Chapter quotes from the book……
Creative Arts in Interdisciplinary Practice, Inquiries for Hope and Change
“ In this book we bring together a field that stresses the vital importance of creativity and the human story, a body of work that seeks to help give voice to the silenced, the oppressed and the marginalized, and narrative accounts of personal transformation that honour creative expression as fundamental and at the very source of human meaning and purpose.”
From the book introduction, “Shaping the Field”
Cheryl McLean
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“The collaborative “Homelessness Solutions from Lived Experiences through Arts-Informed Research” illustrates a particular case in which arts can be brought together in various ways to raise awareness and promote social change…The use of arts was particularly effective because it allowed for the meaningful inclusion of people who are homeless in the research process as peer researchers and the artwork created by those who have experienced homelessness first hand.”
Collaborating to Tell the Stories of Homelessness in Toronto
Isumi Sakamoto, Matthew Chin, Cyndy Baskin
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As an artist researcher working in communities I use the arts as form, method, analysis and more as the art/inquiry itself moves us toward social justice and equity: new forms of relatedness. My work does its best to be participatory and community based, but there are practical and economic considerations that need to enter the conversations….I also understand that the best conditions for this work are not always in place and so must engage where we are invited, working with the limits of the contingencies of each project. Finally, I must admit the importance of using art as process and product in communities, and how staying with arts practices, staying in the metaphors as they emerge, reveals significant personal and community shifts.”
The Voice of the Artist as Researcher, Homelessness in Toronto
Nancy Viva Davis Halifax
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Ultimately, Community Environmental Forum Theatre proves most valuable to science as a bridge process: each project increases scientific literacy within a given community and builds capacity for informed citizens and community based organizations to collaborate on increasingly more complex public health research.”
Engaging Neighbors, Transforming Toxic Realities
John Sullivan
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Photovoice is a creative arts medium which has great potential as an intervention for health promotion and disease prevention. Our experience using a photovoice-based intervention with Latino mothers and daughters demonstrates how broadly the arts can be used to intervene on and advocate for the health and well being of individuals, families and communities.”
Our Voice through Pictures Mother and Daughter
Carolyn Garcia, Sandi Lindgren
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“Empowerment suggests that marginalized communities help to create a space for alternative voices to be heard. That is to say, through engagement in the social construction of the community’s notion of what it means to be healthy, boundaries are crossed, difference is celebrated and cultural empowerment becomes the source of citizen participation. Community participation became the translational bridge for co-creating meaning of the event into positive action of many attendees.”
Health Disparities in Our Community: Reflections in Art and Performance A Community Based Participatory Approach with Arts as a Translational Bridge to Knowledge
Olga Idriss Davis
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“I returned to dance, intuitively, instinctively. The dance of death was now my dance of life. As I danced, like a woman possessed, my conscious mind snuffed out the reality of my loss. While my world as wife and mother had been cruelly wrenched from me, I came to understand that my identity as a dancer had survived, an identity that no outside force could destroy. As I willed movement into my paralyzed arms and legs; step by step, gesture by gesture, my still body came to life.”
Revealed by Fire, A Woman’s Personal Story of Grief, Dance and Transformation
Lata Pada
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“Ethnodramatic representations and presentations of health and illness bring participants’ vulnerability, fragility, and, in most cases, resiliency to heightened prominence. Perhaps more than the academic journal article, the ethnotheatrical performance, if well done for a receptive audience, holds potential to increase awareness, deepen understanding and provide experiences that generate sympathetic and empathetic responses and memories for future application and transfer into clinical practice and possibly healthy care policy.”
Ethnodramas about Health and Illness: Staging Human Vulnerability, Fragility and Resiliency
Johnny Saldana
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Throughout our work, the concept of “empathy” and the practical realization of empathic encounters in performance have proved central to our development of reflective based practice. …We all have a “thinking body” which takes into account the coupling of emotional visceral responses found in empathy. In the area of dance, the term empathy is often used in tandem with the word kinaesthetic to place emphasis on the corporeal. ..Empathy has gained momentum as a concern in performance practice today because of the need to understand one’s own being in relationship to the being of another.”
Performance Based Approaches and Moving Toward Kinaesthetic Understandings
April Nunes Tucker, Amanda Price
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“In order to address the complex challenges now facing our world, the ability for intentional deep listening becomes critical. Arts-based practice can contribute to intentional deep listening as it assists individuals in the development of creative capacity.”
Mining the Depths: Performing Stories of Home and Homelessness
Ian Prinsloo, Jessie Negropontes, Sarada Eastham, Christine Walsh, Gayle Rutherford
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“Through participating in community based media creation novice directors and photographers strengthen their ability to advocate on their own behalf. ..while becoming a director, marginalized individuals learn to actively express themselves in the process of creating new media works, regardless of the commercial potential of the work. In the process of training a novice director, the artist/researcher makes the connection between self-expression and self-determination explicit allowing the novice to apply artistic knowledge to their social relationships.”
