Christina Reading – författare

Conversations on Creative Process, Methods, Research and Practice provides unique insights into the experiences of eight established creative practitioners who use their creative process in a professional and personal context. Each of them details their creative processes and how being creative has helped them to achieve a fulfilling work/life balance. Interviewees discuss how their creativity has helped them to overcome challenges or difficulties they have faced in their lives including grief, health issues, prejudice, divorce, maternity and creative blocks. This book uses original material – research and interviews – to explore the nature of the creative process from the perspective of understanding the activities, thoughts and feelings that shape an individual artist’s creative practice and how this might inform a wider collective understanding of creativity and how it can help us to live well. The book suggests that individual creative practice is a means of coming to know the self and your place in the world a little better and perhaps a little differently. This innovative book is suitable for students, scholars and practitioners using creative and arts-based research and methods in a wide range of disciplines and subjects including the social sciences, education, creative writing and communication and media studies.

Conversations on Creative Process, Methods, Research and Practice provides unique insights into the experiences of eight established creative practitioners who use their creative process in a professional and personal context. Each of them details their creative processes and how being creative has helped them to achieve a fulfilling work/life balance. Interviewees discuss how their creativity has helped them to overcome challenges or difficulties they have faced in their lives including grief, health issues, prejudice, divorce, maternity and creative blocks. This book uses original material – research and interviews – to explore the nature of the creative process from the perspective of understanding the activities, thoughts and feelings that shape an individual artist’s creative practice and how this might inform a wider collective understanding of creativity and how it can help us to live well. The book suggests that individual creative practice is a means of coming to know the self and your place in the world a little better and perhaps a little differently. This innovative book is suitable for students, scholars and practitioners using creative and arts-based research and methods in a wide range of disciplines and subjects including the social sciences, education, creative writing and communication and media studies.

Combining a series of interviews with creatives about how their work presents as activism with collaborative autoethnographic responses from the editors, this book demonstrates the power and evolution of autoethnography, as a form of both art and advocacy. With the interviews centring the work of artists, writers, a filmmaker and a printmaker as they challenges issues surrounding the environment, ageing, wellbeing, poverty, diversity and health, Jess Moriarty and Christina Reading put these ideas into a dialogue with a wide-variety of their own critical-creative responses, offering up methods of collaborative autoethnography and models for writers, students and practice-based researchers on how they can develop their own work as activism. Working to resist the criticism that autoethnography is inward-looking and narcissistic, Arts-Based Activism and Collaborative Autoethnography weaves together collective voices raised within the arts and activism that are more nuanced and multilayered than single voices alone. Engaging, readable and dynamic, this book is a champion of and an essential exploration of autoethnography, qualitative inquiry, social activism, arts-based scholarship and research.