PERFORMERS, MAKERS, METHODOLOGIES

The Staging Australian Women’s Lives project team proposes this ‘Show and Tell Panel’ as a space to reflect on how feminist processes and methods employed in the project disrupt methodological approaches that separate researchers and participants. We examine ways to work collaboratively through processes of reflexivity and reflection. The panel, comprised of members of the reserach team and project participants, will discuss and share how affective methods and feminist pedagogies might be used to collectively map the complex lives, legacies and strategies of Australian women theatre practitioners over the last 50 years. 

We will also share how the disruptive effects of COVID-19 have asked us to adapt and improvise methodologies centred on flexible co-creation and eliciting collective memory and lived experience. We will explore how our current situation has asked us to develop ways of working that approach feminist intersectional research that is intimate, embodied and empathic. As examples, the panel will discuss the process of developing a series of ‘legacy letters’ videos, collective potted histories, map-making exercises, a collection of ‘beautiful trouble’ posters and the generation of word clouds with research participants. In addition, we will reflect on the often moving process of using interviewees’ homes as sites for interviews, which has revealed the work of theatre research as the creation of intimate feminist publics.  We consider how to ethically engage with these co-created materials, intimacies and artefacts which decentre, decolonise, queer and disrupt traditional methodological conventions. 

If it is true, as one participant offered, “You can’t have feminist content, without feminist process” (Valente, 2021), then making feminist processes central to collectively navigating, changing and undertaking research outcomes is key.


Professor Stacy Holman Jones
Over the course of a 20-year career, I have developed an international reputation for leading the development of innovative arts-based methodologies, performance, feminist and cultural studies research, and gender and sexualities studies. I’m recognized for a collaborative and impact-focused research program that integrates theory and creative practice as a means of critique and transforming lives, relationships, ways of living, and communities.  I have published more than 100 articles, book chapters, reviews, and editorials.

Associate Professor Alyson Campbell
My work as a theatre director spans a broad range of companies and venues in Australia, the UK and the US over the last 30 years. I have collaborated closely with Sydney playwright Lachlan Philpott since our production of his play Bison in 2000, creating queer assemblage wreckedAllprods with him in 2001. Our works together include The Trouble with Harry, Colder, Catapult, GL RY, Cake Daddy. Many of these works have also been Practice as Research projects and I have an ongoing interest in artistic research methodologies.

Dr Misha Myers
Through my career as a researcher and practitioner, I have built an international reputation for developing arts-based and digital methods for understanding experiences of place and how it matters politically for isolated and marginalized groups including refugees and asylum seekers, women and rural communities in a global context. This impact-driven work has taken shape through different art forms and media in collaboration with NGO, community organisations, social service providers, theatre companies, and commercial partners to generate new strategies and knowledge.

Mish Grigor – PhD Researcher
Mish Grigor is situated in the performing arts as a maker, writer and performer. Working across a range of collaborative formats, she is co-director of APHIDS with Lara Thoms and Eugenia Lim, and one third of POST with Zoe Coombs Marr and Natalie Rose.With projects often departing from her own experiences, she enjoys connecting tangible everyday dilemmas with larger political and philosophical concepts. Using humour, facts and fiction, she is intent on examining, wasting and/or cherishing time spent with other people.