Conference Agenda

This paper explores how Derrida’s concept of hauntology provides a theoretical and material framework for analyzing the persistence of institutionalized antiblackness in student leadership and coalition building within multicultural spaces. Using a case study of a “multicultural center” within a predominantly white institution, it analyzes the “haunting” effects of institutional memory, policies, and physical spaces that perpetuate harm and disrupt collaboration among student leaders. Ultimately, it argues for institutions to move beyond performative diversity and toward equitable, futurist possibilities grounded in transformative praxis. Delving into the metaphorical and spiritual dimensions of hauntology, this work aims to connect to practices of cleansing, exorcism, and reclamation. These practices are informed by beliefs, ethics, and cultural values, offering a pathway for institutions to confront and dismantle the ghosts of antiblackness while creating new spaces for restorative work. Higher education institutions are often sites where systemic racism and antiblackness persist, even as they claim commitments to diversity and inclusion. These systemic issues are not just rooted in the policies and practices of the present but are also shaped by the lingering “ghosts” of historical harm, exclusion, and erasure. Derrida’s concept of hauntology provides a lens to analyze these persistent specters and their impact on student leadership and coalition-building efforts in multicultural spaces. This paper is an invitation to for those in higher education who are invested in cultivating and sustaining culturally responsive pedagogies and practices within hostile environments to come together to collectively confront the oppressive ghosts that haunt our institutions. Together we will explore strategies for confronting our ghosts within the academy and discover methods for a collaborative “cleansing” of the material and embodied heart and mind spaces from which we work.

In this work, we draw from conversational narratives with preservice science teachers (PSTs) to explore kinship as both an ethical stance and a pedagogical resource. While science teacher preparation often foregrounds content mastery, PSTs’ reflections suggest that their development as inclusive educators emerged through relational memories such as stories, conflicts, and solidarities formed within and beyond the cohort. These ties, described as “my village” or “a network of ideas I can bounce off,” became the ethical infrastructure from which they approached justice-oriented teaching in science classrooms. Their narratives reveal that inclusion is not a default, but a practice learned over time, shaped by coursework where they remembered and shared personal histories (religions, languages, hobbies) and field experiences that taught them to offer accommodations without stripping students of dignity. “I don’t see color” was rejected not as innocence, but as erasure. One PST reframed: “I see it, and this is why I want to be inclusive.” These insights emerged from a dialogic space that valued memory as pedagogy, where humility allowed them to move “beyond surface level,” to listen deeply, and to remember others well. We frame this through Karen Barad’s (2007) relational becoming, where kinship is not a fixed identity but a continuous reconstitution of self-with-others: human and more-than-human. In an era of political polarization and heightened scrutiny over what is taught in schools, these stories offer kinship as a memory-based counter-force: a collective practice of ethical mattering (Authors 2023), remembering, resisting deficit framings, and preparing to confront inequity not through indoctrination, but through lived justice. We invite the field to see cohort kinship as a deliberately cultivated, historically entangled practice that sustains inclusive science teaching.

This conceptual paper draws from our experiences as teacher educators, exploring what healing and justice renewal mean to us personally, with the pre-service teachers we teach, and in the classrooms they will eventually lead. We draw on Barad’s concepts of becoming and diffraction, alongside posthumanism, to reframe pre-service teacher learning as an ongoing process of dynamic self-differentiation—entwined with the reverberations of their ontoepistemological roots. Becoming emphasizes fluidity and multiplicity, viewing identity as continually evolving. Barad’s diffraction involves iterative re-turnings that reconfigure understanding. We also engage Haraway’s response-ability to consider how ethical responsiveness and collective knowing can be cultivated. Using dialogic reflexivity, we analyze narratives from our students to link theory with lived experience, echoing Butler’s (1993) reconfiguration of reality through discourse. Recognizing ourselves and our students as always in process, we share tensions in our praxis and draw from Author et al. (2021) to explore identity and difference in our classrooms. We aim to “work difference” (Ellsworth & Miller, 1996), finding generative connections across diverse perspectives. This framing affirms identity as fluid and transformative, reshaping how justice and liberation are imagined in education. Our work engages the complexities of social foundations in teacher education, focusing on how our beliefs and practices—shaped by personal histories—intersect with those of our students. We examine the tensions that arise when student-centered pedagogy meets entrenched socialization patterns. While not always explicitly focused on justice, the instructor’s commitment to transformation underscores pedagogy’s potential as a site of healing. Ultimately, this paper contributes to broader discussions of equity and justice in education, offering insights into how classrooms can serve as spaces for ethical engagement, personal renewal, and collective transformation.

This conceptual paper interrogates how whiteness is rendered invisible yet communicated through popular discourses surrounding progressive schooling philosophies—Montessori, Reggio Emilia, and Steiner/Waldorf—and how these pedagogies, born of resistance and necessity, are appropriated as markers of capitalist status, including wealth, exceptionality, and protection. Drawing on Hunter Knight’s (2022) work on the production of “innocence” in progressive education, we frame our inquiry with Hasslanger’s (2000) understanding of race as “the social meaning of the geographically marked body,” and Lipsitz’s (2006) notion of whiteness as a resource-hoarding identity investment. Using dialogic reflexivity (Author et al., 2021), we reflect on our diverse experiences with U.S. progressive schooling, in contrast with its post-war philosophical origins and current forms in Italy. Situating the study outside the U.S. illuminates how these pedagogies appear and function across racial and cultural contexts, aiding our understanding of their racialized implications when recontextualized in the United States. Our data includes observations and conversations from teaching an education policy course in Rome, examining how the philosophies’ origins are reshaped through U.S. popular media and discourse. We consider how these pedagogies are racialized over time as part of an ongoing project of whiteness and ask: how does this happen, and what might we learn from tracing their cultural histories? Confronting racism, in increasingly divided times, requires examining how progressive whiteness undermines redistributive efforts and obscures racial discourse. The idiosyncratic “progressive” associated with “nice white parents” (Joffe-Walt, 2020) complicates not only the redistribution of resources but also our ability to address the systemic ideologies upheld by a “possessive investment in whiteness” (Lipsitz, 2006) within progressive education, and those who tie their identities to the modern incarnations of these progressive philosophies.

