Keywords

Introduction: ‘How Is That Geography?’

My fellow creative geographers would likely read the above question and let out an audible sigh for the number of times it’s been asked of them. I’ve certainly lost count. I think it’s because most people I’ve met think that geography is about places—the ‘stuff’ of places (physical geography) and the ‘people’ who live in those places (human geography)—or worse, they conflate geography and cartography. But literally, geography is about writing: geo from Latin and Greek means ‘relating to the earth’ and graphy from French means ‘a system of writing’ (OED, 2022a, 2022b). People and places, and how they are distributed across space and time, are what we mostly write about as geographers, but geography is also (perhaps more so) about how we write those things. It is for this very reason that geography is so diverse, not just in its subject matter but in the way that it’s done. It is the broadest of academic disciplines in that it embraces the full spectrum of programmatic research and its methods, from sclerochronology (Prendergast et al., 2016) to community theatre (Raynor, 2019) and everything in between. It is in this context that art as geography makes sense—as one of the multitude of ways geographers ‘write the earth’.

This book makes a case for art as geography. In doing so, it situates itself at a certain juncture—the translation of geographical knowledge through art. This juncture is blurry, because in the making of art to translate knowledge, new knowledge is created. For this very reason, this book won’t perpetuate a false distinction between knowledge creation and knowledge translation, especially where art making is concerned, but rather it seeks to bring knowledge translation efforts to the foreground of art-geography engagements and critique. Just as art itself is a valid and powerful means of knowledge making, it is also an equally valid and powerful tool for translating knowledge—whether that knowledge be originally created through arts-based practices or by other means. As such, this book is intended to be not only relevant for the discipline of geography, but any academic discipline concerned with ‘bringing research findings to life’.

As a background to the empirical chapters to come, this introductory chapter is grounded in the field of GeoHumanities—a field devoted to art-geography collaborations and explorations that draw on the humanities as a group of disciplines. It then shifts into the field of arts in health—perhaps the most prolific, multidisciplinary arena for art as knowledge translation. The chapter moves on to consider the challenges and successes of art-science collaborations, and then cycles back to the GeoHumanities, and affective geographies, to consider how they are uniquely suited to artistic forms of communication.

The GeoHumanities

The GeoHumanities came to prominence in the twenty-first century when it was defined by the editors of the first book on the subject as ‘the fortuitous convergence of intellectual traffic [between geography, the humanities, and art, which] outlines a distinctive scholarly terrain and emerging zone of practice’ (Richardson et al., 2011, p. 1). This dual aspect of the GeoHumanities as both arts practice and scholarship persists. However, the GeoHumanities is also about the synergies between geography and the humanities and their natural tendencies to cross disciplinary borders. Dear (2011) describes this as a certain epistemological openness that is common to both domains of scholarship, and which makes the GeoHumanities inherently transdisciplinary.

Harriet Hawkins’ (2014) For Creative Geographies is a landmark text in cultural geography, summarising over a decade of work at the intersection of cultural geography and art but also providing a threefold analytic framework for understanding geography-art relations. Her framework involves asking three questions: ‘What work does art do in the world?’, ‘What are the geographies of the artwork’s production and consumption?’ and ‘How is it that we encounter artworks?’ (Hawkins, 2014, p. 237). Regarding the first question, Hawkins suggests that art is a way of ‘knowing otherwise’—not just as visual representation but as knowledge production. For the second question, she argues that art practice has become an ‘expanded field’ that grapples with ideas that are distinctly geographical such as space, place and site. Finally, Hawkins urges creative geographers to explore how artworks are encountered, what leads viewers back to artworks and what it means to be an active viewer. Hawkins’ last question is of special relevance to the empirical chapters to come as she points towards the ‘force of art to stage lived experiences for us’ (2014, p. 242).

Hawkins takes her argument a step further in Geography, Art, Research (Hawkins, 2021). It is here that she lauds the humanities for ‘holding back’ the positivist tendencies of social science to assess creative research and practice in terms of its rigour, critique and scalability. Instead, she acknowledges the humanities for valorising the subjective, the individual, the liveliness of matter and the agency of materials. This has implications for understanding the ‘research-exhibition’ as not merely a vehicle for communicating knowledge or ‘putting things on display’ but a ‘tool for mediation’ and a ‘work of transformation’. By this, she is referring to the capacity of the art exhibition to exert an affective force, especially in relation to emotionally and politically powerful issues. She also sees the exhibition as a ‘research action’ that creates a thinking-space for audiences, rather than telling them what to think. It is the open-endedness of the art exhibition which enables audiences to interpret research findings for themselves as part of an ongoing research process. As Hawkins (2014) asserts, these processes have a special affinity with the humanities.

