countryside Act of 1981) was chosen to demonstrate the vulnerability of such landscapes, described by Bruno Latour as ‘Critical Zones’. This essay contextualises and examines our practice research project through the lens of environmental ethics, particularly the recent works of Michel Serres and Bruno Latour.

Egypt's Celluloid Closet

This practice research project argues that the representation of gay men in Egyptian cinema not only has been historically problematic but rather regressed considerably over the years. While critically reflecting on twenty feature films as case studies, I demonstrate that depictions of gay characters in Egyptian cinema have overwhelmingly been limited to crude and cruel stereotypes. These stereotypes are often associated with mental illness, being sexually abused at a young age, being influenced heavily by ‘Western decadence’ or a result of lack of self-control or willpower. Furthermore, the documentary argues that censorship plays an important but not a major part in depicting homosexual characters in a more realistic and less stereotypical manner. The filmmakers’ interpretations and cinematic ploys also play a crucial part in the way these characters are portrayed. In interviewing experts, as well as filmmakers of Egyptian cinema, my work reveals how the majority of filmmakers remain complicit with the expectations of Egyptian audiences and society. In addition, in adaptations, particularly films based on novels, filmmakers sometimes intentionally transform homosexual characters by portraying them as ‘deviant’.

Practice research’s challenges and opportunities across project conceptualisation, implementation, and dissemination: a Singaporean case study

ABSTRACT Because practice research’s benefits in social work contexts are well-documented, research attention has shifted to improving its operationalisation within organisations. However, few studies have examined practice research’s challenges and opportunities across project conceptualisation, implementation, and dissemination. Even fewer have considered practitioner-researcher and organisational power dynamics, especially in Asia. Using a qualitative exploratory case study approach, we first described the challenges a Singaporean youth work agency faced during conceptualisation, implementation, and dissemination across three practice-research projects. Subsequently, we evaluated how the core practice-research team seized opportunities to address these challenges (i.e. manpower and resourcing, disproportionate researcher influence, sustaining interest internally and externally) and future improvement opportunities (i.e. institutionalise knowledge, build organisational capacity, and examine structural impediments). Implications for practitioners and researchers and effective organisational strategies – internally, externally, and structurally – are discussed.

'Four forms of co-creativity': A framework for the analysis of artistic research as musical composition

This article presents a new framework entitled ‘Four Forms of Co-creativity’ for the musical analysis of artistic (or practice) research projects involving co-creative activities with community participants to reveal the socially contingent properties of such activities. More specifically, this article details a research project involving a series of collaborative workshops with the Leeds Male Voice Choir (LMVC) to develop materials for a community opera. This process is captured through an ethnographic account of the workshops in conjunction with audio recordings and notated transcriptions of vocal improvisations conducted during the workshops. Together with a historical and social account of LMVC, the framework is then deployed to analyse the various levels of co-creativity present in the workshop activities and their effects on the ensuing passages of operatic dialogue. The article then considers the wider application of the framework to other forms of musical composition and performance possible within contemporary societies.

The Benefits of Cooperative Inquiry in Health Services Research: Lessons from an Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health Study.

Health services research is underpinned by partnerships between researchers and health services. Partnership-based research is increasingly needed to deal with the uncertainty of global pandemics, climate change induced severe weather events, and other disruptions. To date there is very little data on what has happened to health services research during the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper describes the establishment of an Australian multistate Decolonising Practice research project and charts its adaptation in the face of disruptions. The project used cooperative inquiry method, where partner health services contribute as coresearchers. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, data collection needed to be immediately paused, and when restrictions started to lift, all research plans had to be renegotiated with services. Adapting the research surfaced health service, university, and staffing considerations. Our experience suggests that cooperative inquiry was invaluable in successfully navigating this uncertainty and negotiating the continuance of the research. Flexible, participatory methods such as cooperative inquiry will continue to be vital for successful health services research predicated on partnerships between researchers and health services into the future. They are also crucial for understanding local context and health services priorities and ways of working, and for decolonising Indigenous health research.

Scoring Loss in a Contemporary New Zealand Musical

This paper functions as an exegesis of a recent New Zealand musical, Mum’s Kitchen. The show was a creative practice research project and involved a collaborative writing/composition process with a team of four creatives. The article explores explore the confluence of musical voices within the work with a focus on the distinct musical choices made in relation to particular narrative themes. Taking a cue from Murphy (2014), we analyse the songs in Mum’s Kitchen that directly express loss and nostalgia. We suggest that the two composers have their own strategies for “scoring” this theme: use of “anachronistic” styles (such as a country ballad) to evoke a past era, and a collection of contemporary harmonic devices (open chord voicings, harmonic ambiguity) that evoke emptiness and uncertainty. We then argue that [author] as orchestrator both unified these voices through a consistent sound palette, while also emphasising these themes through his sonic choices.

