Using embodied socially embedded aesthetics as a socially transformative research method, workshop by Ephrat Huss
Situating arts as the method, subject or end product of research: Arts-based methods, when used in participatory forms, can co-produce knowledge, challenge and effectively influence hegemonic stands, return knowledge to the community, discuss socially taboo issues indirectly, situate stress and coping within specific social contexts, and enable processes of shifts from homeostatic to shifting stands, that is, transform knowledge.This workshop will start with a rational for using arts in socially transformative research in terms of the inherent mechanisms of arts such as the aesthetic tension between form and content and between figure and background.. As well as bringing autobiographical and cultural memory, sensory experience and shifts in perceptions, into our research. Arts can be a method, subject, or end product of research. Each placement has a different impact. We will learn, using participant’s present and future research ideas, how and why the arts can be used as a method subject or end product of research projects. Each of these positions will be experimented with using hands-on arts- methods – drawing photo-voice and collage and examples from the workshop leader’s publications in each of these placements.