The GeoHumanities, and Hawkins’ work in particular, are central to the empirical chapters in this book, because while visitor surveys and the metrics derived from them can provide insights into how research exhibitions are received, they barely scratch the surface of what art exhibitions do. Much of what they do is ineffable, can’t be represented, and, as some scholars argue, is ‘immanent’ (cannot be separated from) the exhibition itself (see Williams, 2021). As this chapter temporarily veers away from a GeoHumanities perspective to explore art as knowledge translation in more positivist territory, this is not meant as a permanent departure. The chapter will return to the GeoHumanities before its conclusion to draw further attention to its role in this book’s wider project.

Arts-Based Knowledge Translation in Health

There is a compelling rationale for arts-based knowledge translation in health and that is the gap between research and clinical practice (Hall et al., 2019). Dew and Boydell (2017) estimate that it takes 17 years for health research to reach practice settings and even then, only 14% of all health research influences clinical practice from day-to-day. As such, health researchers are now encouraged to think in advance about what knowledge translation strategies they will employ in any given project, and art-based knowledge translation is one of them (Hodgins, 2017). Barwick’s (2019) knowledge translation planning template enables researchers to plan across the course of their research project by identifying partners, knowledge translation expertise, knowledge users, main messages and knowledge translation goals. In identifying appropriate strategies, Barwick (2019) sees art-based knowledge translation as useful for generating awareness, interest and buy-in as well as sharing knowledge and informing decision making (see Section 8 of the template; Barwick, 2019). There is also a matching ‘knowledge translation plan appraisal tool’ for assessing the comprehensiveness, alignment and feasibility of knowledge translation plans in health grant applications (Barwick, 2018).

Katherine Boydell is the leading figure in art-based knowledge translation in health, having collaborated with patients and artists on projects relating to mental health, physical disability and drug and alcohol issues over many years (see Boydell, 2019). Parsons and Boydell (2012) argue that arts-based knowledge translation in health offers alternative ways to promote dialogue, share stories and communicate lived experience compared to more traditional ways like public presentations, policy briefs or media releases. Specifically, they argue that arts-based methods engage health practitioners, consumers and carers on an emotional and cognitive level, and that they make research findings more accessible to audiences outside of academic circles. This claim is supported by empirical evaluations which reveal that health-care practitioners can develop new awareness of an issue due to arts-based knowledge translation, that practitioners report adapting or changing their practice because of arts-based translation efforts, that patients who engage in arts-based translation projects report ‘meaningful and lasting differences in their lives and relationships’ and that some patients report actual behavioural change (Parsons & Boydell, 2012, p. 171).

Arts-based knowledge translation in health takes a variety of forms including theatre (Hall et al., 2019), photovoice (MacDonald et al., 2020), body mapping (Boydell, 2021), dance (Boydell, 2011) and poetry (Lapum et al., 2012). While tensions inevitably exist between art and scientific evidence, many arts-based researchers in health see their translation work as contextualising objective knowledge—that is, placing scientifically generated knowledge into a social, sensorial and/or embodied form (Rieger & Schultz, 2014). For that to happen, the knowledge needs to be subjectively interpreted and reconstructed to give it personal meaning (Boydell et al., 2012). It is here that health researchers, in sympathy with the GeoHumanities and performative research in the creative arts, recognise arts-based knowledge translation as not just dissemination but also knowledge creation (Archibald & Blines, 2021; see also Haseman, 2010, on the performative research paradigm). Importantly, this new knowledge is often co-created with research participants who are themselves patients and then translated again through public exhibition and display, which may include work that has been reinterpreted by practising artists (see Boydell, 2019). Essentially, arts-based knowledge translators in health ‘convert’ passive knowledge into active knowledge—knowledge in action and in its social context—through processes that are non-linear and iterative, and with the ultimate goal to improve patients’ lives.

While arts-based knowledge translation in health has distinct overlaps with art-science collaborations (Wellbery, 2021), the ‘end-users’ of the knowledge are different. Rather than patients and clinicians, art-science collaborations have the much wider remit of educating publics and, in many cases, driving social change. At the heart of this activity is the recognition that both cognition and emotion influence decision making, and that people acquire knowledge in various ways (Paterson et al., 2020). It is to this aspect of art as knowledge translation that this chapter now turns.