On the path to rebuilding a sense of hope rooted in nuanced understanding, this paper argues for correspondence as an affective method—one that braids theory and method to invite researchers and participants alike to surrender to the reverberations of history and the emotionality of inquiry. Memory is evocative; it links us through time, bringing emotions both old and new from within and beyond ourselves (Ahmed, 2014; Halbwachs, 1952/1992; Lawler, 2001). Just as we reconcile our memories with the present (Pequignot, 2012), we also reconcile emotions with their origins—shaped internally and by the social spaces we inhabit (Ahmed, 2014). This interplay of memory and emotion informs the historical production of personhood (Holland & Lave, 2009), as we construct identity through the integration of history, memory, action, and cognition (Russell, 2006). Choosing cultural and personal artifacts allows us to make sense of this integration. When we commit memory to paper by hand, the act becomes intimate, affective, and generative, the crafting of artifacts. Handwriting letters demands time with oneself—often uncomfortably so. The recipient is not a physical presence but an emotional one. Unlike conversation, correspondence offers meditative space. We choose, in solitude, what and how to share. This privacy bypasses the self-monitoring often present in face-to-face dialogue, especially when discussing emotionally charged topics (Flemming, 2020; Siraj, 2010). Inquiry inevitably risks pain. Sitting with our own thoughts—and then with others’—requires waiting that feels capacious and uncertain. This indeterminacy can be generative. Letter writing provides refuge: a protected space for reflection, alone or together. Perhaps we owe it to ourselves and those who trust us with their stories, to lean into the affective dimensions of research that resides in the practice of correspondence, where what emerges on the page may reawaken our senses and help us sit with feeling before choosing how to move forward.

This presentation draws on feminist new materialist educational research and stems from the authors’ long-term engagements in developing creative praxis for addressing gender and power in peer cultures with pre-teen children. The authors discuss a two-day creative workshop for children engaging these themes with diverse arts-based activities, focusing particularly on the making of digital-embodied animations that brought children to explore movements, gestures and postures in articulating their hopes, desires, and demands related to gender and power. By providing three glimpses into the making of the animations and the possibilities and trouble of inviting bodies along, the paper discusses digital-embodied praxis as an affirmative and generative way of exploring gendered childhoods and to amplify children’s visions for more capacious gender relations.

This presentation starts with the speculation that the body is more assemblage than form, where children move as molecules of the community, each gesture carrying the transductive potentiality of the whole. Working with a choreographer and two visual-sound artists, we explore how movement bodies difference and diversity, with an implicit focus on the relational ontologies of gender. Drawing on a six-month engagement with 48 children (aged 9–11) in two South Wales primary schools, we trace how, as the virtual meets the actual, the body becomes more-than-one (Manning 2013), and how gestures, voices, and images recompose a collective body as they unfold across the relational milieus of classrooms, halls, and a community theatre. Movement, we suggest, becomes philosophy in action, each movement a proto-political citizen of a community to come, where every body matters.

This diffractive account of events is drawn from field notes from over one hundred hours of posthuman ethnography focusing on neurodiversity in nursery and reception classrooms in a school in north England. While attuning to patterns of activity inspired by Erin Manning, Gail Boldt and Daniel Stern’s Forms of Vitality, my attention was drawn to Eden, aged 4, who is non-speaking. They spent considerable time repeatedly walking backwards slowly down a grassy incline. They appeared to be carefully sensing the forces of gravity and steepness that go through the leg, foot, torso and eyes; in complex experiments with the multiple counteracting forces required to constantly adjust balance to stay upright. By thinking with the physiology of walking, I elaborate Eden’s unique bodymind (Murris, et al. 2016, p. 7) form of expression as a relational and productive example of what more a body can do (Goodley et al., 2016; Lenz Taguchi et al., 2016)’ inviting other ways to organise schools. 

This presentation explores what movement-oriented knowledges (Nail, 2024) make possible for generating well-becomings as an immanent mode of quiet activism (Helne, 2021; Pottinger, 2017). I entangle with two questions: What can a body do when held In the not-knot of post-(not post)Covid? How might ontologically art-ful praxis help generate modes of well-becoming? Moving theoretically with posthuman, feminist materialist and post-qualitative approaches, and with the methodological aesthetic of image-text riffs (Taylor & Fairchild, 2025), I outline a theory-praxis re/compos(t)ing that reframes well-being via relational, curious and creative practice-ings for situated knowledge-ings and becoming-otherwise (Haraway, 1988; Taylor, 2021) to contest the individualized, corporatized, institutional bureaucratization of well-being.

In this presentation, I introduce ‘Bog Somatics’, an experimental movement and somatic practice developed over the past two and a half years. I situate this practice within Irish dance education and peatland preservation, proposing that creative engagement with landscape offers critical insights in our late-capitalist, climate-change context. In Ireland, bogs and peat are deeply tied to national identity, family life, and industry, while also central to contemporary climate debates. Drawing on the materiality of peat, partially decomposed plant matter formed in waterlogged, oxygen-poor conditions. I explore how bog ecologies shape embodied practice and reimagine the interrelations of body, land, and history.