Bad News

The short film Bad News (2023) is the result of a creative practice research project that sought to explore role-playing and simulation as an institutional and corporate training device. The objective was to create, stage and document a fictional leadership training session as the narrative structure for a short film.

Tactile renegotiations in actor training: what the pandemic taught us about touch

This article draws from the practice-research project under the umbrella title ‘From Haptic Deprivation to Haptic Possibilities’. The project began as a response to the first COVID-19 lockdown in the UK in March 2020 and the necessary transition to online interactions. As a practitioner-researcher who has been critically investigating tactile possibilities through somatically inspired methods within and outside actor training, I identified a ‘gap’ in how we could still embody relational potentialities of touch either working remotely or while practising physical distancing. Modified physical contact in my practice research originates in my work with actors in training and widens in online sessions and in-person workshops with non-actors. This article focuses on tactile renegotiations in actor training and critical observations regarding what touch can be, challenging universal and unified perceptions. Advancing two published TDPT blog posts on the project, the discussion directs attention to how necessary physical distantiation during the pandemic expanded the use of touch in my training practice and how these tactile renegotiations can be applied post-pandemically within and beyond actor training. Inspired by phenomenological and feminist theories of embodiment, touch is proposed as an ethical renegotiation between self and other that necessitates differentiation and distantiation in nearness.

Active Spectatorship and Co-creation in the Digital Making of Flanker Origami

How do spectators engage with, elaborate on and articulate the experience of a digital performance? What are the parameters that regulate the bodily interaction between performers and spectators, when the latter are ‘not seen to be seeing’ through digital screens? When and how can a spectator gain agency in a mediated creative encounter? This practice research aims to re-construct the affective nature of the entanglement between the spectator’s body and the technology, facilitated by the performer. In my analysis, I will utilise audience interaction and responses by diverse spectators experiencing iterations of Flanker Origami, a live online and home-specific performance, originally devised with my company Organic Theatre for the first hybrid edition of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2021, and developed into an ongoing practice research project. The analysis draws upon an online exchange and mentorship process on Zoom with Odin Teatret’s founder and director Eugenio Barba and actress, writer and director Julia Varley, alongside spectators’ participation in the performance, and formal and informal feedback gathered through audience reviews, Q&As, emails, and social media messaging. The interaction, reactions and commentary from online spectators shift the focus to a polyphonic reading of the digital work. This, I argue, carries the potential to change meaning, purpose and direction of the performance through processes of active spectatorship and co-creation, emerging as a tendency for spectators to generate alternative pathways of embodying the remote communication. My conclusion proposes that far from being disorienting or promoting detachment, in this fluid and porous interchange, technology activates digital spectators to become co-creators of Flanker Origami.

Co-creating a Brass Band Dance Number for a Large-scale Community Opera Project with the Aid of Improvisatory Techniques: Co-creativity within an Operatic Context

Community opera projects have often integrated bands of varying types to involve participants in ways other than singing and acting. Although many community opera projects incorporate co-creative elements and improvisation techniques in their composition, there is little coverage of how bands, in practice, can be involved as participants in the co-creative process of shaping a new community opera. This paper documents a practice research project that took place with Waterbeach Brass Band based in Cambridgeshire, UK. It records in detail the process whereby aspects of a brass band dance number were devised during co-creative improvisation workshops, and provides both audio-visual recordings and notated examples that capture the emergent creative process, alongside a commentary explaining the processes and methodological approaches employed. The paper discusses the different ways in which members of the brass band responded to improvisational workshops, and how this fed into the co-creative process. It subsequently examines how such co-creative elements can form part of a larger musical-dramatic presentation, demonstrating how they can be developed during an extended operatic scene.

