In collaborative poetics, artists, academic researchers and community participants work together as a ‘research collective’ to produce creative, social-scientifically informed texts.
The method harnesses the skills and knowledge of all of these groups to produce innovative, creative pieces which enrich our understanding of social issues and the lived experience of these issues, helping communicate this new knowledge in engaging, accessible ways.
Helen Jonson began developing this method in Montreal in 2016, with a group of young spoken word poets. Working together intensively for two months as co-researchers, they produced a series of autobiographical poems (autoethnographies,) focussing on issues related to discrimination. These pieces were grounded in three sites of expertise: social scientific theory and research; spoken word writing and performance; and co-researchers’ personal experiences.
She has gone onto establish AHRC-funded work to develop the method by offering it to a range of communities.
Findings indicate that the project achieve a range of outcomes for co-researchers, including:
- providing co-researchers with a sense of ownership and empowerment around their discrimination experiences
- enabling co-researchers to build a range of skills related to poetry writing and performance, and to social scientific research
- enabling co-researchers to develop and articulate their thinking around discrimination, embedding their experiences within broader social scientific frameworks and sociopolitical contexts
- encouraging co-researchers to challenge incidences of discrimination which they encounter in their daily lives.