Performative embodiment and unravelling grandparent-grandchild relationships

This article seeks to intertwine women’s embodied experiences of wartime, dancing, and chronic illness. The author introduces “Granny” through the unraveling rhythms of grandparent–grandchild relationships. Through narrative poems, the author shares Granny’s dramatic stories of World War II. Bodies are socially and historically located, which therefore illuminates the ways in which her past is sedimented into her body and provides an understanding into the multi-layered ways her wartime, her performing bodily experiences, and asthma, encompass the past, the present, and the anticipated future. The author reflects on how some of these stories echo the breathless battle weary heroes referred to by Homer in the Illiad, which is where asthma can be traced back to

‘Don’t just travel’: thinking poetically on the way to professional knowledge

This paper describes how the medium of ‘found poetry’ is incorporated into a doctoral programme for nurses, educators and allied health and social care professionals at the start of their various doctoral journeys. It advocates a narrative practice approach to issues of researcher identity and reflexivity. ‘Finding’ the poems begins with the creation of collages as representational anchors for students to talk about themselves, their professional practice, their hopes and expectations of the doctoral experience, and their research ideas. (Re)presenting their transcribed talk as poetry involves culling and playing with words, phrases and segments, making changes in spacing, lines and rhythm to arrive at an evocative distillation (Butler-Kisber, 2002). This process enables each person to bring stories and/or fragments of experience into critical engagement with others. Poetic thinking functions pedagogically, helping students find a critical voice to enliven and hone their reflexive writing in relation to their doctoral experience and their research positioning. Arts-based methods of inquiry are an ongoing topic of interest in research communities. Found poetry is a useful starting point to explore creative means by which research participants can recount their stories, and equally, by which researchers can witness and disseminate what they have to tell.self funde

Challenging Perceptions of Disability through Performance Poetry Methods: The "Seen but Seldom Heard" Project.

This paper considers performance poetry as a method to explore lived experiences of disability. We discuss how poetic inquiry used within a participatory arts-based research framework can enable young people to collectively question society’s attitudes and actions towards disability. Poetry will be considered as a means to develop a more accessible and effective arena in which young people with direct experience of disability can be empowered to develop new skills that enable them to tell their own stories. Discussion of how this can challenge audiences to critically reflect upon their own perceptions of disability will also be developed

Political branding: sense of identity or identity crisis? An investigation of the transfer potential of the brand identity prism to the UK Conservative Party

Brands are strategic assets and key to achieving a competitive advantage. Brands can be seen as a heuristic device, encapsulating a series of values that enable the consumer to make quick and efficient choices. More recently, the notion of a political brand and the rhetoric of branding have been widely adopted by many political parties as they seek to differentiate themselves, and this has led to an emerging interest in the idea of the political brand. Therefore, this paper examines the UK Conservative Party brand under David Cameron’s leadership and examines the applicability of Kapferer’s brand identity prism to political branding. This paper extends and operationalises the brand identity prism into a ‘political brand identity network’ which identifies the inter-relatedness of the components of the corporate political brand and the candidate political brand. Crucial for practitioners, this model can demonstrate how the brand is presented and communicated to the electorate and serves as a useful mechanism to identify consistency within the corporate and candidate political brands

Investigating political brand reputation with qualitative projective techniques from the perspective of young adults

Capturing and understanding the images and reputations external stakeholders assign to brands can be confusing and challenging. This is reinforced by explicit calls for more pragmatic tools and methods to comprehend the external orientation of brands. We respond by investigating the applicability of qualitative projective techniques in exploration of the external current image and long-term reputation of the UK Conservative Party corporate brand from the perspective of young voters aged 18-24 years. This is achieved by comparing and contrasting the external brand images prior the 2015 UK General Election with the findings collected before the 2010 UK General Election. We demonstrate that qualitative projective techniques are useful applications to capture, deconstruct and understand current image and long-term reputation of political brands. Organisations including those beyond the political context will be able to use this paper as a guide to generate a deeper understanding of their brands image and consistency of their reputation

Re-thinking the boundaries of the focus group: A reflexive analysis on the use and legitimacy of group methodologies in qualitative research

This article aims at problematizing the boundaries of what counts as focus group and in so doing it identifies some continuity between focus group and workshop, especially when it comes to arts informed and activity laden focus groups. The workshop[1] is often marginalized as a legitimate method for qualitative data collection outside PAR (Participatory Action Research)-based methodologies. Using examples from our research projects in East Africa and in London we argue that there are areas of overlap between these two methods, yet we tend to use concepts and definitions associated with focus groups because of the lack of visibility of workshops in qualitative research methods academic literature. The article argues that focus groups and workshops present a series of intertwined features resulting in a blending of the two which needs further exploration. In problematizing the boundaries of focus groups and recognizing the increasing usage of art-based and activity-based processes for the production of qualitative data during focus groups, we argue that focus groups and workshop are increasingly converging. We use a specifically feminist epistemology in order to critically unveil the myth around the non-hierarchical nature of consensus and group interaction during focus group discussions and other multi-vocal qualitative methods and contend that more methodological research should be carried out on the workshop as a legitimate qualitative data collection technique situated outside the cycle of action research