What are qualitative researchers in the social sciences to do with and about sound? Is the goal to be “sounders of the depths” (Stengers and Pignarre, 2011), reading and revealing the social via sound? Should this be our task? In the last decade or so, with the influence of sound studies, interest has grown to include more experimental, ecological, and posthuman understandings of sound. These call our attention to how sound circulates, foregrounding “the relationship between sound and the social production of meaning” (Kelman, 2010). What does this look like in the context of the qualitative study of work?

In this paper, we reflect on the generative “noise” of sound work. We are all part of Work-Life Canada – a multi-media, multi-disciplinary project that explores the meaning of work through the juxtaposition of documentary photography, work-life stories, and sounds of work. In this large undertaking, our team members make decisions every day that move us toward, and sometimes away from, a coordinated inquiry of the working lives of Canadians. In this presentation, we reflect on the ethical, epistemological, and methodological “decision trails” (Cheek, 2004) around the use, analysis, and integration of sound in our work. We focus especially on three kinds of decision points in our use of sound: recording, manipulating, and tagging. We consider these decisions within the broader context of the project, i.e. in relation to image and word, and as we create a complex web collection featuring 100 different working people across Canada. Our aim here is not to offer techniques or technical advice, but rather, to reflect on the “noise” around these decisions and the emerging possibilities of where the sound will take us.

There continues to be discussion about what it means to do qualitative research inwiththrough sound in ways that present such processes and possibilities as novel are strong arguments that miss critical positions due to disciplinary framings (e.g., Paine, 2017), or are rooted in scholarship that continues the ocular framings central to all qualitative research (including postqualitative, posthumanist research). This proposed paper addresses three central concerns of this particular combination of argumentation and its constituent parts for sonic qualitative researchers and then productively employed to underscore the strength of sonic qualitative research.

First and foremost are questions of a qualitative methodologist’s ethical commitments. In conceptualizing sound “as part of qualitative research” without the time and critical attentions required, one often recolonizes the sonic twice: erased using visual understandings to consider sounds and again because qualitative analyses are usually ocular from their epistemologies to ethics (e.g., Behar, 1997; see McKittrick, 2021)

Second, positioning sounds in qualitative research as something new attenuates the depth and breadth of scholarship about sounds from the continually-evolving studies within and across peoples and cultures throughout millennia. Such positioning is also ironically problematic as it reasserts a particular kind of status quo (e.g., Anglo, male, wealthy, straight, etc) much of critical qualitative researchers seek to interrupt with and through our studies. Just as key positivist concepts are inappropriate for qualitative researchers, so too are ocular framings of sounds.

Finally, such combinations as noted in the introductory paragraph above often lend themselves to scholarship that is less equipped to use the sonic as a mode of analysis at any layer of scale. This is because attending to ecologies and the things that comprise them as things to observe regularly precludes centering listening as is mandatory in any form of sonic scholarship.

In this paper, we explore how techniques such as sampling, effects, and loops can disrupt the normativity of music education. Using Chick Corea’s CHEAP BUT GOOD ADVICE FOR MAKING MUSIC IN A GROUP, we discuss data from three international projects with children and young people to show how a posthuman attention to music technology fosters inclusive, relational creativity.

Music production can generate sounds that do not pre-exist (Fisher, 2013). Yet traditional music education often encourages students to reproduce sounds imagined by teachers within Western frameworks (Stover, 2025), reinforcing an artificial divide between sound and its material-human conditions (Cooke, 2024). Research also notes teacher anxiety around generalist music teaching and music technology (Hennessy, 2000, 2017).

Our study draws from three projects in Norway, Spain, and England, focused on free improvisation, virtual instrument design, and research-creation. Each explored how research unfolds through, alongside, and within music-making. Methods included field notes, audio/video recordings, performative community (Hovde, 2024), and music creation as method (Shannon, 2021).

We analyze material relations in technologically mediated music creation and how they shift through listening. Following Fisher, these shifts appear as “cracks in the simulation”: the recorded sound gestures to a lost time, its imperfections revealing temporal folds between past and present. Children displayed fascination, creativity, frustration, and boredom as samples tapped into prior moments. These encounters show how children’s engagements with sound recording spark creativity and identity exploration, challenging music education’s focus on technique and replication.

This paper explores how doing research where listening to local sonic practices, relations, global power hierarchies and to ourselves can momentarily or enduringly destabilize dominant global hierarchies—such as colonial legacies, contemporary imperialism, global racism, and capitalism—and support artistic spaces towards equity (Sayers 2016).

Drawing on postqualitative and performative methodologies we dig into our own practices of care (Christopher, de Tantillo og Watson 2020, hooks 2013), local concepts (Hovde 2019) and sonic expressions to understand when the global power-hierarchies disturb our work (Tuck og Yang 2012,, and when we do not care.

Our methodological approach is grounded in collaborative work where music, dance, and dialogic encounters are performative acts of care. We ask: How can care, and performative modes of engaging with sound, movement, and conversation, support the creation of equitable and balanced relations within collaborative practices?

Our research foregrounds the processual, affective, and relational dimensions of knowledge-making. We position artistic practice in a variety of formats as central modes of inquiry.

We try to show how we are using listening-practices, co-creation, traditional concepts of humanity and relational care to foster ethical and equitable research relations. These practices do not offer simple solutions to systemic injustices, but they can generate micro-moments of resistance and reconfiguration—and help us to understand how structural power-dynamics can be met working in arts education and artistic practices, and how we can learn to produce knowledge as research inside these.

