Interthinking creatively, or what can happen when creative artists and language

researchers work together

(Paper 2 of the Transformative Creativity Symposium atIALIC 2016, November 25th-27th 2016)

Richard Fay(Manchester Institute of Education, The University of Manchester)

On behalf of …The RMTC & CATC Hubs of the Researching Multilingually

at the Borders of Language, the Body, Law and the State project (AHRC) (AH/L006936/1)

Initial Comments

• Paper 2 = an example of ‘transcreation’ • i.e. transformation of our understandings of the complexities of the

research focus (broadly-anchored as in ‘languaging’)

• i.e. transformation through collaboration (co-construction) between applied linguistics researchers and creative artists within a research project*

• i.e. transformation arising from the creative exploration of researcher thinking (‘hotspots’)

• Explorations via: individual reflective prose (‘hotspots’) discussion (AppLing researchers + creative artists ‘in residence’) mime /performance in ‘creative lab’ context scriptivizing for performance in a project symposium theorising (‘interthinking’ + ‘new materialism’) this experience

* False binary between researchers and creative artists …. Better framed in terms of researcher-artists and artist-researchers?

Context

• What ‘happens’ when such creative processes, spaces, possibilities etc form part of a collaborative research process (providing a less familiar modality for a joint exploration of complex phenomena)?

• What new understandings (of research foci etc) can emerge from these creative-collaborative processes, spaces etc?

Project Background/History – complexified concerns and exploratory means

1. Researching Multilingually …. focusing on researcher thinking (e.g. doctoral students and supervisors) about their practices as researchers with regard to the possibilities for and complexities of using multiple languages in any of the many aspects of research (design, engagement with literature, ethics, fieldwork, data generation and analysis, reports, dissemination, etc)

2. Researching Multilingually at the Borders of Language, the Body, Law and the State …. an explicitly multi inter-disciplinary exploration – with the creative arts embedded throughout - of what it means to language and be languaged especially in contexts of pain, pressure and precarity [5 case studies and 2 hubs]

Problematic Purpose Exploratory Practice ‘Curiosities’

• ‘researching the researchers’ • …. ‘shadowing the researchers’ (e.g. participant observation)• concern for researcher thinking (reflection in, on and for action)

• Ways of Working: Exploratory Practice and the purposeful, not non-burdensome, collaborative exploration of puzzles or curiosities

• Curiosities Hotspots …. i.e.

“our developing insights and curiosities …. do not neatly result from specific encounters, engagements, and experiences, but more often emerge from individually-felt project experiences … ‘hotspots’ (or resonant moments and ideas) … formed mostly through reflection-on-action rather than in-action ….

A Hotspot from Mariam

Drawing on one’s linguistic resources – Taken for grantedOne argument … is that multilingual researchers should be encouraged to draw on their linguistic resources when researching multilingually. This is, however, not as simple as it may sound.

Considering that many research conversations nowadays (whether at conferences or in the form of publications) take place in English, contributing to such monolingual conversations, may - over time - separate multilingual researchers from existing work in other languages. ….

Being multilingual does not necessarily mean that researchers have the complete competence or confidence to produce research multilingually. Further investigation is therefore needed to identify the challenges to ‘drawing on one’s own linguistic resources’, especially for researchers whose research training was/has been predominantly in English, and/or operate primarily within English-medium research circles.

Working Creatively with Hotspots

Sharing Hotspots of Curiosity

Exploring Hotspots creatively – performatively

Developing metaphors through mime

Scripting the performance

Sharing 20 min. performance with project colleagues

Theorising the process (interthinking + new materialism)

Interthinking

• During and after this creative-collaborative process, the simple image of ‘drawing on’ was transformed into a deeper, more embodied understanding of the relationships researchers have with their linguistic resources.

• Littleton & Mercer’s (2013) concept of interthinking captures the work that goes on in collaborative discussion amongst groups … and it helps explain the process whereby “people are able to think creatively and productively together” (p.1).

• Talk is central to the concept of interthinking but, following the thinking of new materialists (e.g. Lather 2009; Law 2004), language is fundamentally interdependent with other material factors (e.g. the speakers’ bodies, the environment) … the “bodily entanglement of language” (McLure, 2013, p.664).

• “Interthinking creatively: creatively interthinking”

Final thoughts

• The creative and performative arts for, in, and as research.• Individual understandings can be transformed though interthinking.• Interthinking involves creativity …. and that creativity can be transformed

further through an embrace of the creative and performative explorations of researcher thinking.

• The movement from texts about hotspots to an embodied understanding of the latent possibilities of the ‘drawing on’ metaphor took time.

• In one ‘creative lab’ session just a few aspects of a small number hotspots could be explored in this way.

• The outcomes in themselves were revelatory.• The process of creative interthinking could be usefully applied to all such

researcher thinking …. • How much can a habit of creative interthinking be inculcated from

infrequent ‘creative lab’ experiences?