The goal of our workshop was to unsettle the status quo of academic conferences. We sought to create a space that actively challenged the power structures and fields of dominant discourse we had all encountered many times in our lives as academics. Perhaps we are not the ones to judge the success of this endeavour, however we state here our intentions for the day and how it played out in a tone of collective autoethnography.

Our workshop embodied a spirit of multiplicity as we drew together scholars from around Australia who are on a distinct path that drew upon creative methods. John Law (2004) problematises the ways in which research methods are routinised in the research field. He argues that whilst these standardised packages of qualitative research are successful in many ways “they are badly adapted to the study of the ephemeral, the indefinite, and the irregular” (2004, p. 4). Law (2004) identifies the ways in which research methods often produce the realities that they describe and render much of the research process invisible. This means that there are ontological, epistemological, and axiological assumptions ingrained the accepted norms of research practice that remain uncontested and uncritiqued by the field (Law 2004). Law (2004) argues that we must find new research methods that are able to account for the growing complexity of our world and disciplines.

As an alternative, we put forward Norman K. Denzin and Yvonne S. Lincoln’s (2005) position that the qualitative researcher ought to be considered a bricoleur, whose research emerges out of adaptation, construction, and dynamism and incorporates a range of tools to the interpretive and representative work of research. By evoking the term bricoleur, and quilt maker, they highlight the aesthetic elements of research whereby they use “the aesthetic and material tools of his or her craft, deploying whatever strategies, methods, and empirical materials are at hand” (Denzin & Lincoln 2005, p. 4). It is an approach that does not attempt to know the findings in advance and adapts the context given to the researcher.

The goal of this research modality is to emphasise multiplicity in the voices in a research text, to highlight and contest power structures, and encourage creativity in identifying new ways in which to perform, interpret, and represent research (Denzin & Lincoln 2005). They evoke this image by saying, “the quilter stitches, edits, and puts slices of reality together. This process creates and brings psychological and emotional unity-a pattern-to an interpretive experience” (Denzin & Lincoln 2005, p. 5). The goal of a turn to the creative is not simply rooted in interest or fancy; it is political. A research process rooted in creativity as quiltmaker or bricoleur is engaging in multiple voices, angles, visions, and perspectives at once. This is central to the meaning-making process of research, which is often left undescribed or narrowly presented by routine research methods. However, in adopting the creative spirit of research, Denzin and Lincoln (2005, p. 5) note, “they move from the personal to the political, from the local to the historical and the cultural. These are dialogical texts. They presume an active audience. They create spaces for give-and-take between reader and writer. They do more than turn the Other into the object of the social science gaze.” It is this dialogical spirit between the personal and political, reader and writer, speaker and audience, we sought to create in the workshop.

Our Plan

The Creative Methods Workshop was designed as a day to encourage the emergence creative research methods appearing in various corners of the field of social sciences. Our panelists were chosen to perform activities for our attendees that would allow them to have an experience of what it was like to embody these creative methods. Our initial plan was to have four activities that ran concurrently, and attendees could choose to attend 2 out of the 4. Unfortunately, one panelist, Samantha Hauw, was unable to fly out of Melbourne due to a storm that grounded all planes and could not run her activity, however she contributed in the leadup to the event in discussions. We were sad that Sam could not be there, but her absence inspired us to think about doing an event like this in the future where her important research could be involved.

The event took place in Room 310, Eastern Avenue & Auditorium and Theatre Complex, University of Sydney. This is a flat, multi-purpose space where we could have both desk and floor activities.

We had the fortune to have Deborah Lupton introduce the event. Professor Lupton is SHARP Professor in the Centre for Social Research in Health and Social Policy Research Centre at UNSW Sydney. She leads the Vitalities Lab and the UNSW Node of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society, therefore, she was an obvious choice to launch us into creative explorations for the day.

