Performing the University

1 February 2025

How can we use movement to convey meaning and understanding within the research process? How does embodying a certain role or archetype shapes our interactions with people from outside the normative academic framework? This is more a process of thinking about the embodiment of roles such a ‘the researcher’ and ‘the artist’ and what this means for how we arrange ourselves in co-produced research relationships.

Ideas Exchange 2024/25

Rachael is an artist, Will is an academic. For three years they’ve been exploring what it means to perform a particular role in both the worlds of the arts and academia. Although there is a synergy between their questions of how to subvert or playfully reimagine alternatives to these roles and the practices associated with them, their processes take wildly different forms.

As the two begin to develop a stronger understanding of their work it’s becoming clear how the two can learn from each other. Rachael holds a desire to ground some of their work in more academic literature, and understand what academics really mean when they talk about performativity and affect. Will has the desire to understand how creative methods such as performance can help not just in the methodology and data collection of a research project but to also help work through difficult pieces of writing and unstick the writing process where concepts feel difficult to convey. This work asks how being aware and ‘in’ one’s body can help to develop an academic voice and language.

What will the project involve?

Rachael and Will will hold a 3 day intensive residency within a dance studio to explore themes such as:

The language of interdisciplinarity,
Differing concepts of performance and performativity,
Radical pedagogy and the deconstruction of discourse,
Embodied research beyond the idea of practice

After these discussions they’ll meet with the Action Research and Critical Inquiry in Organisations research group community to expand their experience, and bring other voices into the conversation, to explore how this approach might benefit our wider research community.

They will later work this into a workshop that would have application across both research culture and critical pedagogy, as well as artistic practice.

Who are the team and what do they bring?

Rachael Clerke (Art Business Ltd) takes real life businesses and business practices and presents them as performances. A big theme of this work is the idea of what it’s like to actually ‘be’ and perform the essential business practices associated with being an artist in contemporary society. Rachael has an ongoing interest in how the body can communicate feelings & concepts when language is inadequate or ineffectual.
Will Hunter (School of Management - Business School, University of Bristol) explores how identity manifests in collaborative and co-produced research. Specifically the identities, roles and archetypes that university bureaucracy places on individuals and then boundaries them into neat boxes that often don’t match the collaborators interpretation of their identity in the project. As part of this and through autoethnography he explores what it’s like to perform ‘the researcher’ and make the transition from insider to outsider.
Sheena Vachhani and Patricia Gaya (School of Management - Business School, University of Bristol) on behalf of The Action Research and Critical Inquiry in Organisations (ARCIO) research group. An interdisciplinary community comprised of colleagues from across the Schools of Management, Education, Law and Policy Studies. Many within this group are interested in employing creative methods to co-produce research with community and artistic partners.