Welcome to the new CSR blog
In line with CSR’s mission of collaboration with communities, the blog acknowledges that there are many ways of knowing the world.
It is perhaps ironic that a university blog should highlight the limits of academic knowledge, but it is an important task if we are to respond innovatively to complex issues and promote equality and social justice.
Multiple forms of knowledge exist, including intuition, lived experience, oral histories and stories. There is even recognition from ‘posthuman’ perspectives that human knowledge is always co-produced with the ‘more than human’ world: the environment, animals, technologies. And even not knowing plays an important role, not least in academia.
I frequently employ collaborative arts-based methods in my work as a means of generating understanding that is built on bodily knowing, emotion and imagination. I recently taught a PhD course at Roskilde University on critical, constructive approaches to co-creation in participatory research.
Together with the nineteen students who attended from Denmark, Norway, Sweden and the Netherlands, we co-created art and poetry, experienced embodied knowing as we moved through nature, and played games inspired by the cultural movement of surrealism. These games bypass the ‘rational’ mind and interrogate the nature of collaboration and chance. The question-and-answer game involves one player writing down a question, and the second player providing an answer without having seen the question. Here are two of the ‘remarkable facts’ that emerged:
Q: What is a ‘workshop’ really?
A: It depends on the weather.
Q: What would you tell yourself as a child – knowing what you know today?
A: You can pass the parking lot and head into the woods.
The CSR blog encourages contributions that are creative, collaborative and experimental, and that encourage thinking about social justice. Submissions should be up to 500 words and images are very welcome too.
Please send them to [email protected].
Dr Victoria Foster
Director of CSR