Our four panelists were Samantha Hauw, Anastasia Murney, Laura Simpson Reeves, and Ash Watson. The attendees had the chance to choose their activities when they registered. These are the descriptions that attendees were given to help them make this decision. We provide their descriptions, along with the panelists’ biographies, so that you too may be able to have a sense of what the activities entailed before we provide you with detailed descriptions of what it felt like to do them. We hope you can appreciate the breadth of backgrounds our panelists brought to the event as well as the distinct directions creative methods can be taken.

Samantha Hauw is a PhD student at Deakin University, supervised by Anna Halafoff and Andrew Singleton. She completed an honours thesis on conscious dance and spirituality under the supervision of Dr Anna Halafoff at Deakin, tutors undergraduate students in the sociology of religion, and is a research assistant on the Australian Spirituality: Wellness, Wellbeing and Risks ARC Project. She was going to run an activity based around the practice of Witnessing. She writes:

This activity is normally done in pairs – a mover and a witness - and is adapted from Authentic Movement teacher, Janet Adler (2002) and to include painting as part of a trialogue. The roles of witness and mover are adopted by each partner and a prompt is offered (e.g. our panel theme). As a response to the prompt is explored through physical movement by the mover, the witness tracks the mover’s physical movement, painting/drawing on paper her own inner experience in response. After two minutes, the pair share reflections on their experiences for a further minute. The roles of witness and mover are switched and the activity repeated (Hauw 2023).

Anastasia Murney is a Sessional Lecturer at UNSW Art & Design on the unceded lands of the Bidjigal and Gadigal people. She holds a PhD in contemporary art theory. Her research examines the intersections between art, activism, and environmental futures. She has published her research in peer reviewed journals such as Third Text (2015), Coils of the Serpent (2023), and Journal of Visual Culture (2023). She is also the Managing Editor of the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art. In her description, she wrote:

In this participatory session, I will facilitate a collaborative Tarot reading. Tarot is a practice that unfolds through a deck of playing cards, used for divination or entertainment. In a typical reading, the querent (or questioner) comes to the reader with a problem for which they are seeking guidance. This reading will respond to a question based on participant responses to a questionnaire on the general theme of ‘crisis’ (circulated in advance of the session). The reading will unfold through the interpretative labour of myself and the participants. The symbolic language of the Tarot offers a way to recast the problem, to step back from conventional methods of problem-solving and open space for alternative possibilities (Murney 2023).

Laura Simpson Reeves is a PhD candidate, senior research assistant and sessional academic at The University of Queensland. She is an experienced qualitative social researcher focused on understanding lived experiences of social inequality and inequity. Laura work with vulnerable and marginalised groups at the nexus of culture and disadvantage, especially around ethnicity, gender and sexuality, poverty, and experiences of exclusion and discrimination. Her particular focus and interest in diaspora and issues around belonging, identity, and social cohesion/isolation. She describes her activity as:

LEGO® Serious Play® is a facilitated, small group workshop method. It was originally developed within the Lego Group for strategic thinking in business in the ‘90s and early 2000s, but became open access in 2010. Since then, the method has been adapted and used for coaching, teaching, research, community development, and more. The focus is on storytelling and metaphors, not artistic skills, and so this approach can help participants to externalise abstract concepts, and make the intangible tangible. For research, this can be a great data collection tool to help understand participant perspectives on topics such as identity, poverty, agency, development, and more. The method involves participants going through a four-step process. First, the facilitator poses a challenge or a question. Second, the participants build their answer using Lego bricks. Participants then describe their model to the rest of the group. Finally, participants write a short caption or note to ‘capture’ the model – and maybe even take a photograph. Participants in this workshop will have the opportunity to take part in a mini version of this process, exploring ideas around spirituality and religion (Reeves 2023).

