Sarah Daniels: Feminist Enque(e)ry within the Mainstream

Sarah Daniels is a playwright who has been closely identified with feminist theatre throughout her career. In this article, Carina Bartleet examines Daniels’s plays from the early work of the 1980s through to her more recent output by exploring lesbian representation. Emphasis is placed on lesbian/queer representations through renegotiation with feminist theatre and gendered spectatorship. The work argues that Daniels’s oftcriticized reluctance to stage lesbian desire can be viewed as a continuation of her feminist intervention into the gendered construction of the gaze in mainstream theatre. Carina Bartleet is a Lecturer in Drama at Oxford Brookes University. She read Biological Sciences at Oxford University, taking her PhD in Drama at Exeter on the intertextual dimension of the plays of Sarah Daniels. Her interests are science, gender, and performance in contemporary theatre. She is currently working on a book on theatre and science, and has published articles in Modern Drama and Studies in Theatre and Performance

Guest Editorial: New Directions in theatre and science

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‘Throughness’: A Story About Songwriting as Auto/ethnography

A recent special issue of Qualitative Inquiry (December 2016) throws a welcome spotlight on the place of songs within qualitative research. In this essay, I share a story that contributes to the gathering conversation around music and songs as a (perhaps unique) form of qualitative inquiry. My contribution focuses specifically on songwriting as a form of research, which has received limited attention to date within the qualitative inquiry literature. The story is inspired by recent explorations of songwriting as reflexive practice, and I share it with the aim of expanding understanding and inviting further dialogue on the processes of writing (songs as) qualitative research

Implementing and sustaining higher education service-learning initiatives: Revisiting Young et al's organizational tactics

Although the value of service-learning opportunities has long been aligned to student engagement, global citizenship, and employability, the rhetoric can be far removed from the reality of coordinating such activities within higher education. This article stems from arts-based service-learning initiatives with Indigenous communities in Australia. It highlights challenges encountered by the projects and the tactics used to overcome them. These are considered in relation to Young, Shinnar, Ackerman, Carruthers, and Young’s four tactics for starting and sustaining service-learning initiatives. The article explores the realities of service-learning initiatives that exist at the edge of institutional funding and rely on the commitment of key individuals. The research revises Young et al.’s four tactics and adds the fifth tactic of organizational commitment, which emerged as a distinct strategy used to prompt new commitment, enact existing commitment, and extend limited commitment at the organizational level

Group Singing as a Resource for the Development of a Healthy Public

A growing body of evidence points to a wide range of benefits arising from participation in group singing. Group singing requires participants to engage with each other in a simultaneous musical dialogue in a pluralistic and emergent context, creating a coherent cultural expression through the reflexive negotiation of (musical) meaning manifest in the collective power of the human voice. As such, group singing might be taken – both literally and figuratively – as a potent form of ‘healthy public’, creating an ‘ideal’ community which participants can subsequently mobilise as a positive resource for everyday life. The experiences of a group of singers (n=78) who had participated in an outdoor singing project were collected and analysed using a three-layer research design consisting of: distributed data generation and interpretation, considered against comparative data from other singing groups (n=88); a focus group workshop (n=11); an unstructured interview (n=2). The study confirmed an expected perception of the social bonding effect of group singing, highlighting affordances for interpersonal attunement and attachment alongside a powerful individual sense of feeling ‘uplifted’. This study presents a novel perspective on group singing, highlighting the importance of participant experience as a means of understanding music as a holistic and complex adaptive system. It validates findings about group singing from previous studies - in particular the stability of the social bonding effect as a less variant characteristic in the face of environmental and other situational influences, alongside its capacity for mental health recovery. It establishes a subjective sociocultural and musical understanding of group singing, by expanding on these findings to centralise the importance of individual experience, and the consciousness of that experience as descriptive self-awareness. The ways in which participants describe and discuss their experiences of group singing and its benefits points to a complex interdependence between a number of musical, neurobiological and psychosocial mechanisms which might be independently and objectively analysed. An emerging theory is that at least some of the potency of group singing is as a resource where people can rehearse and perform ‘healthy’ relationships, further emphasising its potential as a resource for healthy publics

Community music in Australia and New Zealand Aotearoa

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