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The following fairy tale is the creative output from an arts-based autoethnographic inquiry created in partial fulfillment for my Master of Arts degree. Inspired by the doctoral work of Lindsay Eales (2018), my main research objective was to challenge, (re)imagine, and transform conventional dance spaces into spaces that were more accessible for Mad bodyminds. I used artistic processes such as painting, dancing, and journaling to examine my own experiences of madness within and outside of dance spaces. I then took my findings and began writing an autoethnographic creative nonfiction piece in the form of a whimsical fairy tale that sought to deconstruct my personal experiences and reconnect them to other Mad works and texts. In doing so, my fairy tale is not only an imagination of the Mad-affirming dance spaces I wish were available to me throughout my dance career, it is an invitation to imagine Mad-affirming worlds beyond.

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Within the neoliberal university, academics become positioned around market-driven managerialist ideologies and the techniques enacting those principles. Audit cultures actively and continuously measure and shape academic subjectivities defined by a specific kind of success. The market-driven individualistic model can conflict with ethical ideals and longings for self-expression, while the mismatch between institutional goals and personal values creates an academic self that is pulled in conflicting directions. We become subjects of the discourse but we can limit our subjectivity and develop authentic insight. In this paper, we engage in a process of embodied making. We create textual and tactile self-portraits as a way of pushing back at neoliberal subjectivities, and to make visible our multiple selves. Although we recognize that we are always a part of what we resist, we use making as a way to create micro-resistances for our own renewal. Our self-portrait assemblages and stories are ambiguous and fluid but capture a view of selves hidden beneath the professional self. We are reminded that we are creative beings, and that there is room within neoliberalism to open intentional spaces. We may not always succeed in seeing our contradictory identities, yet we are able to occasionally capture glimpses of our shifting selves.

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My PhD supervisor and mentor, Carl Leggo, died of cancer on March 7th, 2019. In this essay, I trace the personal, poetic, intellectual, and spiritual journey of his momentous mentorship. In the absence of his physical being, there is still a profound presence, and what I have come to know as pedagogical light. On his passing, another lyrical lesson began for me on how what a teacher leaves behind can stay in the mind, heart, and soul for a lifetime. I have emerged knowing what it means to live poetically, as Carl was writing and teaching us all along. His mentorship is enduring and continues to shape the art of my own being into fullness as a poet, (re)searcher, and teacher. Here, through prose and poetry, I reflect on Carl’s wisdom and how he saw the breadth of my pedagogical being—the whole of the moon.

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Stigma has been defined as a spoiled identity, a branding that sets a person outside the norm, with potential to elicit feelings of shame. The authors recount firsthand experiences of having felt shame in connection with their queer identities and the disavowal this provoked, until such time as they met serendipitously as researchers with related interests and began sharing memories of being queer in a cis-heteronormative society. Two stories, illustrated in comic form and told in first-person narrative, are centrepieces for analysis in which the authors write against themselves, their past assumptions, and interpretations. Applying insights from queer and feminist decolonial theory, and from arts pedagogy, this autotheoretical analysis demonstrates that, despite the injurious nature of shame, revisiting and recodifying its roots can help one avow queer reality and come to terms with feelings of inadequacy induced by the politics of purity infecting many fledgling efforts at self-expression.

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Undertaking a doctoral program is a significant commitment involving sustained effort as an individual engages in academic work and scholarly identity formation. As a graduate student with a psychiatric disability, I face an added layer of challenge: dealing with symptoms as I navigate an academic system that is not designed for bodyminds like mine. This poetry and visual art collection offers a glimpse into my experience as a first-year doctoral student with schizoaffective disorder1 as I navigated Zoom classrooms, considered academic timelines and campus mental health awareness week, and wrestled with symptoms during the summer session. Through a schizo-poetic and visual inquiry informed by disability poetry and schizo-poetics, I present an embodied, multi-sensory exploration to highlight similarities and differences in the experiences of doctoral students with mental illness and their neurotypical peers, as well as to expand the conversation around disability and academia.

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This article presents audio found poetry as an approach which positions participants’ voices in the heart of the inquiry. The methodology was influenced by radio autoethnography and audio papers where theory, voices, and sound are combined to create a new aural experience—an approach that argues that it is essential that the audience listens rather than reads. These two audio found poems share the voices of 14 participants from Australia, United Kingdom, North America, and Mainland Europe, interwoven with the author, talking about their relationship with underwear. Participants recorded their own story. Each voice was edited using Audacity (a software program) and then different voices were joined together. Two poems emerged. Audio 1: Practical Underwear shares stories from day-to-day underwear preferences and stories of those who do not wear underwear. The stories in Audio 2: Dress Code Red are connected to sexuality and political aspects of underwear. Framing the work through the lens of new materialism creates a space of agency for an entanglement between the underwear and the human voices speaking about it, which in turn affects the embodied experience of the listener. What stories could your underwear tell?

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Making With Place explores expressions and desires of queer, Indigenous, and racialized young artists on place, community, and culture. During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic (from spring 2020 to fall 2021) community-based researchers engaged in participatory arts processes with young artists, culminating in public art installations theorising evolving inquiries and ideas into place. In this paper, we showcase six artworks to exemplify three conceptions of place that emerged from this collective work: (a) place holds histories; (b) place is relational; and (c) place as a verb. We consider how learnings from this project can help to more equitably reclaim public space through (re)mapping and (re)visioning as living processes of place-making. Community arts, in public space, can inform how we create, investigate, and make place through the arts. Who does this inviting, and who is ultimately assembled, is of vital importance. Place is where we encounter each other.