Dr Ash Watson is a Senior Research Fellow at UNSW Sydney, with the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society and the Centre for Social Research in Health. Her research uses creative and qualitative methods to explore how people live with digital technologies and imagine the future. She is Fiction Editor of The Sociological Review, author of the novel Into the Sea (Brill, 2020), and the creator/editor of So Fi Zine (sofizine.com), an open access publication for sociological fiction, poetry and visual art. She explains that:

This workshop will introduce zine making as a method for social research. Zines are indie publications with a long history as an alternative grassroots platform for community communication and creativity. Featuring diverse work including poetry, collage, personal essays, photography and visual art, the medium offers a rich approach for critical social scholarship by affectively and materially drawing together the personal and political. In this workshop, participants will experiment with zine making by repurposing scholarly and public materials into zines of their own, to think differently about the affective and material encounters that make up social research (Watson 2023).

Deborah Lupton began the day with a provocation and introduction. Sam was going to get us to dance, Anie had us thinking creatively as a group through the divinatory practices of tarot cards, Laura brought play to the table through LEGO, and Ash had us cutting and glueing our research into zines.

What Happened on the Day

We set up the room so that there would be an open space in the centre where attendees could either sit on the floor or on chairs. Two tables were placed at the side in preparation for the activities. At the other side of the room, we laid out the catering of sandwiches and cakes. To orient everyone’s attention to the centre, we created a visual display of items that symbolically referred to each activity. We included magazines that were to be used to make zines, coloured pens, paper, Lego pieces, and tarot cards. This also helped to communicate to attendees that this workshop was going to be different to the standard format of an academic conference. Instead of orienting the room to the front where an authorial voice could stand and lecture, we redirected people’s energies and attention to their relationships with their fellow convenors, panellists, and attendees. This arrangement also conveyed the sentiment that whilst we may have organisers, facilitators, and experts to guide the day, we also acknowledge that those attending also have knowledge, expertise, and experiences to share.

Introduction

Deborah Lupton introduced the event over Zoom. We projected her onto the screen, and she gave us a concise picture of the goals of creative methods and provided us with a provocation.

The provocation was to consider how creative methods and a willingness to think and feel in our bodies may help us to uncover ‘more than human entanglements’. Lupton encouraged us to integrate theory, experience and feelings as we seek to uncover and analyse ‘thin’ places, movements, and events. She encouraged us to look for instances in which there is a form of everyday magic, which we ordinarily do not recognise within the academy. The panelists then were able to each have a turn in speaking to this provocation and introducing themselves and the activity they were running. Each of them were easily able to connect with this theme.

Activity 1: Tarot-Reading with Anastasia Murney

This introduction and group discussion initiated by Lupton flowed easily into the first activity of the day, Murney’s tarot-reading. It was initially planned that Hauw would run their witnessing activity, instead we had all participants join in on the tarot-reading activity. This turned out to work very well to create a sense of cohesion amongst our group of attendees. Our first task was to come up with a guiding question for the cards, which was how do we overcome barriers to creative research. Incorporating Deborah Lupton’s provocation, we stretched this to also consider, how do we see the everyday ‘magic’ and ‘thin places’ in the world that aren’t normally recognised? How might this help us to direct our own work in Studies in Religion?

Murney drew out the deck on the ground in the centre and explained how a classic tarot-reading works and what the position of each card is meant to convey and what the cards tend to symbolise. Then, the floor was opened for anyone to contribute to how they made sense of that card in answering the guiding question.

Interestingly, we drew the Queen of Wands as our ‘forces below card’, which is the card that represents the structure informing the situation. Given our guiding questions of overcoming barriers to creative research and recognising the more than human and every day magic of thin spaces, it almost felt ‘spooky’ to draw a Queen which many of us read as representing imperialism and white women. A tangible reminder that it is perhaps the colonial, western university system which prevents us recognising these more ‘spooky’ and ‘magic’ moments as legitimate knowledge.

Organically, the cards began to be passed around the circle so each person could see them up close. People’s interpretations ranged from theoretical points, current research trends, and personal experiences. One notable moment was the discussion about the experience of having pets and the sadness of losing them, evoked by the presence of animals in the cards. This led to a discussion about the role of the more-than-human world in contributing to our research, but the ways in which these broader contexts are deleted from how we present research to the public. The ease by which the group shifted between the modality of personal and academic demonstrated how the activities were able to operate on both registers, and connect the personal to the political, the subjective to the collective (Denzin & Lincoln 2005).

