Doing Performative Social Science

Creativity in Doing Research and Reaching Communities

Kip Jones

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9781032035239
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000509755
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Social Science Research & Methodology
• Index: Psychology

Doing Performative Social Science: Creativity in Doing Research and Reaching Communities focuses, as the title suggests, on the actual act of doing research and creating research outputs through a number of creative and arts-led approaches. Performative Social Science (PSS) embraces the use of tools from the arts (e.g., photography, dance, drama, filmmaking, poetry, fiction, etc.) by expanding—even replacing—more traditional methods of research and diffusion of academic efforts. Ideally, it can include forming collaborations with artists themselves and creating a professional research, learning and/or dissemination experience. These efforts then include the wider community that has a meaningful investment in their projects and their outputs and outcomes.
In this insightful volume, Kip Jones brings together a wide range of examples of how contributing authors from diverse disciplines have used the arts-led principles of PSS and its philosophy based in relational aesthetics in real-world projects. The chapters outline the methods and theory bases underlying creative approaches; show the aesthetic and relational constructs of research through these approaches; and show the real and meaningful community engagement that can result from projects such as these.
This book will be of interest to all scholars of qualitative and arts-led research in the social sciences, communication and performance studies, as well as artist-scholars and those engaging in community-based research.

1 INTRODUCTION Performative Social Science as Methodology

Kip Jones

DOI: 10.4324/9781003187745-1

I start by returning to the early days of establishing Performative Social Science (PSS) or arts-led research by revisiting a more traditional research platform—the academic journal. Thanks to the editors of an online qualitative journal back in 2007, a band of like-minded academics were able to cobble together 42 articles for a Special Issue on PSS for the journal, Forum: Qualitative Social Research (Jones et al., 2008, May). The issue provided a wide range of examples and manifestations of PSS, with contributions from various disciplines/subject areas and contributors from 13 countries.

In the Editorial for the Issue that I wrote with Mary Gergen I suggested:

Thinking performatively is about putting aside that analytical part of ourselves that normally deals with data and such and moving to the other side of the equation and getting in touch with that earlier place where we were energized by the data itself—how it was sparking ideas that were coming from our own personal experience which, every creative person will tell you, is the fount of all creativity.

It’s also about communication; it’s about how we are going to develop our skills in collaborating with someone who is speaking a different language, coming from a different background; going through that learning process is almost as important as the end product itself. Where I see people going a bit off is when they want to sit and talk about “What is Truth?” and other cerebral gymnastics that we all do all the time anyway. In reality, it’s more about how we find our creative impulses and how we contribute those to the experiences. It isn’t the end production, really.

Ultimately, is it possible to collaborate and produce something creatively that is better than having research printed in a journal? It’s one of those either/or things and you may walk away and say, “I’d rather have my material printed in a journal”, and that’s one answer. If, however, you’re interested in tapping into a zeitgeist in a wider arena than just standard scholarship, PSS is one way to go.

(Gergen & Jones, 2008)

FIGURE 1.1 Cast and crew shooting scene for research-based biopic RUFUS STONE. Kip Jones Author and Executive Producer.

Many more scholars in the social sciences have, since those early days, in fact, explored what is conceived of as “the performative” or “arts-led research”. These efforts are still often met with curiosity: “What is it?” and “Is it Art or is it Science?”

PSS isn’t one or the other. It is a fusion of both, creating a new model where tools from the arts and humanities are explored for their utility in enriching the ways in which social science subjects might be researched and/or disseminated or communicated to various communities. Ideally, audiences should be almost unaware of the seams where practitioners have cobbled together in-depth, substantial scholarship with artistic endeavour. PSS is defined as the use of tools from the arts or humanities in investigating and/or disseminating social science research.

PSS has gained attention, even popularity, amongst academics who are particularly frustrated with PowerPoint as the only “show and tell” game in town. In addition, the use of “Zoom” and other virtual environments for academic communication have devolved mostly into hours on end of “talking heads”. In fact, academic PowerPoint and Zoom lectures and presentations have morphed into mostly “tell”—slide after slide of text simultaneously recited to captured audiences. In addition, academic publishing has its limitations in reaching the wider community. The actual readership of academic journal articles is quite low and, by their nature, have a limited readership. New means of including a wider public (the “impact factor”) are sought.

The road to creating a set of principles on which the practice of a “performative” social science is based began for me in reading for my PhD, which involved delving into what were more traditional ways of thinking. I then came upon social constructionism, helping me to understand that ‘knowledge, scientific or otherwise, is not obtained by objective means but is constructed through social discourse’ (Gergen, 1985, p. 270). It was in having free access to the prepublication drafts of Kenneth Gergen’s work uploaded to his website that then guided my thinking electronically (now available on ResearchGate: www.researchgate.net/profile/Kenneth-Gergen). His early use of the Internet to share his work proved crucial on my way to a PhD awarded in 2001 in narrative biography (Jones, 2001) and based in part in Social Psychology. Gergen’s Social Constructionism had further elucidated “the processes by which people come to describe, explain, or otherwise account for the world in which they live” (Gergen & Davis, 1985, p. 3). His Relational Humanism had begun for me what was the quest for the truly relational in the way that I might share my research with a wider world. Social constructionism places the self-concept within the sphere of social discourse (1985, p. 11).

