Performance and Wellbeing Symposium
Programme
When | November 2020
Where | Online
What | This one-day interdisciplinary symposium gathers together academics, students, writers, artists and practitioners and anyone who is committed to developing imaginative, creative, researched responses to the core themes.
Call for papers, workshops, discussion groups and on-line performances. The symposium has an emphasis on innovative, out-of-the-ordinary ways of presenting artistic methods / practice / research / case studies of teaching on relevant themes/issues / engaging with communities outside of HE – that might contribute to the discussion around narrating and co-constructing work relating to themes of performance and wellbeing.
Themes the symposium will address but is not limited to include:
- Teaching, practice and research that connect with notions of performance and wellbeing
- Community projects and work that are committed to diverse and inclusive practice
- Critical and creative thinking about how performance practices can impact on well-being (this might speak directly to the pandemic and how work on performance can respond to/capture/support experiences with Covid-19)
- Performing maternity – research and practice that challenges dominant narratives around motherhood (see below)
The 500 word abstract needs to include your name, affiliation, the title of your presentation, an outline of your contribution and any technical issues you envisage. There will be a post conference publication with the book series Performance and Communities for Intellect Books.
Please send your abstract to CentreforArtsandWellbeing@brighton.ac.uk by the 1st August
2020.
Performing maternity – research and practice that challenges dominant narratives around motherhood
Sharing and creating stories about maternity has always been a vital way of gaining professional, practical and personal insight and support through both midwifery and motherhood.
These stories have shaped and informed individual, mutual, historical and cultural understandings of maternity and motherhood: developing knowledge and crucial awareness around notions of pregnancy, birth, post-natal experience and mothering more broadly.
Midwife, mother and artist all perform similarly creative and practical roles: using their craft to capture experiences and open up other and new ways of seeing and knowing. This inter-disciplinary project will facilitate and promote the telling and sharing of diverse and marginalized maternal stories as valuable research tools, artistic expressions and impactful community engagement.
This strand of the symposium will identify messy, complicated and unique stories from midwives, writers, researchers, artists, seeking ways of mutual working learning: the output will be a performed epic poem of the diverse and multiple threads of stories produced on the day.
Researchers explore and open up historical and current narratives in the arts and healthcare to celebrate and identify mainstream and alternative stories of being, as researchers, artists, healthcare professionals and mothers.
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