Activity 2: Zine-Making with Ash Watson

We then broke for a short break and reconvened for the next two activities. One group split up to make Zines with Watson on the table, and the other group went to build Lego with Reeves on the floor. On the zine table, we were given scissors, glue, paper, and old magazines. Ash began with a short description of how she usually ran the activity and started us off with a paper folding tutorial. The goal was to take an A4 piece of paper and fold it into a small booklet. For some of us, this was a complicated task, which made us laugh together as we struggled to fold in the correct places. Ash then gave us a short period of time to cut out pictures from the material she provided and put it into a coherent order on each page.

The goal of the booklet was for it to be a representation of how we understood our role as a researcher or what the research process meant to us. This challenged us to think beyond our formal roles in a university context and discuss broader ways of conceptulising ourselves and our research passions. Each participant had a very unique take on the project, which Ash encouraged as part of our own meaning-making journeys.

Gerry’s experience of doing this activity was a feeling of being hyper-excited and flustered, mixed with an intense zen-like focus. In her reflection of the event, she said:

I rummaged through the pages of material given by Ash with desperate hands, trying to find the right image that stood out. I found a person rock-climbing from one of the magazines and found it to be amusing because they clearly had no idea how to perform correct climbing technique as they splayed themselves over the wall. I thought this is what research is like – being precariously straddled between points and ready to fall off at any second, but continuing to reach for the next hold, so that you may go further than you’ve been before.

As I performed this activity, I noticed that the process was not only about myself and my paper, but that of my neighbours too. We laughed as we removed lines of text from a document and rendered the phrases bizarre by removing them from its original context and re-ordering to take on new meanings. It made me feel like we were kindergarten children giggling about funny words and pictures. I laughed again as I realised that I had stuck most of the picture upside down.

When the time for cutting and gluing was up, we stopped and went around the table to explain what we had created. It was a beautiful way to share with one another our own research journeys in a visual medium but also to reflect on how approach to research in a way that bypasses the authorial voice of the researcher and enter a modality that identifies the hidden and unremarked upon ways in which research is produced.

Zoe’s zine showing the tension between working in a Business School and having a Religion PhD.

Activity 3: Lego with Laura Simpson Reeves

In this activity, Laura instructed us to build ourselves as a researcher. Participants build small models - some realistic others quite abstract – and then took turns to explain the models. This allowed us to use our models as a prompt to discuss our understanding of our research processes and our position within the university.

Taking time to build the model before speaking meant that there was no immediate pressure to answer straight away. We could also refer to the models, rather than ourselves, thereby creating distance. This is a helpful strategy for topics that are hard to discuss, or with participants who may be hesitant to reflect on their own experience. Having the model as a prompt means you can step back from yourself and narrate your story.

Rosie reflects that while she went to the event wondering how she might be able to use creative methods, what she most appreciated was the time and space to think collaboratively through Lego and tarot.

Conclusion

The themes of the day centred around where creative research methods could take us in the future. At the conclusion of the event, we exchanged details with many of the attendees who were interested in further exploring what the day had evoked and how we might take it into the future. We wondered how we might create a collective of creative researchers to support one another in an academic world where creative research methods are still often relegated as marginal and unimportant. We also left with a renewed sense of purpose, having directly experienced the value of alternative methodologies and exploring these marginal spaces.

Three of the event organisers – Gerry Smith, Enqi Weng and Rosie Shorter – presented their initial reflections in a paper at the annual conference of the Australian Assosiation for the study of religion. We intend to incorporate these reflections into a published piece of reflexive writing.

References

Denzin, N.K, & Lincoln Y.S, 2005, The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research [Third Edition], SAGE Publications, Thousand Oaks, California.

Law, J. 2004, After Method: Mess in Social Science Research, London, Routledge.

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