Using arts-based research to explore dance and challenge the audit culture

What is it about?

This article considers the use of arts-based representations such as poetry, narratives and drawing to explore experiences of dance. Like poetry, visual images are unique and can evoke particular kinds of emotional and visceral responses, and so can resonate in different and powerful ways. In the article, we draw on grandparent-grandchild interactions, narrative poetry, and artistic representations of dance in order to illustrate how arts-based methods might synergise to offer new ways of ‘knowing’ and ‘seeing’. We also raise concerns regarding the future for more arts-based research in the light of an ever-changing landscape of a neoliberal university culture that demands high productivity, often within very restricted time-frames. Heeding feminist calls for ‘slow academies’ that attempt to ‘change’ time collectively, and challenge the demands of a fast-paced audit culture, we consider why it is worth enabling creative and arts-based methods to continue to develop and flourish in studies of sport, exercise and health, despite the mounting pressures to ‘perform’.

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