In recent years, psychobiography, the study of distinct lives, has been revitalized, adopting a variety of theoretical lenses or prisms. It has been described as case study research with complete lives, and is now included as a subject in the curriculum of a growing list of psychology departments worldwide. Endorsement of postmodern methods of qualitative inquiry for psychobiography, like the narrative approach to the study of lives, has further widened the field. We use psychobiography in the training of therapists to help achieve several goals, one of them being their learning of qualitative research methods in action, with emphasis in narrative inquiry: from asking research questions with possible implications for counselling and therapy, to forming small study groups, to field work or archive search, to conducting analysis and presenting findings to conferences and/or publishing it. We conduct narrative analysis of form and/or content, but also visual narrative analysis with emphasis on themes. In terms of data, we favor the study of first-person narratives and/or artifacts (diaries, letters, full autobiographies or autobiographical writings, early memories, interviews, self-portraits etc). Even though one might see life stories under the prism of either redemption or contamination, depending on longevity and death cause (e.g. natural causes or suicide), we treat them all as stories of resilience, given their histories of hardship and trauma. Short examples are presented with an emphasis on the variety of narrative inquiry methods used and the importance of learning in action.

The famous Greek photographer Ellie Sougioultzoglou-Seraidari (Nelly’s) (1899-1998) was born in Aidini (Asia Minor), and in her early years she experienced the tragic events of the Greek-Turkish War (1919-1923). She studied photography in Dresden (Germany), and worked in Athens (Greece) and New York (U.S.A.). A narrative and cultural psychology framework was adopted to explore the way that Nelly’s constructed her life story. An adjusted version of the “Life-Story Interview” (McAdams & Bowman, 2001) was used that distinguishes between redemption versus contamination narratives. The narrative analysis of autobiographical materials revealed turning points and a central life theme. The photographer appeared to construct her life story as a process of reinventing herself or managing “rebirth”. This construction matches the dominant narrative of Greek refugees of Asia Minor, following what is known in European history as the Asia Minor “Great Catastrophe” (1922). Both narratives are surviving and thriving stories of “rebirth”. The importance of making meaning of life stories within a specific socio-cultural and historical context is emphasized.

In this visual-narrative psychobiography study, we examine the life of the recently discovered street photographer Vivian Maier (1926-2009) of Austrian-French origin, who made a living as a nanny in the USA. There is limited information on her life that was possibly marked by early trauma, and no witnesses to her photographic activity. In our study we adopt a narrative psychology framework to look into her self-portraits, and understand how Maier constructed herself through time. Following principles of visual narrative analysis, we examined a series of published self-portraits, placing them in temporal sequence. We observed the development of one life theme (“I as photographer”), reflecting the effort to narratively construct a self that makes meaning. Over more than three decades, this life theme followed a progressive story-line initially, with Vivian Maier gradually exposing her face and leaving the camera aside, but a regressive story-line later, with her camera rather than her face gaining central position and with both of them disappearing eventually. We discuss the findings with emphasis placed in the many forms of repeated self-portrayal as meaning-making, but also in the limitations of making meaning of the self in solitude.

Francesca Woodman (1958–1981) was an American photographer who achieved posthumous fame after her suicide at age 22 and is now regarded as an “icon” and “rock star of contemporary photography.” Our study approached her life and work through a three-level narrative analysis. The first level examined recurring patterns in photographs, videos, and self-narratives, triangulated with the family story as depicted in the documentary The Woodmans. All members of the family were artists striving for recognition. A central theme that emerged was visibility/invisibility, linked both to Francesca’s personal experience of acceptance and rejection and to broader family dynamics. The second level focused on her final self-published photo-book, compared with an earlier one created during her time in Rome. Using a coding system for self-portrait analysis, we observed a sharp decline in psychological progression markers. This decline mirrored a visual and symbolic transition: from concrete motifs toward abstract geometries where identity appears to dissolve into impersonal forms. The third level analyzed diary entries, letters, and notes from the same photo-books. Here, too, we found a shift: decreasing self-reflexivity and internal markers, alongside growing reliance on metaphorical and externalized expressions, some foreshadowing her death. Overall, findings suggest that Woodman’s struggle with visibility and invisibility intensified in her final works, evolving into a fragmented symbolic language that reflected deepening existential isolation and withdrawal from tangible reality. The analysis carries clinical implications for understanding suffering and for supporting suicide prevention.

As two scholars who have read and thought with post-philosophies, such as posthumanism, we invite a discussion on how post-philosophies have, and could, open-up possibilities for thinking about early literacies. The paper traces the development and contribution of post-perspectives in relation to early childhood literacies, before identifying three interconnected facets via which post-philosophies demand we conceptualize, teach, and research literacies: uncertainty, mundanity, and movement. Concepts such as these, we argue, have frayed the edges of ‘the box’ that defines literacy via Humanist logics, thus serving as gathering points for a growing critique of the assumption that ‘human’ is a fixed and unproblematic category. Through personal reflections of how post-philosophical concepts have forced us to think differently, we ask; what has, does and could post-philosophies, specifically those that align with posthumanism, contribute to the field of early childhood literacies?

This paper speaks to the conference theme by inviting others to consider how post-philosophies offers creativity and interconnectedness in unprecedented times. Thinking with theories and ideas outside of our normal disciplinary homes is a generative process over time and an ethical project of producing difference towards a more just world. As we reflect on and propose, this process is getting us somewhere otherwise conceptually and politically, not as a quick fix or neat answer, but as an iterative and long-term intellectual project that also produces new, different realities along the way. Inspired by writings on thresholding, we propose the phrase ‘child with/in the world’ which encompasses what post-philosophies produce for us. Post-philosophies are not trying to get rid of ‘child’, rather, post-philosophies shift how we think and teach children with/in the more-than-human lively world.

Education is often positioned as a ‘solution’ to social inequalities, with literacy framed as a set of discrete skills essential to children’s well-being. Reading and writing can help children relax, gain confidence and understand others. However, dominant discourses privilege fixed, decontextualised views of literacy and narrow, eudaimonic outcomes such as achievement, belonging and economic security. These frameworks ignore the complex relations between literacy and well-being, positioning children as ‘becomings’ not ‘beings’ and aligning with neoliberal logics of future human capital.

