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3rd Global Conference
Making Sense of: Health, Illness and Disease
Monday 5th July - Friday 9th July 2004
St Catherine's College, Oxford
Conference Programme, Abstract & Papers
Session 2: Art and Health,
Illness and Disease
Chair: Vera Kalitzkus
Liminality: Living and Practising at the Threshold
Caryl Sibbett
Graduate School of Education,
Queen's University Belfast,
Belfast, Northern Ireland
The research is an illustrated auto/biographic story
of an art therapist's
experience of having cancer and practising art therapy with those affected
by cancer. It investigates the concept of liminality and its relevance
to
such experience. The research paradigm was qualitative, with the main
approach being bricolage which encompassed autoethnography, auto/biography,
narrative and art based research methodologies. Multi-modal data collection
sources and methods were used, including observation, depth interviews,
documentation and artwork reviews.
This story will explore the topic of
liminality through an interplay
between "turning points" or "nodal moment(s)" in:
1) my personal experience
of receiving a cancer diagnosis and my related art-making; 2) my
professional experience of practising art therapy with those affected
by
cancer. The exploration encompasses my attempts to make sense of my cancer
experience through words and images.
The anthropological metaphor of liminality,
the transitional phase of rites
of passage, is used as a potential metaphor for the cancer experience.
Key
aspects of liminality are explored, such as: limbo; play and power; and
embodied experience. The limbo experience features heightened life/death
awareness, uncertainty and waiting, and several relevant visual metaphors
are introduced. Different types of playing and their relationship with
power are referred to. Liminal characteristics of embodied experience
in
cancer are referred to, such as: body/self image; gender identity chaos;
and stigma, what is perceived to be unspeakable and/or unhearable. I
will
refer to issues such as secondary liminality, countertransference, and
facing one's own death when working with terminal illness.
In art therapy
symbols resonate with many meanings and can enable
expression and possible re-storying of such liminal experience, offering
a
both/and rather than either/or perspective. Thus perhaps art therapy
accommodates, and could potentially promote better tolerance of, the
unique, ambiguous and shifting meanings inherent in the cancer experience.
Download Full Conference Paper - 
The Role of Music in Qualitative Inquiry
Norma Daykin
University of the West of England, Bristol, United Kingdom
This paper
explores the use of music in research, drawing on a study undertaken
by the author (Daykin, in press). The starting point is the growing
interest in arts based research in an extended epistemology that sees
these as capable of enhancing representation as well as generating new
knowledge.
While creative writing and visual arts are increasingly being
used in research contexts, the use of music in research is rare. This
may be because the use of music in the generation and exploration of
knowledge raises particular problems, such as the mediating effects on
interpretation of culture, knowledge, repertoires and experiences of
listeners. For some, music can only make limited use of semiotics, since
there is no systematic relationship between music and what it indicates.
While music’s meanings are varied and complex, music making is
clearly a social process and musical meanings reflect social contexts as
well as identities. Traditions in music such as romanticism and modernism
have both contributed to the denial of the social in aesthetics (Williams,
2003). There are also democratic impulses to protect autonomous musical
values. Hence many postwar composers have resisted the manipulation of
music whether in the name of commercialism or nationalism.
While these
problems of meaning may seem unique to music, in fact, they highlight
the contingencies surrounding interpretation of many texts used in qualitative
research texts. Hence consideration of issues of musical meaning may
be of broader importance to the development of an arts based arts based
epistemology.
The paper addresses these issues through listening and
discussing musical examples, selected to illustrate three particular issues:
semantics; heterophony and empowerment. The paper concludes by suggesting
that music rarely speaks for itself, but that music can enhance research
by problematising meaning; creating richly textured and multi voiced forms
of representation; and by enhancing group processes in collaborative inquiry.
Hence music and music making can offer useful resources for research, as
well as highlighting some important problems of contingency that are of
broader significance in the context of new insights claimed for arts based
research.