Jess Moriarty – författare

The shift to a neoliberal agenda has, for many academics, intensified the pressure and undermined the pleasure that their work can and does bring. This book contains stories from a range of autoethnographers seeking to challenge traditional academic discourse by providing personal and evocative writings that detail moments of profound transformation and change.The book focuses on the experiences of one academic and the stories that her dialogues with other autoethnographers generated in response to the neoliberal shift in higher education. Chapters use a variety of genres to provide an innovative text that identifies strategies to challenge neoliberal governance. Autoethnography is as a methodology that can be used as form of resistance to this cultural shift by exploring effects on individual academic and personal lives. The stories are necessarily emotional, personal, important. It is hoped that they will promote other ways of navigating higher education that do not align with neoliberalism and instead, offer more holistic and human ways of being an academic.This book highlights the impact of neoliberalism on academics’ freedom to teach and think freely. With 40% of academics in the UK considering other forms of employment, this book will be of interest to existing and future academics who want to survive the new environment and maintain their motivation and passion for academic life.

The shift to a neoliberal agenda has, for many academics, intensified the pressure and undermined the pleasure that their work can and does bring. This book contains stories from a range of autoethnographers seeking to challenge traditional academic discourse by providing personal and evocative writings that detail moments of profound transformation and change.The book focuses on the experiences of one academic and the stories that her dialogues with other autoethnographers generated in response to the neoliberal shift in higher education. Chapters use a variety of genres to provide an innovative text that identifies strategies to challenge neoliberal governance. Autoethnography is as a methodology that can be used as form of resistance to this cultural shift by exploring effects on individual academic and personal lives. The stories are necessarily emotional, personal, important. It is hoped that they will promote other ways of navigating higher education that do not align with neoliberalism and instead, offer more holistic and human ways of being an academic.This book highlights the impact of neoliberalism on academics’ freedom to teach and think freely. With 40% of academics in the UK considering other forms of employment, this book will be of interest to existing and future academics who want to survive the new environment and maintain their motivation and passion for academic life.

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.

Offers an arts-based, storying, textual and visual lens on gender-based violence in the UK and Mexico.This book is a unique image-based bilingual (English and Spanish) book of textual and visual narratives of gender-based violence (GBV) in the UK and Mexico, framed with a critical commentary that sets these stories in the context of GBV in both countries.Visual and textual stories convey the 'felt' experience of GBV, engaging readers and audiences in the apparently mundane as well as the shocking. Such stories help contest the prominence of crime statistics in evidencing GBV, statistics which often distort experience and reflect and maintain exclusionary policies and practices, particularly for minoritised communities.The transnational project on which this book is based invited artists and creative writers from diverse backgrounds in the UK and Mexico to respond to lived accounts of GBV in comic stories, short stories, poems, 3D installations, fine art photography, painting and film. This book brings together these visual and textual stories and sets out a series of readings and analyses that seek to further knowledge on GBV in different cultural contexts.This book is open access under a CC BY licence.

Offers an arts-based, storying, textual and visual lens on gender-based violence in the UK and Mexico.This book is a unique image-based bilingual (English and Spanish) book of textual and visual narratives of gender-based violence (GBV) in the UK and Mexico, framed with a critical commentary that sets these stories in the context of GBV in both countries.Visual and textual stories convey the 'felt' experience of GBV, engaging readers and audiences in the apparently mundane as well as the shocking. Such stories help contest the prominence of crime statistics in evidencing GBV, statistics which often distort experience and reflect and maintain exclusionary policies and practices, particularly for minoritised communities.The transnational project on which this book is based invited artists and creative writers from diverse backgrounds in the UK and Mexico to respond to lived accounts of GBV in comic stories, short stories, poems, 3D installations, fine art photography, painting and film. This book brings together these visual and textual stories and sets out a series of readings and analyses that seek to further knowledge on GBV in different cultural contexts.This book is open access under a CC BY licence.

The chapters in this collection explore the constellation of points where stories of individual experience and experiences are in dialogue with political, cultural and social narratives.Encompassing themes of individual and social identities and relationships, (un)belonging, motherhood, academic lives and what it means to be an arts practitioner, these stories and accounts continue and expand the ongoing conversations of how practitioners and academics do their work. They show the ongoing need to rethink and re-examine how to do critical and engaging scholarly work. Life stories are necessarily, messy, complex, personal and often deal with experiences that have been challenging for the author in some way.Contributions from Ross Adamson, Suzy Bamblett, Emily Bell, Jenni Cresswell, Hannah Davita Ludikhuijze, Sandra Lyndon, Vanessa Marr, Jess Moriarty, Éva Mikuska, Holly Stewart, Deirdre Russell, Louise Spiers, Lucianna Whittle.This is the first book in a new series. The Performance and Communities Book Series celebrates, challenges and researches performance in the real world. The series will consider how contemporary performance can engage, build and learn from previous, existing, evolving and new communities of people – practitioners, academics, students, audiences.

This is the second book in the Performance and Communities series.  An edited collection from academics and artists engages with both these notions of performance – that of identities in and through time and space - and of more formal instances of specific time-limited performances; textual, embodied, visual and communal.Each chapter focuses on an individual or group’s mode of working and methodological practice of performance across a range of modes, disciplines and media – from community opera to online queer performance, from anti-racist class-room pedagogy to 1980s cabaret in nightclubs, from community art projects in schools to community writing projects in transport interchanges, the performers, writers and creators represented here all engage and grapple with contemporary performance as a situated practice and as a problematic.The personal perspective of each performer – directors, librettists, producers, writers, performers – is explicitly located in a community and the book offers a series of case studies detailing socially engaged work that aligns with concepts of performance and community.

Performing Maternities is a collection of essays, creative work, images and scripts which emerged out of an online international symposium held at Brighton University in November 2020. Collectively, the contributors challenge, celebrate and share the normative, the queer, the transgressive, the joy and the pain of performing maternity. The book asks key questions about the construction of maternal identities and mythologies in the contemporary world, the ways these impact on individuals in different social, economic and sexual identities, and the ways in which - as mothers, writers, artists, parents and grandparents -we can challenge and address those identities.