“…The text‐images threaded throughout this article arrange fieldnotes and creative writing into non‐linear relationships to explicate the multiple personal and social terrains of being alongside and becoming researcher. To write towards this methodology I would need to ‘take the problem of educational research writing to be one of creation rather than the application of the pre‐existing … what is required is a style and structure that eschews the already thought; a writing that is against style and against structure’ (Honan & Bright 2016, 733).…”
This article offers an analysis of a period of autoethnographic fieldwork conducted at Venture Arts, an art studio in Manchester (UK) that provides infrastructure to support people with intellectual disabilities to participate in the visual arts. The analysis is concerned with two 'discomfort zones' that have become apparent in the research period. The first is my positionality as a researcher in the studio space. In this section I draw on new materialism and critical disability studies to propose my methodology, mode of analysis and strategies of writing. In writing towards an understanding of my positionality and associated affective flows, the second discomfort zone provides an exposition of my emerging methodology. In this section I analyse my fieldnotes to explore the tensions and alliances between different zones of practice in the Venture Arts studio, and their relationship with existing conceptions of contemporary art and relational art. While each of these lenses offers tools through which to understand the artistic practice that arises out of the studio, none of them does completely. Instead, I propose an alternative account that recognises the overlapping, converging and co-constituted zones of practice in the Venture Arts studio.
“…The text‐images threaded throughout this article arrange fieldnotes and creative writing into non‐linear relationships to explicate the multiple personal and social terrains of being alongside and becoming researcher. To write towards this methodology I would need to ‘take the problem of educational research writing to be one of creation rather than the application of the pre‐existing … what is required is a style and structure that eschews the already thought; a writing that is against style and against structure’ (Honan & Bright 2016, 733).…”
This article offers an analysis of a period of autoethnographic fieldwork conducted at Venture Arts, an art studio in Manchester (UK) that provides infrastructure to support people with intellectual disabilities to participate in the visual arts. The analysis is concerned with two 'discomfort zones' that have become apparent in the research period. The first is my positionality as a researcher in the studio space. In this section I draw on new materialism and critical disability studies to propose my methodology, mode of analysis and strategies of writing. In writing towards an understanding of my positionality and associated affective flows, the second discomfort zone provides an exposition of my emerging methodology. In this section I analyse my fieldnotes to explore the tensions and alliances between different zones of practice in the Venture Arts studio, and their relationship with existing conceptions of contemporary art and relational art. While each of these lenses offers tools through which to understand the artistic practice that arises out of the studio, none of them does completely. Instead, I propose an alternative account that recognises the overlapping, converging and co-constituted zones of practice in the Venture Arts studio.
“…Although there has been longstanding attention to writing differently in organisation studies, the doctoral thesis as a specific form of academic writing has not been an explicit part of the conversation. The lack of attention to doctoral writing is particularly problematic as there is a fairly rigid, and almost formulaic, expectation of how a doctoral thesis ought to be written or expressed (Honan and Bright, 2016). In addition, there are unique pressures surrounding doctoral writing such as the demands of writing an ‘acceptable’ thesis in order to pass and in order to lay the foundation for future careers.…”
Writing a doctoral thesis is a testament to years of anxiety, excitement, confusion, terror and passion. A thesis is, however, much more than just an output of learning. It is a formative process through which a doctoral student learns what it means to be a researcher. The doctoral thesis as a form of academic writing has, however, received scant attention in organisational studies. My decision to write my thesis differently inspired me to think deeply about the conventions and procedures of doctoral writing. How is it that doctoral students write? What conventions govern them? And how could doctoral writing be done differently to expand the boundaries of thought in management? In this article, I give an autoethnographic account of how I wrote my thesis differently to provide the groundwork for doctoral students to reconsider the conventional approach to doctoral writing. Ultimately, I offer guidance and points of reflection for how doctoral students and their supervisors might break with writing conventions and contribute to their learning as emerging management researchers through writing the doctoral thesis differently.
“…While graduate thesis writing can be an endeavor in itself, it often requires students to use an orthodox format of writing with a strict structure in how the thesis should flow, starting with a literary review, followed by methodology and data analysis and ending with a discussion on the research (Hanan & Bright, 2016). Thesis writing is a standardized process that often requires students to become a follower of the expected academic discourse, one that promotes literacy, and to do so, every student must learn to follow a specific way of thinking, perceiving and performing.…”
Through a Disney perspective, this author discusses how students can use creative strategies to cope with learning disabilities in secondary, post-secondary and even graduate levels of academic achievement. In particular, the paper will be presenting how the author, who has an infinity for “everything Disney”, chose to use both Disney Characters and Disney Song titles from movies and television shows, as a creative strategy in the organization of her master’s research thesis. The research study entitled “Why is it so hard to go a good thing? The Paradox and Dilemma of Parental Advocacy within the Individual Education Planning Process” took a qualitative, phenomenological approach to investigate the experiences of parental advocacy and to seek out macro/micro factors that may have contributed to positive or negative outcomes within the IEP process. The author used Disney song titles as an adaptive tool not only to help in the organization of the findings of the research, but also to help illuminate the phenomenological existential themes that were revealed through the analysis. The paper hopes to demonstrate that through the use of creative strategies in otherwise conventional academic expectations, students experiencing disabilities may increase the potential of achieving academic success.
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