Community Media Arts, Encouraging Citizenship through Creative Self Expression
Lorna R. Boschman
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“Psychological and psychosocial interventions including music therapy play their part by assisting clients in rebuilding social, emotional, education, recreational and vocational skills and can lead to enhanced social functioning and quality of life. In recent years, there has been an increase in evidence based research and literature promoting the effectiveness of music therapy in the treatment of schizophrenia and like illnesses. “
Rapping from the Inside Out, Music therapy and Rap Music
Anthony DiGiacomo
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“Making theatre has the potential to shift identities, create relationships and build communities. ..Making theatre is not only a construction of a story, it is the construction of a new reality…Theatre, at its best, is social dreaming, on the stage, behind the scenes, in the audience and outside the theatre walls.”
Community, Hope and transformation for a Hard of Hearing Student
Theresa Webber, George Belliveau, Graham Lea
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“When I started the narrative ethics group at The University of Toronto’s Joint Centre for Bioethics, I began to understand that such narrative practice allowed a more robust and deeper human inquiry to emerge beneath the layers of intellectual dialogue about ethical issues in healthcare. The layers of reality that a narrative exploration uncovered added significantly, in my opinion, to the intellectual discussions we were having as clinical ethicists on notions of right and wrong.”
To be Human with Other Humans , a Caregiver’s Narrative
Susan K. MacRae
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“ This project enlisted dietitians in an experiential, narrative inquiry through use of a Resiliency Map. Three themes emerged: disconnection, workplace conflict and relational resiliency which were further informed by gender, emotionality and burnout. “
Mapping Resiliency: Building Bridges Toward the Future, An Experiential Arts-based Narrative Inquiry with Dietetics Professionals
Jacqui Gingras, Jennifer Atkins
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“Creative leadership demands creative problem solving and there are many areas..in which arts based learning can assist leaders in developing innovative solutions…Management programs in higher education are looking toward the arts to cultivate the leadership skills and attributes necessary to succeed in the current marketplace. The application of the arts in management education encompasses cross sector leadership skills that include collaboration, team building, communications, innovation and creativity; with the intent of strengthening these skills through arts based learning.”
Creating A Place for the Arts in Healthcare Management Education
Sherry Fontaine
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“I believe my personal experience with illness drastically changed the way I practiced medicine in many ways. It led me to practice with more empathy and greater understanding of the importance of active listening, validating experience, and involving patients in decision making among other things.”
Honouring the Patient’s Voice in Health Professional Education
Seema Shah
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“ students eagerly began the process of creating their own digital stories as representations of patient narratives. They recognized early on that process was just as important as form and function. Their goal was not simply to reproduce what they had heard, but to communicate the rich multidimensional experience they witnessed. What came forth was their own unrealized artistic talent and originality, an appreciation for the challenges that go into writing and rewriting the narrative and the sense of sheer joy in creating a lasting communication product.”
Digital Stories and Experiential Learning, Teaching Medical Students about Patients as Educators
Kim a. Bullock, Kathleen McNamara, Donna Cameron
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“ The shoreline of Newfoundland is where I return, in body whenever I can, or at other times at least in spirit, to reflect, to write my life—its present, its past and its future. My mother’s body gave me life, remembered my past, and could foretell my future.”
My mother’s body, A story of grieving, remembering and touch
John J. Guiney Yallop
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“As daughters of women who lived with and died with Alzheimer’s disease, we remember and use the practical and emotional realities that were our own experience of caregiving to guide our work. Rooted as we are in the everyday routines of caregiving, we found ourselves drawn to three dimensional installation art with its assemblage quality of found materials. Using the “everyday” and “ordinary” as guides we chose universal, domestic symbols and forms in order to keep “the academy and the kitchen table” together and make our work broadly accessible.
Paying Tribute to Caregivers through Arts informed Research as a Path to Hope and Change
Ardra Cole and Maura McIntyre
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“At the center of this inquiry into ethics, aesthetics, the power of public mourning and connection to place, is a series of questions about home’s properties, associations, and manifestations (or lack there of) in the political, cultural, emotional and embodied realms. How do the stories we tell about home influence our experiences of home? Once displaced, what are the conditions necessary for making home anew?”
Performing Beauty, Practicing Home
Collaborative Live Art and the Transformation of Displacement
Devora Neumark
"This book is filled with research, narratives and ideas for the student, scholar, community art-maker and anyone interested in using the arts to connect with and engage the marginalized in our communities. In Creative Arts in Interdisciplinary Practice, Inquiries for Hope and Change, editor Cheryl McLean enlists a talented and passionate group of researchers and practitioners to share their experiences using various art forms to change lives and skillfully weaves a tapestry of empathic and innovative practices that provide a series of effective real-world strategies for engaging marginalized populations who are facing daunting social issues. Empathy is clearly the thread running through the text which connects the stories and experiences of the practitioners, patients and researchers described in these pages. " P. Cormier, MS, Non Profit Management, Worcester State University, BA, Sociology, The University of Notre Dame)