This paper explores the digital-literacies-in-the-body of three-year-old Niyat as she engages with diverse cultural, material and social resources including the (post-)digital in the context of her Eritrean diasporic family home in the UK. Drawing on a home-based ethnographic study, I discuss some of the ways in which my research unfolded ‘from the floor up’; reflecting on who I became in my research with Niyat and her family, how the things I noticed seemed to matter and how our shared practices became methods over time.

I also trace how Niyat’s embodied practices with media and everyday objects - such as stone carrying seemingly connected to her watching of In the Night Garden or dancing with her mother and sister to Eritrean worship songs and Beyonce’s Single Ladies - can be read as complexly entangled action texts. These moments highlight how very young children both draw from, and transform, the cultural, affective, and material ecologies they inhabit.

Posthuman orientations guide this analysis, unsettling teleological accounts of literacy as linear skill development and instead foregrounding affect, embodiment and relationality. In doing so, the paper reimagines young children’s digital practices as simultaneously cultural, critical, embodied and affective, expanding thinking about what ‘counts’ as ‘digital literacy’ and its association with ‘well-being’ in early childhood.

Research on language and literacy practices has addressed the different contexts in which children make meaning, and how children are full, competent and able when considered as phenomena. However, narrow considerations of language in the classroom may tend to put the focus on what the children lack. This situation is particularly striking in the case of non-normative children where deficits, associated to disorders or syndromes, populate educational discourses. In this contribution we focus on a child with a diagnosis of Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) that puts the focus on her lack of words. We apply neo-materialist theories to pay attention to what emerges when DLD diagnosis becomes part of a classroom entanglement.

In our research we accompany Alice, a five-years-old child diagnosed with DLD, during a school moment in which her classroom group reads a silent book that recreates Little Red Riding Hood tale. We pay attention to Alice’s sounds, silences and movements, and to what those same sounds, silences and movements do. Considered that way, agency during this event does not belong solely to Alice, nor solely to the non-human matter. We read this event through Barad while we assume that concepts and ideas are not constituted autonomously. In our approach we apply the concepts of material-discursive apparatus and agency to look into non-normative children in a different way. In doing so, we re-conceptualise DLD, Alice, the classroom floor or Little Red Riding Hood. We reflect on what DLD does and how it creates relations, transforming both the human and the non-human and challenging standard definitions of DLD as deficit.

This paper explores how very young children make sense in museums through refrains: small, repeated utterances, sounds, and gestures. We explore how these fragile and fleeting refrains shape children’s engagements with cultural spaces, considering their implications for museum education and early childhood literacies.

Background

Research on early language development often emphasises “serve and return” interactions between adults and children. However, posthuman and affective perspectives highlight the material, multisensory and relational dimensions of language. Building on Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) concept of the refrain, we propose that children’s sense-making emerges through rhythmic patterns of repetition that are at once generative and precarious—holding things together only temporarily, always at risk of dissolving.

Methods

The study draws on a collaboration with Humber Museums Partnership. We conducted ethnographic observations and continuous audio recordings with families and under-fives across diverse museum and heritage sites. Data consists of field notes, audio vignettes, and researcher reflections, analysed with attention to rhythm, affect, fragility, and place-making.

Findings

Our analysis identifies refrains as rhythmic, fragile, and emplaced. Vignettes such as “waddle waddle” at a penguin enclosure, “ding-bell” during play with a toy, or whispered repetitions of “it’ll be alright” show how refrains create temporary territories of order and belonging. These refrains are unstable and contingent, breaking apart as quickly as they coalesce, yet precisely through this fragility they open possibilities for new relations and sense-making across bodies, soundscapes, and places.

Conclusions

We argue that refrains demonstrate how children’s literacies are aesthetic, improvisatory, fragile, and multisensory, exceeding conventional models of language. Museums can play a vital role in supporting these precarious yet creative practices, providing hospitable spaces where young children’s vocal, embodied, and relational engagements are valued. Attending to refrains expands understandings of early childhood language beyond developmental norms, foregrounding rhythm, affect, and fragility as central to children’s cultural encounters.

The Arts-Based Research Global Consortium is a group of international scholars who have gathered together for the purpose of advocating for the visibility, accessibility, and valuation of arts-based research approaches in addressing human rights, social justice, and critical global issues. Currently, the values of empathy, understanding, introspection, and truth, relative to the communal human condition are at a critical point within our current socio-political context and climate. The regard and positioning of these human values directly relate to how we construct and protect our global community, our roles and agency in these communities, the socio-political discourse, the advancement and dissemination of knowledge, and the ultimate impact on our survival and evolution. Within this context it behooves us to study these phenomena in the social and health sciences critically exploring, disrupting, and deconstructing the implicit research philosophies that drive and contribute current neoliberal and colonizing trends in defining truth, knowledge, justice, values, and our overall inclusive quality of life. This videograph presents a brief overview of the founding, mission, and works of the ABR Global Consortium.

The impact of current trends in technology, digitalization and mass media on our global

culture raises questions regarding the responsibility and ethics of research decisions in

contemporary social and health sciences. Embedded in the dominant paradigms, these trends subtly affect our worldviews, our valuation of the human condition, and the nature of socio-political discourse. In such critical post normal times, radical imagination and epistemic activism that embrace non-dominant modes of knowledge production in the social and health sciences becomes a necessity. Arts-based research (ABR) is resonant with the onto-epistemological perspectives and methodologies necessary to challenge and disrupt current unilateral and hegemonic paradigms underlying decaying societal and geo-political constructs. In this paper, we discuss the radical imaginative philosophy that motivates arts-based research methodologies as an approach to social activism and epistemological change.

