Knowing together, differently: collaborative performance practices in a disability arts group as inclusive artistic research

A link to an easy read version summary of this research

This research is a collaboration between the lead researcher – Dr Cassie Kill – and The Professors – a disability arts group – exploring The Professors’ collaborative artistic methodologies as creative, participatory and inclusive modes of knowledge production.  The Professors are a Sheffield-based performing arts group, including around six disabled artists and two paid lead artists. Spawned from a political protest in 1985, The Professors are passionate about collaboration, equality and inclusion. In The Professors’ words:

“We work collaboratively. We are an independent company who have worked together for over 35 years. This has afforded us the opportunity to develop a unique approach - an approach which values all members of the company and their contribution. Through collaboration and ingenuity, the lead artists devise appropriate frameworks to enable everyone to contribute equally.  These frameworks are flexible and responsive, experimental and organic. Ideas grow and work is created.”

Over the years, group has gradually moved from a narrative-led model to a more fluid, abstract and collaborative approach. They often use film to allow members to make different contributions flexibly, according to their interests, needs and availability. Inclusive collaboration in The Professors does not have to mean everyone is all doing the same thing; in fact, it might depend on them doing different things. The lead artists provide a structure – the bones of the work – and other members add content, ideas and creativity into this structure, fleshing it out into a piece of performance.

This research acknowledges that established research methods have had a role in reproducing ableist research cultures. Academic texts often claim that participatory research methods are a “solution” to these problems. However, it is still commonly assumed that co-produced research involves academics teaching community co-researchers how to carry out established academic methods (Bell & Pahl, 2018; Gallacher & Gallagher, 2008; Kill, 2022). This model is not actually very empowering because it once again assumes the researcher is the one who knows everything, including how to produce knowledge. By contrast, this project considers what The Professors do as already a valid form of research. The lead researcher and The Professors will collaboratively explore these methodologies, seeking to teach others at the university about how to work in this way, and to challenge ableist research cultures.  

The study has three research questions:

1. How do The Professors do inclusive participatory research through arts practice?
2. What do these approaches to participatory arts-based research do, and what do they not do?
3. How can The Professors’ ways of working inform anti-ableist participatory research in and beyond the university? 

To answer these questions, the lead researcher will do ethnographic research with The Professors. This involves hanging out in their meetings for around eight months: participating in, observing, and documenting their artistic methodologies. In this time, the lead researcher and The Professors will investigate the groups practices through exploring the group’s archives and making a new performance about their ways of working.