Short Abstract

Can creative scholarship and arts-based methods open up new ways of knowing, questioning, and communicating science - and might they reshape knowledge itself? Let’s find out by staging performances that are serious or artful, alongside more conventional presentations, each with a creative twist.

Description

Despite efforts to develop more engaging and creative forms of communication, contemporary scholarship continues to privilege content over form. Playful experiments with theater, dance, or cartoons exist, but remain limited. This panel invites contributions that truly push the envelope: turning texts into music, or crafting research through plays or cabaret. We welcome performances (silly, serious, artful) alongside conventional presentations with a creative twist. Together, we will discuss how creative scholarship can offer new ways of knowing, questioning, communicating, and organizing scientific knowledge. For instance, a song might illuminate pattern in data; a play could surface conflict in theory. Experimenting with diverse forms of communication thus becomes a method of inquiry enacting a “logics of interdisciplinarity” (Barry & Born 2010), revealing insights that conventional writing or lecturing might leave hidden. Creative STS approaches offer valuable lessons here, showing how STS and arts-based approaches can productively inform one another. In line with the conference theme of resilient futures, participants are invited to consider how – and if – creative scholarship and arts-based methods can contribute to resilient research and engagement practices.

We welcome presentations that address one or more of the following topics:

- Transforming texts into performance: Turning lectures, papers, or research findings into plays, cabaret, or musical pieces

- Art as tool for epistemic innovation: Using art, theatre, dance, or multimedia to generate new insights or heuristics for scholarship

- Interactive and participatory methods: Co-creative approaches like card games that blend research and audience participation

- Visual scholarship: Employing comics, illustrations, infographics, etc. to communicate and translate complex ideas

- Experimental formats across scholarly practice: Exploring how teaching, political organizing, database design, or creative writing can be reframed as forms of creative scholarship

- Evaluating form as knowledge: Investigating when and how innovations in form enhance understanding, engagement, and reflection in research

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