Art-Science Collaborations

A recent poll in the journal Nature found that 40% of the 350 scientists who responded had collaborated with artists in the past, and they would do it again (‘Art-science alliances’, 2021). Commentators note that although art-science collaborations are not new, there is a recent appreciation of the processes of collaboration and their value, instead of the dominant focus being on the product or outcome of the collaboration (Baker & Gilchrist, 2021). Part of this is a recognition that a successful alliance is at the core of successful art-science collaborations, and that artists and scientists share a common goal to ‘describe the world around us’ (Paterson et al., 2020).

Over 200 papers on art-science collaborations have been published in the journal Leonardo since 2010 (JSTOR search ‘art-science collaborations’, 25 March 2022) and while it is not possible to consider them all here, there are notable examples. In a project called Ten Trenches designed to promote a wider understanding of the consequences of global warming, a team of scientists and archaeologists worked alongside a team of artists and historians over three years (Cohen et al., 2013). While the science team carried out excavation works on a rural property in New South Wales, Australia, the arts team conducted a creative exploration of the site which included responses in the form of Indigenous dance, music and light projections. The authors emphasise that the project was ‘development driven and not public-outcome focussed’, despite it attracting significant media attention (Cohen et al., 2013, p. 75). As an expression of environmental change, the project was able to draw public attention to the issue across a range of contexts and audiences including significant stakeholder groups. Interestingly, the authors suggest that the ‘rolling’ nature of events and activities and their associated publicity over time was a key feature of the project’s success.

Art-science collaborations don’t have to confine themselves to their obvious duality. In a project called TRACKS (TRAnsforming Climate Knowledge with and for Society), an interdisciplinary team of social and natural scientists worked with a local community and a local artist to co-produce knowledge about the conditions of the local environment (Stiller-Reeve & Naznin, 2018). In what the authors call an art-science-citizen project, a series of artist-led creative workshops took place with citizen scientist groups in Bangladesh. Members of the citizen scientist groups who were already actively involved in collecting weather data in climate ‘hotspots’ were asked to produce drawings of how the weather was impacting on the local community, landscape, plants and animals over time. The artist who led the workshops took the participants drawings and produced a painting from them, over three canvases, which represented the participants’ stories. The final version of the painting was displayed across different sites and countries, and prints were produced and donated to schools and government offices. The citizen scientists reported being inspired by the project, which they felt was personally motivating as well as nurturing of a sense of community.

Art-science collaborations can take place over a significant period of time. In a project called 6&6, six artists were paired with six scientists to co-produce work that was intentionally transdisciplinary in contrast to interdisciplinary (which is interactive and the nature of most art-science collaborations) or multidisciplinary (an additive approach where, usually, the artist contributes something extra to an already existing scientific project; Clark et al., 2020). In the 6&6 project, each artist-scientist pair developed their own project over four years, starting and finishing the project together. Artists and scientists in this project were committed to the bidirectionality, or what they described as ‘the dash in art-science’. Outputs of both the artistic and scientific kind were produced as well as a set of recommendations on how artists and scientists can work together in a truly transdisciplinary way (see Clark et al., 2020).

Whereas most articles on art-science collaborations focus on the positive aspects of these interactions, there is also something to be said for embracing differences and disagreements. Ellison and Borden (2022) argue that art-science collaborations are not about finding common ground but about creating new spaces for thinking and exploring. For them, constructive friction and debate are essential. There is also something to be said for embracing ‘sameness’ in that scientists may bring artistic skills with them to a collaboration, and artists may have relevant scientific backgrounds. In these situations, it is possible for artists and scientists to co-create by contributing skills as well as knowledge (see Rock & McKinlay, 2018, e.g. and Boyd & Barry, 2020 for caveats). Finally, there are several instances in art-geography, where the artist and geographer are the same person, whose geographical knowledge informs their arts practice or arts-based research (e.g. Barry, 2016; Cresswell, 2013; De Leeuw 2012; Gorman-Murray, 2018; Zebracki, 2017).

Affective Knowledge Translation

So far in this chapter, we have seen how art is enrolled in knowledge translation efforts across health and science to communicate lived experience and/or urgent social messages. We have also seen how art-based knowledge translation and art-science collaborations create spaces of knowledge creation and provide new perspectives on existing problems or issues. In most cases, these approaches to knowledge translation start with what is intellectually perceived to be objective knowledge (Parsons & Boydell, 2012)—biological processes, medical phenomena, scientific or social facts—to give it personal meaning or social gravitas. In this section, we return to the GeoHumanities to consider different types of knowledge and why we might want to translate them to wider audiences. In particular, the focus of this section is on ‘affective knowledge translation’.

