Davina is the designer/typesetter and one of the editors of Artful Collaborative Inquiry published 2021
Artful Collaborative Inquiry comprises essays created collectively by a group of scholars and artists, the majority of whom have several decades of experience of working together. The book challenges commonly-held, individualistic beliefs about ownership, authorship and scholarly and artistic ethics and practices.
The essays exemplify the entangled kinds of scholarly and artistic works that emerge in a post-human world, where humans, other species, environments, things and other matters, all matter and are of equal concern in the conduct of ethical artful scholarship. Situated at the (messy) crossroads where contemporary scholarship and artistic practice converge, the seamless mo(ve)ment and interplay between text and image make up the main body of the work in this book.
The chapters combine the playful use and merging of time, space and place, researcher and researched, to give a unique exemplar of research and creativity in the rapidly emerging field of collaborative scholarship. It will be of particular interest to creative and qualitative scholars wishing to conduct more artful research, and artists engaging with scholarship.
Embodied Absence and Evoking the Ancestors, published in Art/Research International. A Transdisciplinary Journal https://journals.library.ualberta.ca/ari/index.php/ari/article/view/29483
Keywords:presence, absence, grief, co-creation, walking, ritual, making, gifted objects.
Abstract: This paper argues that through participation, dialogue, co-action and the occurrence of immersive experiences, as suggested by Kester (2011), key elements of the research process, relationship, and friendship deepen and are enriched by engaging with absence and presence as part of a chosen activity and bodily experience. The following narrative explores how the production of visual artwork and co-created ritual experience in a chosen landscape weaves a gossamer safety net across the chasm of loss and raises questions of absence and presence, personal loss and the collaborative shared experience; the power of ritual, conversation, and object-making give attention to the presence of absence. My argument builds on the notion of presence, manifest absence and Otherness (Law, 2004, pp. 84-85) and extends the ideas that absence can be located in space and have materiality and agency (Meyer & Woodthorpe, 2008).
Inquiring into Red/ Red inquiring – Published in Humanities 2013;2(2):253-277
This layered account of an inquiry into ‘red’ emerged out of a collective biography workshop. In the middle of the Wiltshire countryside, an international and interdisciplinary group of scholars gathered together to write and make other things and marks on paper that asked questions of, and into, the spaces between words, people, things and their environments. We did not set out to workshop or write into or paint ‘red’ but, rather, it was red that slipped in, uninvited, and painted and wrote us. Red arose as a blush or a stain seeping amongst us that became referenced obliquely by material objects, metaphors and fairytales. The stain spread, became noticeable through our weekend together and beyond it, creating another (bright red artery) vein of connection to write with.
Davina is a contributor to the book Collaborative Writing as Inquiry
This is a new and overdue contribution to the recently burgeoning literature on writing as a branch of qualitative inquiry. The book places a diversity of approaches to collaborative writing alongside each other, and explores these methods and the spaces between them as critical arts-based inquiry practices within the social sciences. It is not intended or written as any kind of a handbook, more of a scrapbook, containing summative and rich prologues to each section, and substantive chapters (some adapted from work previously published in international peer-reviewed journals), fragments and snippets of ‘writing in progress’, as well as more extensive excursions into a range of approaches to writing collaboratively, including: collective biography; call and response (to people, to landscapes and to ‘what happens’ in the writing spaces); ‘take three words’; poetic writing; and writing in scholarly communities and/or on retreat. This book illuminates, investigates and interrogates these emergent spaces, particularly as a critical gesture towards the individualised, market-driven agendas and neo-liberal practices of the contemporary academy.
