Conference Agenda

The Trojan Horse Greek legend recounted by Roman poet, Virgil, in Aeneid, and Homer, in the Odessey, tells of the Greeks who, after 10 brutal years warring with the Trojans, turned to creative subterfuge to take their foe off guard. Near defeat, the Greeks constructed a wooden horse, hiding soldiers in its cavity. Mounting a brilliant ruse, the Greeks feigned defeat by presenting the horse to the city of Troy as a peace offering, then pretended to sail away. While some Trojans were skeptical of the offering, most were emboldened by their city’s triumphant win. Swayed by the horse’s stature and the populace’s pride, the equine was hauled into the city as a trophy. While citizens slept, Greek forces snuck from the horse, opening the city gates for the returning army to infiltrate and destroy the city, ending the war.

This Dream Team session reimagines the Trojan Horse figuration, recasting its metaphorical significance from deceit and concealed threat to consider capacities for inspiring speculation and activation of strategies, bypassing defenses and polarizing politics to invite non-confrontational and transformative change in troubled times. Delegates will convene to integrate theories and techniques of Expressive Arts (EXA) with qualitative inquiry, envisioning production of a generative Trojan Horse. Following, EXA is introduced to provide context for the session’s interactive components including inspiration for initiating an international EXA Inquiry Writing/Making Collective.

Introducing EXA as a Field of Practice

A small, international contingent of psychotherapists and faculty in the 1970s, initially trained in conventional western theories of psychology, became critical of the medical models of mental illness and treatment practices. Each had experience in the arts and struggled with keeping modes of creative engagement central to their work. Collectively, they became the shapers of the EXA field and for decades embraced their arts practices to deconstruct and reconstruct ideas about human health and wellness. EXA is an intermodal process of engaging individuals and groups, joining two or more sensory modalities--movement/dance, sound/music, visual arts/imagery, and poetry/writing--to facilitate expressive possibilities. EXA offers a non-judgmental space for externalizing experiences, offering alternative pathways when verbalization is less optimum or unavailable. Especially generative when engaging groups, EXA highlights lived experiences through activation and honoring of embodiment, resulting in fostering of community and social cohesion. EXA emphasizes the artmaking process over artistic production, employing a 'low-skill, high-sensitivity' framework, meaning participants engage in high-sensitivity processing of mind-body connection requiring low skill or no formal art training.

Where Expressive Arts and Arts-Based Research Touch

What is the physical, social, atmospheric and/or emotional terrain that compel our turn to the arts, making it difficult or impossible to explore a complex world otherwise? What principles and practices of EXA assist arts-based researchers in enacting methods that cultivate habits of ‘thinking about’ social and educational phenomena alongside habits of ‘doing with’ bodies, art, affect, and movement? As educational arts-based researchers (ABR) trained in EXA, we wander and wonder through our work with such questions. While EXA and ABR are distinct fields, they share important territory. Both EXA and postfoundational arts-based research practices (e.g. a/r/tography) draw on body-centered, modalities of dance, music, writing, drama, and visual art. The creative process rather than the end products attunes to and follows sensorial provocations. We experiment with where and how EXA and the proliferation of Arts-Based Research touches, departs from, and holds underexplored potentialities--all of which we are eager to explore with delegates.

Cultivating Creative Subterfuge

As EXA facilitators and researchers, we understand the importance of building a flexible container to support session emergences, while not premeditating or flattening paths. Following is what might thoughtfully instigate and flexibly hold our session:

20 minutes: Overview of EXA as Practice and Inquiry Mode

Presenters will provide a brief EXA overview and introduction to EXA as inquiry mode.

30 minutes: Engaging EXA as Inquiry Mode

Illustrating and practicing EXA as inquiry, presenters will facilitate multimodal activities, using the following guiding question: What can a collaboratively envisioned, creatively constructed, and strategically intelligent metaphorical academic equine do to subtly introduce compassionate subterfuge aimed at taking hyper-conservativism’s presently noxious contagion in academic realms off guard, for good?

40 minutes: Cultivating the Conditions for an EXA/INQ Writing Collaborative

We dream of a collective creatively disrupting the currently-amplified ethos of human (sic) supremacy, separatism, and rapid capitalism. Harnessing momentum from the session, we aim to cultivate conditions to transport compassionate subterfuge in higher education, sorting what it means to be companions of the strategically intelligent Trojan Horse.