This paper presents the philosophy, innovative methods, and final aesthetic synthesis of a collaborative arts-based research project about the lived experience of COVID-19. The project was initiated in 2020 and completed in 2022. Nineteen international arts-based research scholars participated as co-researchers, submitting their arts-based and narrative responses to the project. The six-member core research team guiding the project collected and organized the submissions while simultaneously entering into immersive, iterative, dynamic, arts-based data generation, dialogic analytic and syntheses processes with co-researchers, and each other. Materials-discursive analytic processes, arts-based responses, sensorial coding, intersubjective dialogues, and arts-based assemblages conducted iteratively throughout the project. The performative result captured the sensory, embodied, and emotional experiences of the evolving stages of the pandemic as identified by and resonant with the co-researchers and multiple audiences. These stages were identified during the project by the co-researchers as: initial anxiety and panic; reflection and creativity; and resilience. The final synthesis of the project is an arts-based and performative piece using video and interactive gallery venues representative of these stages.

Community-Based Participatory Action Research (CBPAR) promotes collaborative knowledge production and social transformation by engaging community members as co-researchers. However, sustaining meaningful participation and equitable communication remains a challenge, particularly in settings marked by power asymmetries and cultural complexity. This article introduces the VisionArte methodology, which integrates art-based methods and sensory ethnography to foster youth engagement and enhance dialogical processes within CBPAR. Developed through fieldwork conducted in 2023–2024 with Indigenous youth in San José de Chiquitos, Bolivia, the study explores how visual and sensory tools—such as visual mapping, embodied exercises, and data portrait drawing—can build trust, strengthen communication skills, and amplify marginalized voices. A central finding is the transformative potential of collective sensory envisioning exercises, which enabled youth to articulate pressing concerns—ranging from domestic violence and healthcare access to pollution and narcotrafficking—while simultaneously challenging researchers’ assumptions about local priorities. By emphasizing co-creation, emotional attunement, and community-driven design, the VisionArte methodology demonstrates how tailored visual and sensory approaches can foster inclusive participation, redistribute epistemic power, and support long-term engagement in participatory research. This article contributes to the growing literature on art-based methods in CBPAR by offering both theoretical insight and practical guidance for designing equitable research interactions.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce, define, and outline the continuum of arts-based research philosophies and best practices. In doing so we hope to provide a comprehensive guide to understanding and assessing the rigor of ABR for those who: a) evaluate research in peer-reviewed journals; b) review funding opportunities; c) teach, study and conduct ABR.

Arts-Based Research (ABR) is an approach to research that aims to access and explore phenomena that exist beyond tangible, observable, and descriptive forms of ways of being and knowing using artistic forms of inquiry. ABR aspires to study the more elusive and intangible sensory-embodied, aesthetic, and intersubjective dimensions of human experience and social discourse that are beyond words and otherwise inaccessible. The investigation of these dimensions of the internal human experience contributes to the insight and illumination about the human mind, perceptions, and related behaviors. ABR falls under the wider umbrella of creative practice-based research, and research-creation, among others, which are differently represented and explored across different disciplines and geographical locations. With this paper we aspire to increase the visibility, credibility, and accessibility of ABR by proffering guidelines to defining, reading, understanding, conducting, and evaluating ABR. To accomplish this, we present definitions of ABR, when it might be used, philosophical assumptions or worldviews underlying ABR, methodological practices, and approaches to evaluation as well as ethical concerns that must be considered when assessing the quality and rigor of ABR.

Termination in the context of brief psychotherapy, and its effective management, often presents a challenge for therapists. The aim of this study is to explore how therapists experience and manage the ending of brief psychotherapy within a community mental health setting. Adopting a phenomenological perspective, it examines how therapists experience and ascribe meaning to the issue of ending, as well as the factors that appear to shape their management of this process. The study involved eight (8) mental health professionals, with varying levels of experience, working in community psychiatry. Data were generated through semi-structured interviews lasting 50–60 minutes. Analysis was conducted using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA), a method particularly suited to investigating subjective experience and its meaning-making processes. The findings highlight themes related to therapists’ personal histories of loss, the difficulties and challenges they encounter in their clinical work, and the use of good practices in managing endings. Overall, the study underscores the influence of therapists’ personal experiences on how they approach termination, as well as the importance of reflection, supervision, and personal analysis in sustaining the therapeutic role.

The aim of the present study is to investigate the subjective, lived experiences of service users and their families regarding the onset of psychosis and the pathways in seeking appropriate treatment as well as the barriers they may have encountered during this process. Six in-depth individual interviews were conducted (4 service users and 2 mothers). The study took place between May - October 2023 within a Day Centre for Psychosocial Rehabilitation, located in Athens, Greece. Recruitment was purposeful following the snowball sampling technique. Thematic analysis was utilized for the analysis of data produced from narratives. Duration of Untreated Psychosis (DUP) for participants in the present study ranged between 3-9 years. Six themes emerged. All participants experienced trauma in the family prior to the onset of prodromal symptoms. The second theme refers to the first indications that seem to mobilize the family regarding the early onset of psychosis (emergence of positive symptoms, sleep disorders, academic failure and social withdrawal). The third one refers to individual’s and family’s sensitization and orientation towards psychic life. The role of the therapeutic alliance and stigma also emerges as a critical parameter implicated in early intervention. A prominent theme is the lack of information made available to the wider public regarding the availability and accessibility of services. The present qualitative study identified a number of factors contributing to treatment delay for first episode psychosis, including both intrapsychic and organizational level parameters that are responsible for long DUP in our Greek sample.