If the main goal of arts-based knowledge translation in health is better clinical practice and improved treatment outcomes for patients, and the main goal of art-science collaboration is to translate scientific knowledge about issues of social importance, then the main goal of affective knowledge translation is to promote empathy. Unlike other forms of knowledge translation, translating affective knowledge starts with the body—that is, the embodied-affective experiences of researchers and/or research participants. Affective knowledge translation is about enabling ‘felt’ knowledges to be ‘transmitted’ so that they might be ‘felt again’ (Boyd, 2017).

There are multiple meanings and conceptualisations of ‘affect’ in the social sciences and humanities (see Gregg & Seigworth, 2010). However, Wetherall (2012) argues that human affect is always linked to meaning-making. Affective practice, as the author understands it, folds together the body’s capacity to feel and practices of meaning-making. As Wetherall (2012) argues: ‘[i]t is the participation of the emoting body that makes an assemblage an example of affect rather than an example of some other kind of social practice’ (p. 159). For affective knowledge translation to happen, something needs to be felt by the researcher, that ‘something’ then needs to be put into a form which foregrounds that ‘felt knowledge’, and that form must be presented to others so that they might gain something from that affective knowledge for themselves (Arboleda, 2021; Boyd, 2017). However, any affective knowledge that is communicated cannot be the same as what the researcher felt or heard, because it is mediated by the disposition of the ‘receiver’ (or audience), who then makes their own meaning which is in no way guaranteed to correspond to what the researcher intended. Furthermore, ‘the message consciously received may be of less import to the receiver of that message than his or her non-conscious affective resonance with the source of the message’ (Shouse, 2005, para. 10).

Communicating affective knowledge often means putting it in a representational form or providing a framework to assist the audience in the process of translation, which arguably has its own affective force (see Anderson, 2019), but it may also involve the use of arts-based methods to create an atmosphere, produce an ambiance, or incite the body in other ways such as the use of non-diegetic sounds or imagery (Hawkins, 2014). Either way, communicating affective knowledge relies on notions of affective transmission (Brennan, 2015) and affective practice (Wetherall, 2012)—the circulation of affect, its (re)embodiment and the processes of meaning-making enrolled by the audience.

In an example from social and cultural geography, Parr and Stevenson (2014) conducted a research project which responded to a lack of knowledge and understanding of the lived experiences of people who go missing in Scotland. The main aims of the project were to change police attitudes to missing people, which positioned them as a ‘time-resource problem’, to encourage empathy with missing people, and provide insights into their emotional experience. Parr and Stevenson (2014) conducted 45 in-depth interviews with people who had gone missing and used these to write a set of stories or ‘creative re-constructions’. The stories, ten in total, were either constructed from a single interview transcript or created as ‘composite stories’ that brought together experiences from across the interviews. These narratives have been presented at conferences and in academic journals (Parr & Stevenson, 2014) but were also included in a police training package. Chief Constable Pat Geenty, UK Police Lead for Missing Persons, on hearing these stories, said: ‘[The project’s] findings have made a huge impact on me and gave me a greater insight into the psyche of those who go missing than anything I had experienced in the past 30 years’ (see Parr, 2013).

Parr and Stevenson’s (2014) research demonstrates that arts-based knowledge translation can be applied across the spectrum of academic disciplines regardless of the type of knowledge being translated. This matters, because arts-based knowledge translation is not simply about giving objective knowledge aesthetic form (Boydell et al., 2017). It is a process of ‘communicating research with the goal of catalysing dialogue, awareness, engagement, and advocacy to provide a foundation for social change on important societal issues’ (Kukkonen & Cooper, 2017, p. 293). The communication of emotions, feelings, desires, anxieties, hopes and aspirations can be relevant in fulfilling knowledge translation goals, and it is here that the GeoHumanities comes into its own.

Overview of the Empirical Chapters to Come

The chapters that follow present a singular example of arts-based knowledge translation ‘from start to finish’. Chapter 2 forms the foundation while Chap. 3 describes the creation of artwork based on research findings. The ‘short monograph’ format of this book allows for a much more detailed and process-based account of these efforts than a journal article might afford. As much as we learn from our own mistakes, another aim of using this format is to provide sufficient detail that anyone wanting to embark on a similar project for the first time might gain something from the advice and recommendations offered.

Another further aim of this book, also afforded by its format, is to provide an evaluation of the work undertaken. To this end, Chap. 4 not only relays what was involved in bringing the art exhibition to the public but also public responses to the exhibition based on visitor surveys and phone interviews. The book concludes by considering the strengths and limitations of the approaches taken and lessons learned.