Open Scholarship Summary

A link to an easy read version summary of this research

Open Scholarship is a collaboration between Grace Joseph, Research Associate on Cripping Breath, and Extant, the UK’s leading professional performing arts company centring visually impaired artists. At Extant, visual impairment is celebrated as a rich source of creative engagement that inspires fresh perspectives. Open Scholarship is continuous with previous collaborative research projects between Grace and Maria Oshodi, the Artistic Director and CEO of Extant (Open Scripts, for example).

Open Scholarship will explore the relationships between: 

• Visually impaired researchers and access to research materials
• Written scholarship and archival practices
• Performance, the archive, and research dissemination. 

Through this research project, we hope to identify—and work towards resolving—a need within academia for presenting research in different kinds of ways, and for this thinking to be led by disabled approaches to and experiences of knowledge. We are convinced that performance can do important work here: by activating access issues; disseminating scholarship to a public audience; and by creating a space for interactive interpretation of research.  

Open Scholarship addresses the following research questions: 

1. What is the current status of access provision in the University for visually impaired and blind researchers, in terms of accessing texts and other research materials?
2. How might accessible archival practices, innovated at Extant and elsewhere, inform approaches to access to scholarship?
3. How might performance capture and accessibly convey complex academic research?

The project will be carried out across three phrases, corresponding to our research questions: 

1. Status of access to scholarship
2. Accessing the archive
3. Performative translation of academic outputs. 

In Phase 1, we will carry out interviews with visually impaired university students and staff to find out barriers and approaches to access to scholarship. We will centre the ad hoc and personal methods visually impaired and blind researchers have developed—often in the face of ableist institutions—to access texts. This is informed by our Open Scripts research. We found that multiple preferences and modes of access were represented across even a relatively small number of participants. We want to capture this plurality, and the ways it resists standardised and unfit-for-purpose access techniques. 

Phase 2 will consist of a literature and practice review, as we explore accessible archives as a potential model for academic access. We will pay particular attention to archival practices that take a re-enactment approach, and to innovative practices in theatre and performance. This research period will inform an anti-ableist and transformative account of access (Jones and Gauthier-Mamaril 2024), which refuses an incompatibility between visual archive and visually impaired researcher.

In Phase 3, we will bring together our findings in order to produce a short piece of performance. This will be devised by three visually impaired performers over a workshop period, directed by Maria. Through this performance, we are aiming to: 

• Disseminate the research to the general public
• Investigate the possibilities of an enactment approach to archiving and academic authorship
• Innovate access methods for performance. 

Open Scholarship aims to advocate for transformative access in the university, and to create access to research through performance.