Presentation 1
Getting Industrious With Others: Workshop(s) on Creative and Crafty Public Engagement Methods
Annette N. Markham(1), Katrina Jungnickel(2), Mary Elizabeth Luka(3), Kishonna L. Gray(4), Larissa Hjorth(5)
1: Utrecht University, Netherlands, The; 2: Goldsmiths University, UK; 3: University of Toronto, Canada; 4: University of Kentucky, United States; 5: RMIT University, Australia
This experimental session offers two sequential workshops* during the course of the conference where participants learn about and experience hands-on practice making things with others. These creative practice research modalities function as prompts and provocations for participants in public engagement or participatory action research. Playful and engaging, these industrious methods can help bring a diversity of practices to the table and open up ways of knowing, especially when conducting community based or advocacy research. But to be effective, they also require safer spaces and expert facilitation, an approach that grows from researchers experimenting with different techniques, repeatedly and iteratively with different groups and projects, adapting to each situation. The practices we demo in the workshops reflect multiple strategic interventions that foreground critical making, rather than verbal or abstract discussions.
For the experts convening the workshops, creative practice engagement that blends analog and digital modalities is at the heart and soul of doing critically engaged and collaborative work with/in communities. So, too, the ability to respond to emergent needs in the moment and in the research, including finding ways to accommodate participant disappointments as well as the "aha" moments when they happen. Workshop facilitators’ practices include having participants build moodboards to critically analyze automated smart city data collection; working with young adults to build online games to better understand the politics of gender and race in their communities; sewing and performing in costumes to explore historical technologies; co-creating interpretive infographics, audio, and video with communities of practice as advocacy strategies for action; prompting participants to write postcards to their future datafied selves.
The workshops are designed to include practical making experiences as well as robust discussion of the value of each method in the research of the presenters. We will share how these methods connect to particular epistemologies and across disciplinary trajectories, as well as tips and tricks for using/facilitating these modalities among one’s own participants. Methods we demo will depend on number of workshops available (likely includes: collaborative infographics or exploratory audio and video making (M.E. Luka, UToronto), stitching and performing (Kat Jungnickel, Goldsmiths), game play with participants (Larissa Hjorth, RMIT), game making as critical race pedagogy (Kishonna Gray, U Kentucky), and critical counter-mapping with smart city data (Annette Markham, Utrecht Uni).
Each workshop will introduce the general idea of participatory creative practice followed by two short hands-on demos (participatory exercises), highlighting two different modalities. These are tightly planned to work with limited timing. Facilitators have significant experience conducting these types of workshops.
Chang, E. Y., Gray, K. L., Bird, A. (2021). Playing difference: Toward a games of colour pedagogy. In Critical Pedagogy, Race, and Media. Routledge.
Hjorth, L. (2017). Care, Media & Ritual: Creative, design, social, and ethnographic
Interventions. Report. https://www.larissahjorth.net/s/Care-media-and-ritual_Summary_July2017.pdf
Jungnickel, K. (2020) (Ed.). Transmissions: Critical Tactics for Making and Communicating Research. MIT Press.
Luka, M.E. (2019). Walking matters: A peripatetic rethinking of energy culture. In Energy Culture. West Virginia University Press.
Markham, A., Harris, A. Luka, ME. (2020). Massive and Microscopic Sensemaking. Qualitative Inquiry.
