Conference Agenda

How do we evaluate the impact of a theatre performance when the data from the field could be sentences like “I got loving vibes” from a performer? This paper draws from my ongoing doctoral research into the perceived impact of professionally produced cultural events—especially theatre—for individuals with diverse needs. Focusing on accessibility, inclusion, and lived experience, the study engages with audiences, carers, educators, and theatre practitioners through qualitative methods such as field observations and in-depth interviews.

Rather than seeking universal metrics, I argue for a pluralistic and situated understanding of impact in the arts. Dominant evaluative frameworks tend to favour quantifiable outcomes, often demanded by policymakers and funders. Yet these approaches frequently fall short of capturing the affective, relational, and transformative dimensions of cultural participation. Drawing on the work of Eleonora Belfiore, Oliver Bennett, Matthew Reason, and others, I explore how qualitative researchers might reconceptualize 'evidence' in ways that honour embodied experience and personal testimony, without abandoning rigour or ethics.

Reflexivity and positionality are central to this inquiry. Working with structurally marginalised communities—particularly neurodivergent children and their families—requires ongoing reflection on the researcher’s own role and assumptions. I examine the tensions between research and advocacy, and the risk of projecting presumed benefits onto cultural events without critically interrogating what kind of impact truly matters, for whom, and why.

This paper contributes to methodological debates about evaluating perceived impact in contexts where conventional tools may obscure more than they reveal. It makes a case for research practices that are ethical, empathetic, and accountable, but above all, it invites continued dialogue.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine that began in February, 2022, saw millions of Ukrainians—primarily women, children, and the elderly—being forced to flee their homes. This workshop performance examines the migratory stories of four female Ukrainian musicians, now living in Ireland and Germany. We explore how these women make music as an alternative way of being and as a way to understand the self and others. Using fragments of sound and story, the workshop performance illuminates the lives of these forced migrants as they navigate new contexts. The presentation draws on narrative data and previous work with performance students to ‘theatricalise’ the research findings (Belliveau 2015). The musicians’ stories of leaving and belonging served as the source material, which was then crafted into a structured verbatim piece. Throughout the project, the team collaborated to explore ideas with the intention of avoiding the ‘objectification of the individuals’ (Denzin 2003). At the same time, we recognised that by choosing which parts to present and how, we were shaping the narrative (Blythe 2005). The deliberate inclusion of the original researcher in the performance highlights the interrelated connection between the researcher and the research, as well as the distinctive influence of a researcher’s background, knowledge and subjectivity that they bring to research. Ireland-based Ukrainian musicians were later invited to add musical layers to the piece, which they then performed live. Their contributions provided an additional ‘musical context’ that added sonic layers to the work. These combining elements transformed the experience from simply data sharing into an embodied (musical and dramatic) representation of non-linear and deeply personal experiences. Thus, this workshop performance offers new and nuanced ways to understand the lived experiences of forced migrants and de-exceptionlise displacement by placing musical identities at the centre of their stories (Western, 2020).

This paper explores how sound can serve as a rich form of qualitative data to investigate experiences of belonging, identity, and citizenship in increasingly diverse Irish primary schools. Drawing on twenty soundscape workshops conducted in two intercultural school settings, the study examines how children engage with and interpret their sonic environments. Rather than focusing on music as repertoire or representation, this inquiry positions sound as a relational and embodied medium through which children express agency and negotiate cultural identities. Using arts-based and qualitative methodologies, the research foregrounds children’s voices—both literally and metaphorically—through their participation in collaborative sound-making and reflective dialogue. The workshops generated a range of sonic outputs and narratives that illuminate how migrant children experience displacement, connection, and citizenship within the school context. Inspired by Elizabeth Ellsworth’s (2005) concept of “places of learning” as embodied and affective, the study challenges static notions of culture and instead embraces fluid, co-constructed understandings of identity through sound. This paper argues for a reimagining of intercultural music education that moves beyond tokenistic inclusion toward ethically engaged, creative pedagogies. Sound is not only a medium of artistic expression but also a powerful tool for qualitative inquiry—one that captures the nuances of lived experience, emotion, and belonging. Through analysis of workshop data and focus group interviews, the study offers insights into how sound-based practices can foster inclusive learning spaces and support children’s active participation in shaping their educational and social worlds.

A sound piece is a way of describing a sonic creation, a sonic-something that one has made. Such a sonic-something is a sound piece irrespective of audition for trees recent piece), composition (emergent or prescribed), players (trees vs mobile device vs musicians), or (more than) human animals (e.g., Masaoka, 2025; Sterne, 2025).

A sound piece is also an expression that denotes a piece as part of a larger (sonic) something. This is the case when wondering about a soundwork regardless of its classification (art, scholarship, the ocean). In this way, a sound piece can be a part of a larger piece, itself a part of a never-ending whole, or a piece of that piece. A sound piece as a soundwork or a sound piece as a part of a soundwork.

A sound piece can also be a descriptor. This can be in the sense of a positive value judgement, a sound idea, or as a written work about sound, a sound piece. From this definition, a sound piece could be a performative utterance: a good piece of writing about sound.

Because sounds are central to all forms of qualitative research, such questions are significant irrespective of a researcher’s attention to the sonic. As expressions of event, ecologies, and relations, what “sound piece” means/expresses/is/does strongly informs how sounds are conceptualized and considered.

This proposed performative presentation takes seriously McKittrick and Wynter’s (e.g., McKittrick, 2015, 2021) calls for critical forms of praxis and the use of the arts as modes for interrupting the disciplining of knowledge. In so doing, it also attends to McKittrick’s Wynterian approach of narrative-creation through critical arts. To these ends, this an essay about sound pieces will read and recorded with live instrumental accompaniment, performatively turning an essay about sound pieces into a sonic expression (sound piece).

This paper examines The MacKenzie Method as a qualitative framework for analyzing visual
data within arts-based qualitative research. Originally developed by gallery educators, this
dialogical and multisensory approach has guided art engagement for more than three decades, yet
remains underexplored in methodological literature. The method’s five cyclical stages, which are
First Impressions, Analysis, Interpretation, Context, and Synthesis, invite gallery visitors to
move among perception, inquiry, and reflection in ways that democratize meaning-making and
foreground relational and embodied epistemologies.
Grounded in pragmatist feminist and participatory pedagogies, the method draws from Paulo
Freire’s (1970) conception of dialogue as liberation and bell hooks’ (1994) anti-oppressive
education. It attends to sensory and aesthetic experience through Maxine Greene’s (1977) notion
of wide-awakeness and John Dewey’s (1934) Art as Experience. Authors of this paper uncover,
as pragmatist feminists often do (Dea, 2022), the previously invisible work of the women
educators who co-authored the method in the early 1990s. The MacKenzie Method thereby
reflects the often-forgotten contributions of feminist educators who refused hierarchical and
didactic gallery practices, seeking rather to position art interpretation as collaborative and
community-oriented.
Applied to qualitative inquiry, the method offers a structured yet flexible process for engaging
with visual data. Each stage of the process invites researchers and participants to co-analyze
visual material through sensory noticing, affective response, and contextual interpretation. This
approach supports relational ethics, shared authorship, and attentiveness to the political and
aesthetic dimensions of visual meaning-making. Responding to the growing use of arts-based
data in educational research (Freedman and Siegesmund, 2024; Flint and Toledo, 2021), the
MacKenzie Method provides a theoretically rigorous yet accessible framework for interpreting
visual material. By reframing analysis as an iterative, collective, and sensorial process, we
authors propose that this method contributes to qualitative inquiry by offering a structured, yet
open and accessible means for analyzing visual data in qualitative scholarship.