Practice Research through Creative Bodies

Perspectives on Embodied Inquiry

Caroline Frizell, Marina Rova

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2025
• Topic: Psychology
• eBook ISBN:
  9781040426944
• Subtopic: Social Science Research & Methodology
• Index: Psychology

This anthology brings a focus to practice research in which moving bodies and creative processes are imperatives. It brings together a diverse range of researchers and performers who present innovative research through single authored and co-authored projects that trouble the notion that there are limited ways of researching and performing.

As the anthology unfolds, readers are invited to consider the many different ways in which (em)bodied research and performance generates new knowledge; that is new ways of seeing the world. The approaches include phenomenology, new materialism, posthumanism, arts-based research, autoethnography, case study and ecofeminist methodologies. The wide range of methodologies performed in the book illustrate the multiple (infinite) possibilities of practice research, each of which are uniquely situated within personal, professional, spacio-temporal and socio-political contexts that enable inquiry to emerge and submerge as responsive processes. The contributors represent a wide representation from mother-artists, to psychoanalytic practitioners, to community dance artists, to performers, to somatic therapists to arts psychotherapists. Their research and performance includes non-stylised movement, improvisational dance and dance as participation in the world.

This book democratises the idea that creative moving bodies are a practice research resource that can enable each of us to become part of the wider world. It is a useful resource for students, researchers and professionals in art therapies, somatic practice and arts performance.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Can We Go a Bit Slower? Ethical Meanderings through Practice Research: Creating Knowledge through and towards Cultures of Care
• 2 The Entangled Research Team: Research Inquiry through Collective and Diffractive Engagement with Data
• 3 Creative Voices Collective: Empowering Communities through Art and Expression
• 4 Embodied Investigation and Performance Activism as a Catalyst for Change
• 5 Dear Izzi, Hi Mum: A Soft Approach to a Movement Practice between Mother and Daughter
• 6 Exploring Radical Self-Care and Community Empowerment through The Body Room
• 7 Processes Evolving in the Wood Wide Web of Be-coming Tree
• 8 A Journey through Personal Landscapes: An Autoethnographic Study of the Embodied Sense of Place
• 9 Dwelling within the Body’s Forgotten and Neglected Garden: Have You Been on Your Bench Today?
• 10 aRTSjAM: A Therapists’ Collective for Embodied Processing and Being
• 11 Opening Doors to Peer Supervision
• 12 In Search of Existential Joy
• 13 Pushing beyond Limits and Realigning Together
• 14 Weaving the Threads of Trainer/Trainee Perspectives on Embodied Relational Research during Training: A Tapestry of Personal and Communal Transformation
• 15 Connection through Separation: Negotiating Boundaries in Dance Movement Psychotherapy with Psychosis
• 16 Living the Questions
• 17 Scratching beneath the Surface: In Search of Belonging
• 18 Echoes across the Generations: The Relationship between Mover and Witness in Audience Responses to an Autobiographical Performance
• 19 Mapping the Lived Experience of a Cultural Nomad through Relational Stories that Move
• 20 Precarious Health: Moving Bodies and Affirmative Ethics
• 21 Research and Lived-Experience: Multidirectional Spillage
• Epilogue
• Index