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The authors’ research project, Sizing Up Gender, explored the experiences of thirteen participants at the intersections of gender expression and fat. Through a series of photographs of participants and their garments, the project pushed the boundaries of art, identities, representations, and research. This article seeks to consider the ways in which innovative arts-based practice with a deep focus on justice and anti-oppression can allow for a thickening of intersectionality research. The blending of art and research practices, such as those under discussion here, can simultaneously maintain a commitment to the genesis of intersectionality’s critical potential while allowing the term to evolve and consider heretofore undiscussed terrain.

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In this article, which includes a feminist micro-chapbook, the author has chosen poems written both prior to and following their recollection of and subsequent therapeutic struggle to work through their lifelong experiences of sexual harassment and assault. Situated within the neoliberally co-opted #MeToo campaign, Betsy Devos’s 2020 Title IX cross-examination mandate, and post-Trumpian, ongoing COVID U.S. landscape, this work performs an ethnographic autopsy on the body politic: displaying the fleshy lived consequences of an unjust legal system. By continuing Faulkner’s work on poetic inquiry as feminist methodology, this piece contributes to the tradition of poetic praxis as a means of clapping back to structures of oppression. At its core, this article reveals relived experiences and words spoken by institutional figures reluctant to fulfill mandatory reporting requirements. By playing off Higginbotham’s (1993) term respectability politics, “Requirement Politics” blurs lines of academic and poetic writing to deliberately collapse a fabricated line between public and private lived experiences.

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In this article, I discuss the ways that contending with my own resistance around being a mother while researching mothers/mothering, inspired and shaped a study on maternal self-care. Using Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (2006) as a beginning guide, I discuss how I developed a poetic hermeneutical phenomenology, which emerged as a way out of my resistance and into a deeper relationship with the texts and substance of my project. The purpose of the article is not to present findings; instead, I express my personal and theoretical rationale for the study, offer up my methodology, and provide examples of the poetic performances that steered my analyses. I also reflect upon the ways that I became folded within this project and how my own positionalities affected, and were affected by, engaging in this work. Lastly, I issue a call for qualitative researchers to make explicit our connections to our research, and to interrogate how these connections relate to our goals and gazes.

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In her making practice, Colour Words, Thompson represents the words used to describe colour in novels as embroidered squares on paper. In doing so, she creates alternate visualisations of literature, which has led to more questions, discoveries of patterns, and a new way of thinking about and relating to narratives and text/s. In this article, Thompson describes her making practice/process as an example of small data methodology and reflects on the experience to draw out meaning.

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The purpose of this article is to focus on one land-based, poetic experience at the Blackfoot cultural site Aisinai’pi, Writing on Stone Provincial Park in Alberta, Canada. The focus is on an experience with two participants in the research, the Elder and the artist, who are both working with the school involved on this journey and me, the researcher. To situate the article as part of a research study, I also share the context of the broader qualitative study that works within an Indigenous paradigm to explore the development of kinship between children, the land, and each other. My question in this article is this: How do the poetics of land open new possibilities of how to cultivate a kinship ecology with children? I engage poetic inquiry and life writing to illuminate how this experience on the land gave meaning to and shaped the rest of the research study as it unfolded with children, teachers, an artist, and the Elder who guides the work.

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Patricia Leavy’s Re/Invention: Methods of Social Fiction presents a highly readable how-to guide to writing social fiction as an accessible and impactful form of research inquiry. Providing extensive background information on the development and purposes of the genre and then discussing examples from her own social fiction novels, Leavy not only teaches readers how to go about writing social fiction but also explains why this is a worthwhile thing to do. This book review creatively puts into practice what I have learnt through reading Re/Invention. Through a fictional recounting of a book club discussion about Leavy’s work, both the form and content of this review illuminate many of the key points, tips, and techniques on offer in this highly recommended primer

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This is a review of A Poetry Pedagogy for Teachers: Reorienting Classroom Literacy Practices by Maya Pindyck and Ruth Vinz, with Diana Liu and Ashlynn Wittchow. The authors, U.S-based poets, educators, and arts-academics, share a crafted master class in creative thinking and poetic confidence building for teachers. They employ a strongly collaborative stance, and take readers with them on a poststructural journey by weaving together a collection of poems, scholarly literature, and resources which aim to provoke their teacher-readers to write. Readers should ready themselves with pen and paper, notebook, or computer as the many ”Invitations” (writing exercises which appear at the end of each chapter and in a section of their own towards the end) will have readers sliding into poetry and seeing it in the most unexpected places.

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This piece is a review of Teachers and Teaching on Stage and on Screen: Dramatic Depictions, edited by Diane Conrad and Monica Prendergast (2019). Mortimer’s personal poetic response opens the review to honour her artistic ways of knowing and responding to the content. The book’s contributing authors, all educators, provide diverse cultural, social, and socio-economic perspectives and insights into how teachers and teaching are represented in film and on stage. Conrad and Prendergast’s book invites a range of audiences (from pre-service teachers to academics) to reflect on dramatic depictions of teachers and to use them to deepen understandings of the complexities of teaching, schooling, and students—and, if readers are teachers themselves, to examine their own practice.

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Within this conversation, Patricia Leavy discusses her new book Re/Invention: Methods of Social Fiction. As a leading artful scholar, Leavy shines a light on the slippage between fiction and nonfiction, and the long history of merging scholarship with the literary arts. Within the paradigm of arts-based research, Leavy views social fiction as a method. She speaks about how crafting academic fiction allows for research to become both an act of discovery and a pathway toward personal healing. Christina Flemming is delighted to hear more about Leavy’s daily writing practice, her thoughts on writing as rewriting, and the metaphorical blender that is required to take one’s lived experiences and transform them into academic fiction. You can learn more about Re/Invention: Methods of Social Fiction via the Guilford Press website. To read more about Patricia Leavy, visit her website: https://patricialeavy.com/