Embracing the Mosaic: Crafting Collaborative Poetics Research for Critical Resilience

As a poetry performer/writer/curator and social science scholar/researcher I lived for many years with a fractured identity. The pressure to delve into this jumble of assorted shapes and colours, showing them to the world piece by piece, as each new situation demanded, was enormously wearing. Furthermore, this artificial compartmentalisation of skills, knowledge and creativity served to limit the value and impact of my work, as someone who seeks to understand and act upon issues of social justice. Performative Social Science (PSS) has enabled me to understand myself and my research differently.
Through PSS, I have begun to angle these shards of broken tiles to the light, revealing new colours and patterns within them, before crafting a mosaic for myself and my research that (like PSS) is neither art nor science, but a seamless fusion of the two. That mosaic has ultimately taken the form of Collaborative Poetics, a participatory creative research method, aligned to and informed by PSS. This chapter invites you, as reader, into the mosaic to explore how the light shines, spins and refracts within it, to consider both why and how we should consider human inquiry to be inherently emotional, ethical, ideological and creative.