Davina celebrates the research groups she is affiliated with. They are vital to counteract the isolation of making and writing predominantly alone. They are a great place to share, discuss and debate ideas. provide practical support and a way of mapping and navigating through the labyrinthine world of academia.
ARE (Art, Research, Ecology) is a trans-disciplinary international group of artists, writers, performers and researchers. Set up in 2018 by Anna Walker with Jo Milne and Belen Cerezo, we investigate concepts of individual and collective agency from locations across the UK, Europe, and Canada. We currently have 17 members, meeting once a month, online, to share our artistic practices and disseminate research.
We are an adaptable form with the ability to correspond to space and the environment, moving across boundaries to explore new territories, new ways of communication, and connection.
The inaugural Game Changer, for the 2018 European Congress of Qualitative Inquiry, hosted in Leuven Belgium, became a place of pushing at the boundaries and silence placed upon the material body – the corporeal site of intra-actions (Barad, 2007; 2014) and becomings (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987).Within this nascent group of predominantly early career researchers, our concerns at exploring the body were varied, divergent and presented an exciting opportunity to flatten academic hierarchies through conversations and movements aimed at seeing, perhaps even appreciating, the corporeal body anew. (Bodies Collective 2019)
Space Place Practice is an artists’ research collective which comes together to create dialogues and to develop projects informed by a shared interest in notions of space, place and creative practice.
The aims of SPP are to:
- Maintain a network to inform practices and invite theoretical discourse.
- Foster creative development through shared interests to generate further research practice.
- Develop and realise group projects through publication and exhibition.
- Give group members an opportunity to reflect and write on relationships between their theories and practices.
Ani-net: (the artful narrative inquiry network) is attached to the Graduate School of Education, University of Bristol and consists of an INTERDISCIPLINARY community of RESEARCHERS AND SCHOLARS IN EDUCATION AND SOCIAL AND HUMAN SCIENCES; THE HUMANITIES AND THE ARTS in both Bristol and beyond.
As well as an e-community of scholars, ani-net engages in a number of scholarly activities, including collaborative and other writing retreats: monthy open narrative space meetings in Bristol; community visits to conferences and gatherings and evenings and workshops with invited speakers.