Given that juvenile delinquency is a multifaceted mental health issue, community-based prevention interventions for youth at risk should take place in a continuum so that individual, family, school, and social risk and protective factors are simultaneously addressed. A needs assessment study is then necessary to adjust prevention practices to the current state as well as the desired goals through the incorporation of different “voices” of the local community. Along these lines, eighteen focus groups with adolescents and young people, parents, teachers, and stakeholders of the local community were conducted in four municipalities in Northern Athens (Greece) where the program of psychosocial intervention for the prevention of youth violence and delinquency, entitled “It’s Up to You(th)”, is implemented by the Association for Regional Development and Mental Health (EPAPSY). In total, 163 participants were interviewed according to an original interview guide focusing on both risk and protective factors of youth delinquency. Thematic analysis of the transcribed interviews revealed seven main themes with regard to risk and protective factors, including the feeling of instability among young people, the normalization of violence and its internalization as an acceptable way to resolve differences, the lack of trust to (significant) others as well as the desire for a meaningful relationship with adults, the need for common spaces and a culture of dialogue, and the need of inspiration for values and principles. The risk and protective factors resulting from the thematic analysis are also presented comparatively with respect to the different groups and regions participating in the study. Based on this user participation approach, the findings of the needs assessment study shed light on the importance of embracing different community agents and local groups in the co-construction of a selective prevention strategy against youth violence.

In this presentation we outline and reflect upon the process of evaluating three community mental health facilities of EPAPSY through the W.H.O. QualityRights Toolkit. The Quality Rights Toolkit is a structured process for assessing quality of care and human rights in mental health facilities, introduced by the World Health Organisation in 2012. It is designed as a tool for collaborative research, engaging outside experts, facility professionals, service users and carers. More than an assessment tool, it intends to foster continuous development and empowement, whereby all parties involved engage in long-term monitoring and improving the standard of care in the facilities they partake. In the assessment process, data collected through interviews with service users, professionals and carers, systematic observation and archive review is collectively examined by an assessment committee, which formulates a report for each facility. We are currently piloting the use of the Toolkit in a supported accommodation facility, a mobile mental unit and a day centre of the NGO EPAPSY, in view of extending its use in all EPAPSY units, mental health units of collaborating institutions and eventually at national level. The talk will focus more on this innovative process, and the challenges it poses, than on the results regarding the specific facilities.

In this introductory section, I talk about Connor, also known as Laughing Boy, his loves and the ways in which his dreams have come true in his absence. The #JusticeforLB campaign, to gain accountability for his death, generated an extraordinary collective response in which buses and heavy haulage vehicles were named after him, a collective justice quilt was displayed in the People’s History Museum in Manchester, and the play Laughing Boy was performed in his favourite city with the only props, chairs and a London bus.

This context is set alongside the continuing structural and other forms of violence directed at people with learning disabilities in this country and wider. Violences which are documented, curated and published in research, public inquiries, safeguarding and other regulatory processes, and ignored (Ryan 2025). We are left asking how and why this production generated the impact it did when we so callously ignore the everyday harms people with learning disabilities experience. The research community can, further, be part of the problem with a tendency to not reflect on what has come before, to use othering language and concepts, and present findings and recommendations with a certainty that they will lead to the change identified, happening. The Laughing Boy project has led to the research team entering the unfamiliar world of the theatre which has caused us to question our own practices and work.

This paper explores a workshop held with staff from an organisation supporting people with learning disabilities, following their group visit to Laughing Boy at Jermyn Street Theatre. The workshop, facilitated by some members of the research team, used collages as tactile, relational prompts to evoke memories of the play and spark conversation. Collage was chosen for its materiality and layered nature, with images and words overlapping in ways that potentially mirrored the emotional and political complexity of the performance and its aftermath.

Staff participants reflected on their own advocacy and roles, the impact of seeing Connor’s story on stage, and their belief that others “should see this” to confront ongoing injustices. The workshop became a site of shared witnessing, where personal responses met collective calls for change. However, the workshop also surfaced tensions and discomfort within the research team, which has prompted reflection on the ethics of participation.

This paper will share excerpts from the workshop, visual documentation of the collages, and raise questions about how arts-based methods can both illuminate and complicate our understanding of inclusion, impact, and voice. In the spirit of the panel’s commitment to witnessing, this paper provides a moment to sit with discomfort, honour the insights shared, and consider how research itself must be accountable to the people it seeks to represent.

This paper offers personal reflections on the ethical and methodological challenges encountered when interviewing members of the Laughing Boy cast about their experiences of the production and their perceptions of its impact. While we anticipated issues around anonymity, given that both the play and its cast list are in the public arena, we were less prepared for the navigating the relational dynamics that unfolded in practice when interviewing actors about their experiences of portraying real people. The research space became one in which our unfamiliarity with theatre intersected with participants’ expertise, and their relative unfamiliarity of disability intersected with our own lived and professional experience. These intersecting (un)familiarities, created moments of both connection and dissonance, shaping the dynamics of the interviews and subsequent reflections within the research team. We consider how the potential for both respect and disrespect is generated, negotiated and performed within and beyond the interview encounter. Additionally, in revisiting these experiences, our reflections lead to a consideration of the broader implications of what it means for qualitative researchers to work ethically and responsibly when seeking to promote social justice when anonymity of participants cannot be guaranteed.

This paper discusses the interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) of interviews with actors who performed in Laughing Boy. As described above, the study forms part of a wider project exploring how theatre can transform understanding, empathy, and political awareness around learning disability and social justice.

This analysis was distinctive in that the participants were actors reflecting on the experience of embodying someone else’s story, thereby engaging in layered acts of interpretation that blur the boundaries between performance, empathy, and advocacy. Through iterative and interpretative engagement with the data, constructed themes included a deepened sense of responsibility towards representing lived experience ethically; the affective impact of performance as a form of witnessing; and the ways in which theatrical embodiment facilitated shifts in understanding about learning disability, care, and justice.