In Norman Denzin’s 2001 seminal article, “The reflexive interview and a performative social science” (Denzin, 2001), he proclaimed that the turn to narrative in the social sciences has been taken, a fait accompli (2001, p. 23). One democratising practise within this paradigm shift was a renewed interest in biography as a method of knowing persons. At the same time, I had studied and used in practice the Biographic Narrative Interpretive Method (Wengraf, 2001; Jones, 2001, 2003). I learned to appreciate the process of really listening to the stories of others, without interruption, allowing “story telling” to take place. Nonetheless, as Denzin pointed out, ‘No longer does the writer-as-interviewer hide behind the question-answer format, the apparatuses of the interview machine’ (Denzin, 2001, p. 30). The interviewer, finally, has come into the light as willing participant in a dialogical process. Crucially, narrative biography or “story-telling” offered up the opportunity for democratising the experience of teller and listener (or performer and audience).

Performative itself was a term that Denzin first coined in an article using the very the word in its title of this seminal article (Denzin, 2001). Early in the new century, researchers had begun to reconstruct the research interview in what Denzin described as ‘not as a method of gathering information, but as a vehicle for producing performance texts and performance ethnographies about self and society’ (2001, p. 24) where ‘text and audience come together and inform one another’ (2001, p. 26) in a relational way. The relational of social constructionism, informed by Denzin’s take on the performative, came into its own when John Law and John Urry (2004) proposed that research methods in the social sciences do not simply describe the world as it is, but also enact it (2004, p. 391). They stated that they are performative; they have effects; they make differences; they enact realities; and they can help to bring into being what they also discover (2004, pp. 392–3). Indeed, ‘to the extent Social Science conceals its performativity from itself it is pretending to innocence that it cannot have’ (2004, p. 404). PSS was born.

With these new approaches to research at hand, PSS was then beginning to provide the overarching intellectual prowess, strategies and methodological and theoretical depth to engage and unite scholars across disciplines in this new methodology. In turn, researchers’ endeavours could be connected with artists, communities and stakeholders. What “performative” refers and relates to in these contributions and elsewhere is the communicative powers of research and the natural involvement of an “audience,” whether that be connecting with groups of citizens, peers or students, a physical audience or a cyber audience, even a solitary reader of a journal or a book. This was good news, not only for participants in research studies, who can often be involved in producing subsequent performative outputs, but also for the larger community to whom these findings should be not only directed, but also connected.

By this point I no longer considered Art and Science a binary, but both as a result of the same activity: creativity. For me, creativity was about working within certain boundaries while, at the same time, somehow changing them (Jones & Leavy, 2014). Art becomes socially constructed (Ekholm, 2004, p. 3). 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 the 21st century, were repeated habitually. It became time 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.

The first step in reporting emotive encounters in research was to move 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 was key to communicating an understanding of the How’s and Why’s of the human condition. The second step was 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 belong to a particular club or community.

Nonetheless, the answer was not in simply writing a poem or putting on a play merely because that happens to be a pastime (or frustration) of an academic. Rather, it was in finding the right arts-led method to help answer a research question and/or to disseminate its findings to a community. In certain instances, this was about forming collaborations with professional artists themselves. These creative learning and/or dissemination experiences, which include the wider community, engendered therefore, a meaningful investment in a project, its outputs and outcomes.

But where did I find a philosophy and the theoretical criteria in which to base PSS?

The 20th Century was not kind to 18th Century notions of the aesthetic. With Social Constructionism’s principles in mind, 21st Century ideas of what “truth” and “beauty” mean need to be re-examined from a local, quotidian vantage point, with concepts such as “aesthetic judgment” located within community.

The principles of Nicolas Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics (Bourriaud, 2002) offer one theoretical grounding to the search at hand, basing theories of Art in terms of co-operation, relationship, community and a broad definition of public spaces. Relational Aesthetics are suggested as a starting point because Bourriaud offers a post-modern, contemporary framework that allows social scientists to think about aesthetics and means of dissemination in refreshing ways.

Relational Aesthetics also forms a structure on which we can begin to think about a “performative” Social Science—a science that includes more emphasis on collaborations with our research participant co-authors, co-producers or co-performers themselves. It also provides a platform on which to base the production values of our dissemination efforts and gauge the effects that our fabrications have on our audiences as well, allowing for their own participation in a dialogical, creative social exchange.

(Jones, 2016, n.p.)

Relational art is located in human interactions and their social contexts. Relational art bridges or blurs the differences between life and art and involves the public as co-creators of artworks,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword by Kenneth J. Gergen
• 1 Introduction: Performative Social Science as Methodology
• SECTION I
• SECTION II Theatre and Engaging Across the Fourth Wall: Audience Participation, Performance, and Drama
• SECTION III Education: Teaching and Embodied Learning
• SECTION IV Poetry as Identity and Community
• SECTION V Innovations
• SECTION VI PSS, Virtual Realities and Self-reflection
• SECTION VII Conclusions
• Index