Conversations on Creative Process, Methods, Research and Practice provides unique insights into the experiences of eight established creative practitioners who use their creative process in a professional and personal context. Each of them details their creative processes and how being creative has helped them to achieve a fulfilling work/life balance. Interviewees discuss how their creativity has heled them to overcome challenges or difficulties they have faced in their lives including grief, health issues, prejudice, divorce, maternity and creative blocks. This book uses original material – research and interviews – to explore the nature of the creative process from the perspective of understanding the activities, thoughts and feelings that shape an individual artist’s creative practice and how this might inform a wider collective understanding of creativity and how it can help us to live well. The book suggests that individual creative practice is a means of coming to know the self and your place in the world a little better and perhaps a little differently. This innovative book is suitable for students, scholars and practitioners using creative and arts-based research and methods in a wide range of disciplines and subjects including the social sciences, education, creative writing and communication and media studies.

The chapters in this collection explore the constellation of points where stories of individual experience and experiences are in dialogue with political, cultural and social narratives. Encompassing themes of individual and social identities and relationships, (un)belonging, motherhood, academic lives and what it means to be an arts practitioner, these stories and accounts continue and expand the ongoing conversations of how practitioners and academics do their work. They show the ongoing need to rethink and re-examine how to do critical and engaging scholarly work. Life stories are necessarily, messy, complex, personal and often deal with experiences that have been challenging for the author in some way. Contributions from Ross Adamson, Suzy Bamblett, Emily Bell, Jenni Cresswell, Hannah Davita Ludikhuijze, Sandra Lyndon, Vanessa Marr, Jess Moriarty, Eva Mikuska, Holly Stewart, Deirdre Russell, Louise Spiers, Lucianna Whittle. This is the first book in a new series. The Performance and Communities Book Series celebrates, challenges and researches performance in the real world. The series will consider how contemporary performance can engage, build and learn from previous, existing, evolving and new communities of people - practitioners, academics, students, audiences.

Conversations on Creative Process, Methods, Research and Practice provides unique insights into the experiences of eight established creative practitioners who use their creative process in a professional and personal context. Each of them details their creative processes and how being creative has helped them to achieve a fulfilling work/life balance. Interviewees discuss how their creativity has heled them to overcome challenges or difficulties they have faced in their lives including grief, health issues, prejudice, divorce, maternity and creative blocks. This book uses original material – research and interviews – to explore the nature of the creative process from the perspective of understanding the activities, thoughts and feelings that shape an individual artist’s creative practice and how this might inform a wider collective understanding of creativity and how it can help us to live well. The book suggests that individual creative practice is a means of coming to know the self and your place in the world a little better and perhaps a little differently. This innovative book is suitable for students, scholars and practitioners using creative and arts-based research and methods in a wide range of disciplines and subjects including the social sciences, education, creative writing and communication and media studies.

The shift to a neoliberal agenda has, for many academics, intensified the pressure and undermined the pleasure that their work can and does bring. This book contains stories from a range of autoethnographers seeking to challenge traditional academic discourse by providing personal and evocative writings that detail moments of profound transformation and change. The book focuses on the experiences of one academic and the stories that her dialogues with other autoethnographers generated in response to the neoliberal shift in higher education. Chapters use a variety of genres to provide an innovative text that identifies strategies to challenge neoliberal governance. Autoethnography is as a methodology that can be used as form of resistance to this cultural shift by exploring effects on individual academic and personal lives. The stories are necessarily emotional, personal, important. It is hoped that they will promote other ways of navigating higher education that do not align with neoliberalism and instead, offer more holistic and human ways of being an academic. This book highlights the impact of neoliberalism on academics' freedom to teach and think freely. With 40% of academics in the UK considering other forms of employment, this book will be of interest to existing and future academics who want to survive the new environment and maintain their motivation and passion for academic life.

The shift to a neoliberal agenda has, for many academics, intensified the pressure and undermined the pleasure that their work can and does bring. This book contains stories from a range of autoethnographers seeking to challenge traditional academic discourse by providing personal and evocative writings that detail moments of profound transformation and change. The book focuses on the experiences of one academic and the stories that her dialogues with other autoethnographers generated in response to the neoliberal shift in higher education. Chapters use a variety of genres to provide an innovative text that identifies strategies to challenge neoliberal governance. Autoethnography is as a methodology that can be used as form of resistance to this cultural shift by exploring effects on individual academic and personal lives. The stories are necessarily emotional, personal, important. It is hoped that they will promote other ways of navigating higher education that do not align with neoliberalism and instead, offer more holistic and human ways of being an academic. This book highlights the impact of neoliberalism on academics' freedom to teach and think freely. With 40% of academics in the UK considering other forms of employment, this book will be of interest to existing and future academics who want to survive the new environment and maintain their motivation and passion for academic life.

Sooner or later, most of us get stuck. Feel stuck. Our creativity in crisis... lost, blocked, overwhelmed by work, family, illness. How to find or recover that creative edge? How to get unstuck? For the authors, it began with cancer and stretched into the pandemic. One primarily a writer and the other a painter, they decide to walk together, to talk, write, feed back, reflect and repeat, again and again. They explore trust, openness, motherhood, their willingness to take risks and be exposed, and the particular insights they bring as women. Along the way, they walk and map their way back to creative life. This is their story, but more than that - it's a map for anyone who is feeling stuck. Whether or not you have had a creative practice before (writing/painting/making/crafting), this book will help you find your way into creative expression. The authors offer creative tasks and suggestions in each chapter, and ideas and structures to get you going. But most important, they offer warmth, friendship and inspiration from their own shared vulnerability, struggle, setbacks and muddy walking.