In reflecting on these findings, the paper considers what it means to analyse interpretations of interpretation and how such work interacts with understandings of the hermeneutic cycle in phenomenological inquiry.

Ethnographic fieldwork relies substantially on participant observation (Atkinson & Hammersley, 1998). When conducting participant observation, ethnographers must navigate the vagaries of the real-life practices and meaning-making processes of participants on the ground (Emerson et al., 2001). This process often entails moments of ‘collapse’ – for example, a collapse between the researcher’s assumptions and the participants’ lived realities, or between different realities across diverse field sites. While existing methodological reflections have discussed how moments of collapse during the research design phase can uncover new findings (Schwartz, 2024), few studies address how researchers can such moments during ethnographic fieldwork, or how these experiences can inspire new methodological and conceptual insights. In this context, my paper reflects on how the moments of collapse during participant observation have shaped the research focus, researcher’s practices in the field, and the relational dynamics between researcher and participants. Drawing on an ethnographic case study of human-nature relationships at an environmental NGO in Luxembourg, I offer reflections from two perspectives:

1) How engaging in the ‘waiting field’ (Mannay & Morgan, 2015) helps the researcher navigate the collapse between her preconceived notions and participants’ lived experience in the field.

2) How the lens of ‘relational ethnography’ (Desmond, 2014) meaningfully brings together scattered field sites.

Reflecting on my experience of conducting participant observation through the conceptual lens of collapse, I find that such moments occurring across multiple layers significantly shape the research questions, process and outcomes. I argue that, rather than being viewed as crises or negative results, moments of collapse in ethnographic fieldwork can spark novel methodological insights and inductive discoveries.

In January 2025, the first iteration of an experimental speculative fiction event was run in Cambridge (UK) that brought together local water industry representatives, engineers, and religious and spiritually-motivated water activists to address a fictional – but not beyond the realm of possibility – crisis: Cambridge will run out of drinking water in one month. The participating water-focused actors came to this exercise of (fictional) structural and environmental collapse with diverse ways of being in the world and with water. Through a series of presentations, readings, and guided discussions, they worked together to consider the likely effects of the crisis across scales and realms, reflect on their own reactions to the crisis, and build plans of action. In the process, participants were confronted by others’ watery relations and experiences and often-overlooked local water conditions in ways that created slippage across the usually more or less rigid boundaries between fact and fiction, past, present, and future, geographic spaces, human and more-than-human beings, and value worlds. For water industry actors this confrontation was particularly jarring, and many left the exercise with a realization that might “with hindsight, [seem] obvious…a society’s relationship with water is not simply about the pipes and pumps” and that meaningful knowledge of and visions for water futures might lie beyond industry borders. This paper explores the various moments of collapse that occurred across this speculative fiction exercise, the techniques that drove them, and the collaborations that emerged from them. Ultimately, I suggest that those collapses were not destructive but generative, as participants were drawn to notice the ontological unruliness of water and imagine previously unimaginable collective routes forward.

Many of today’s technologies of memory are digital, fast-paced and data-heavy. Genres such as lifelogs (Heersmink, 2018) or multimedia biographies (Crete-Nishihata et al., 2012) rely on large databases or a broad range of digital data, merging lines of time, story and memory.

This paper investigates how lines of time, experience and memory, collapsed into objects and human bodies can become disentangled, identified, relived and reconnected in the process of creating a stop motion animation movie.

Inspired by work in phenomenological philosophy (Colombetti & Bogotá, 2024), I start from the assumption that the human ‘self’ is firmly anchored in its material environment and entangled with worldly objects. Hence, memory is stored as sedimented meaning (Merlot-Ponty, 1945/2012) in both, humans and objects, creating superposed layers of experience, habit, and knowledge, accumulated over the life span of an individual or of generations.

I explore how animation making – the simple, intuitive, and repetitive process of moving objects in small incremental steps and taking pictures after each move – unfolds as a human-object-co-creation, in which memory stored in human bodies and evocative objects (Turkle 2007) becomes re-distributed, interconnected, and interwoven.

I propose that such an approach has purchase for qualitative inquiry as it can expand our ‘topography of the self’ (Gonzales, 1995) through representing important relations, emotional ties, and past events in space and movement; not by accumulating heaps of new material and data, but by disentangling the already condensed, with slowness and care, peeling away layers of long-lived memory, to create resonance and expansion of and within our own selves.

In our current moment of rapid AI proliferation and incorporation, we seem to be in the midst of an epistemological shift, where generative AI is collapsing our processes of inquiry and creation from journeys of travel into instantaneous arrival of results. Ingold (2007) offers a metaphor for conceptualizing different types of journey-processes: the line that "goes out for a walk," which indexes a process of "wayfaring," and the line that goes from A to B, which indexes a process of "transport." In this paper, I argue that generative AI tools in fact represent a collapse of process, further condensing a journey of inquiry into two points that overlap nearly instantaneously: input/result. This transformation prompts a number of troubling questions: Are we moving from a paradigm of transport to one of arrival? What happens if we are constantly arriving, without the journey behind? What becomes of temporal processes like learning, writing, research, and creation in an era of incessant, consecutive arrival?

I argue that if we frame this collapse as productive— "saving time," "working smarter not harder"— we run the profound risk of negating temporality altogether and repeatedly devaluing the process of creation until making itself becomes unfamiliar. Drawing on an intersemiotic translation project conducted with a group of artists, teachers, and students in Luxembourg, I explore the notion of process as journey, time, and material endeavor that offers another way of thinking/being/making in our current moment of AI efficiency, productivity, and innovation obsession.