We invite PhD candidates, postdoctoral researchers and early career researchers working with art-based methodologies in geography to participate in an in-person workshop at the London School of Economics and Political Science (London, UK) on 25 March 2026, 10.00am–3.00pm (room tbc).
Conceptual Orientation: Increasingly, geographers are engaging participatory arts practices to co-investigate pressing social and spatial issues alongside communities (McLean, 2022). Critical feminist, queer, anti-racist, and decolonial scholars have mobilised arts-based approaches to explore the intersectional dynamics of precarious labour, neoliberal urbanism, austerity, carceral regimes, food sovereignty, and environmental crisis, among other concerns (McLean, 2017; Johnston and Pratt, 2019). This growing
body of work demonstrates how creative methods can foreground relationality, care, and collaboration, while amplifying voices and experiences frequently marginalised within dominant academic frameworks. At the same time, as McLean (2022) reminds us, arts-based methodologies do not sit outside the institutional conditions in which they are produced. They are shaped by neoliberal and colonial university structures that prioritise measurable impact, competitive outputs, and particular forms of professionalised knowledge production. These pressures raise important questions about extractive research relations, authorship, compensation, and the politics of representation. Yet arts based research can also open fissures within these enclosures, offering possibilities for unsettling dominant notions of value and impact, and for reworking how research is practised and shared. Against this backdrop, this workshop approaches arts-based methodologies not simply a srepresentational tools, but as practices that shape the research process as a whole—from the framing of research questions and fieldwork encounters to ethical negotiations, collaboration, authorship, and the circulation of outcomes. We invite contributions that critically engage with both the possibilities and tensions of arts-based research within contemporary institutional contexts, and that reflect on how creative practices might cultivate more reflexive, accountable, and transformative engagements with social, political, and spatial change.
Focus of the Workshop: This workshop seeks to bring into conversation scholars whose work engages questions of conflict, violence, justice and inequality, particularly in relation to colonialism and capitalism (including dispossession, extractivism and exploitation). We are especially interested in research that mobilises artistic and creative practices — including, but not limited to, photography, film-making, drawing, performance, sound, installation, creative writing and participatory arts — as methodological, analytical and political practices. The day will include contributions from invited guest speakers, short presentations by selected participants, and a collaborative session designed to place projects into dialogue.
We are particularly interested in reflecting on:
• Politics: How do art-based methods stage, negotiate or contest relations of power? What political imaginaries, antagonisms or solidarities do they help to assemble?
• Publics: What kinds of communities are brought into being through artistic practice? Who is included, excluded, or transformed through these encounters?
• Space: How do art-based methodologies create interstitial, interventional or commoning spaces? In what ways do they reconfigure the spatialities of research, collaboration and dissemination?
• Knowledge Production: How do art-based methodologies shape — or become shaped by — the institutional and political conditions under which knowledge is produced in western academia? In what ways might such work disrupt or reproduce colonial and hierarchical formations of knowledge?
Collective Exhibition (May–September 2026): The workshop aims to lay the groundwork for a collective exhibition in central London (May– September 2026, venue tbc), bringing together participants’ research outputs under a shared curatorial theme emerging from the workshop discussions. The exhibition seeks to create a space where diverse methodological experiments can be placed in conversation, foregrounding the ethical, aesthetic and political dimensions of art-based research in geography. Selected participants will be invited to contribute one or more outputs.
Participation and Selection: We will select up to 20 participants based on alignment with the workshop theme, the coherence and originality of the proposed projects, and their potential contribution to collective discussions and the exhibition. Participants are expected to attend the full workshop in person and to take part in subsequent online coordination meetings in preparation for the exhibition and potential further collective research outputs.
Submission Requirements: Please submit the following in a single PDF document:
· Project title
· Project outline (max.150 words)
· Motivation for participating in the workshop (max. 150 words)
· Reflection on the significance of art-based methodologies in geography in relation to your work (max. 150 words)
In addition, you are encouraged to attach 1–3 examples of potential outputs you would propose for the exhibition (these may include images, short films, audio clips, installation proposals, performance documentation, or other creative formats). Candidates should send their submissions to devgeogs@gmail.com by the deadline: Monday 2 March 4pm
For further information or enquiries, please contact Dr Ivana Bevilacqua at ib23@soas.ac.uk.