Affective Atmosphere: A Non-Representational Method of Devising Film Performance and Fiction

Affective atmosphere is a new method of directing film performance and producing experimental fiction in the tradition of art cinema, which emerged from a wider practice research project entitled Affective Cinema, funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council. As an approach to filmmaking, affective atmosphere prioritises the becoming of an event over a narrative/production plan, and uses experimental production strategies to maximise the potential of spontaneous directorial decisions and the unpredictable flow of reality for generating alternative narrative/dramatic film structures. The method is rooted in practitioner know-how stimulated by reflection, but also informed by a synthesis of the key concepts of Deleuze and Guattari, and theoretical writings on atmosphere (Böhme, Griffero) and film performance (Benjamin, Del Río). In this way, the project meaningfully applies philosophical concerns to filmmaking, expanding, in the process, on theoretical understanding, while embedding this knowledge tacitly in artistic practice. Furthermore, the research leads to the development of a set of applicable film production methods, unified by a clear rationale and a creative purpose linked to demonstrable outcomes.

Smart storytelling

ABSTRACT While there are several publications in the field of documentary studies that deal with the digital disruption and innovations, the sub-field of emerging media needs constant re-examination as modes of production, dissemination and exhibition are exposed to significant changes and interact with documentary film in its various established and new facets. Smart Storytelling leverages contemporary digital transformations in Film and Screen Production, Screen and Digital Media and the Creative Arts more generally and synchs these with documentary studies. This special issue also explores creative practice research projects in order to demonstrate novel approaches in documentary storytelling with a focus on online, network and multilinear non-fiction and documentary practice. Particular emphasis is placed on accessible storytelling approaches, illustrating often overlooked creative processes, such as audio in cinematic VR documentary, and exploring current developments and trends such as AI for documentary media.

Experiences of nurse managers and practitioners on implementation of an evidence-based practice intervention.

BackgroundAn evidence based practice (EBP) research project was undertaken to implement EBP interventions utilising the Iowa model in order to build the capacity of the nurses in using research evidence to improve decision making and quality care.AimExploring and understanding the experiences of nurse managers and practitioners who participated in the EBP change project.SettingThe study was conducted in the intensive care unit (ICU) of a tertiary hospital in Lilongwe district in Malawi.MethodsA qualitative approach and an exploratory-descriptive design was employed. The ICU was purposively selected as a unit where the EBP change project was implemented. A purposive sample of 10 nurse managers and practitioners was selected. Semi-structured interviews were conducted. All interviews were audio-recorded with a digital recorder and transcribed verbatim. Thematic analysis was applied to the transcripts.ResultsThe participants’ experiences of implementing EBP interventions were underpinned by four themes namely, evidence-based patient management, effective nursing care, competence in delivering EBP, and factors interplaying in EBP. Use of model, protocol and availability of supportive managers and team were major determinants of EBP.ConclusionIt is recommended to continue utilising the Iowa Model to facilitate building the EBP capacities of providers during scale up.ContributionUtilising the Iowa Model facilitates building of the capacity and empowers frontline nurses to effectively develop, implement and evaluate discipline specific EBP changes needed to improve practice and optimum care.

Mindful playing: a practice research investigation into shakuhachi playing and meditation

ABSTRACT This article describes a practice research project investigating how the practice of meditation may be integrated into the playing of shakuhachi, an instrument utilised during the Edo period (1603–1867) as a tool for spiritual practice by monks of the Fuke sect and later becoming part of the hōgaku (Japanese traditional music) world as a stage instrument. Although we cannot know how the monks were trained to use the shakuhachi in meditation, I have combined my own shakuhachi and meditation experiences, in order to investigate how a shakuhachi player today may approach the incorporation of meditation in their musical practice. In transforming my experience into words, I here employ auto-elicitation, a micro-phenomenological interview technique developed by Claire Petitmengin to describe the subtle and fine-grained experiences of meditation while playing. The project here is regarded as a practice research within the field of ethnomusicology and challenges the narrow kind of scholarship in academia, which overshadows the practice research—the research of the act of playing music.

Exploring the application of practice-based research on affective cinema to the teaching of creative cinematographic techniques within UK higher education

This article outlines an exploratory approach to the delivery of film practice education, as developed and tested with a second-year undergraduate module in cinematography. Students were provided with two existing creative sound pieces composed by a professional sound designer within the context of an AHRC-funded practice research project entitled Affective Cinema. These aspects of sound design inspired and informed the students’ work, while allowing them to focus upon the module’s key learning outcomes as related to camera and lighting skills. Above all, the approach allowed for aspects of the film theory synthesised through the preceding research – and pertinent to the nature and unique expressive potential of film – to be partially absorbed and learned by the students through practical experimentation, thus becoming an embodied, tacit practitioner knowledge. In this respect, I argue that such approaches help transcend the fraught divisions between film practice and film theory.