​​​I successfully defended my thesis and completed my PhD in Visual Cultures in 2024. The thesis was examined by Dr Rachel Sweeney and Dr Molly McPhee. In this practice as research project, I approached the moving body as an ecologically entangled and storytelling medium, informed by my applied experience working in mental health crisis recovery services, and embodied research encountering somatic and dance movement improvisation practices. The activist scholarship of Mad Studies and Critical Mental Health orientate my praxis to question experiences of distress as the sole responsibility of the individual to consider how structural inequities and material environments may also generate experiences of distress in times of polycrisis. I engage embodied practices, primarily using creative movement as method, to unearth ecologically entangled and collective embodied storytelling. In this way, the methodology I developed through my practice research enables me to politicise personalised experiences in dominant approaches to mental health. The Visual Cultures doctoral researchers Counterfield Collective as well as the Embodied Research Working Group were important spaces of experimentation and reflection in the development of this praxis research.
My project enters the field of practice research by identifying a form of new activist scholarship which considers the potential application of the multiple modalities that this practice offers - from mixed dance and creative movement lineage - to respond to current frameworks of power in dance and therapeutic settings within an expanded field of movement studies. The unique signature of this practice, marked by a resistance toward oppressive norms, has yet to be met within current dance and proximate fields such as applied dance, as well as health professional communities of practice, thus responding to a gap within the field of dance and therapy.
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The research thesis seeks to respond to this gap through the form of storytelling across multiple modes as a way of cultivating polyvocal practices of creative attention, to navigate curatorial practices around hosting and navigating collated research materials, and story as a way to foster critical objectivity navigating within institutional structures. By critical objectivity, I am referring to here to my strategic use of embodied storytelling and the methodology I developed through the research to collectivise what are traditionally personalised stories focusing on responsibility and cure. In this research, I mobilise the form of storytelling through embodied actions as interventions to produce a thesis that is also an anti-narrative.
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