Facilitating (the) facilitators: A self-reflexive joint practice mapping
🗓️ Thursday, 25 June — 3:10pm
- 4:10pm
(60 mins)
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Abstract
An abiding interest in the possibilities of dialogue and ethical human interaction anchors much of facilitative work. Enabled by precisely articulated prompts, play and improvisation often take a central role, yielding experiences of resonance or even communitas. As facilitating takes place across a gamut of scenarios, a few quick sketches complicate its potentials. For example, artistic researchers methodically frame, craft and facilitate engagements with multiple constituencies, including research partners, subjects, and collaborating agencies. Professional facilitators and coaches work in settings that address stated needs and goals of corporate, governmental, educational and individual clients. Across institutional and public situations and beyond disciplines, artists co-create and advocate for agendas under which to facilitate dialogic interactions with audiences, publics, communities and each other.
Contributors to our SIG work with all the above scenarios. What can we learn from each other? How much do our practices have in common? How do we navigate ethics and agenda setting? Which additional trajectories will emerge as we engage in focused conversation?
As an experimental session, our Forum convening will use sequenced one-on-one and group conversations to initiate spatial mappings of our facilitation practices. We will have simple materials such as paper, pens, tape, fabric, string, and some furniture at hand. For those who cannot be in Galway, we will design opportunities to contribute by proxy. We solicit your prompts, suggestions and digital materials so that those in the room can react to, animate and incorporate them. While we ask that participants will spend the full session with us, we can also imagine improvising introductions and tours to those dropping in, incorporating their comments and additions. With permission, photography, video and notes will serve to co-create a Research Catalogue project following the event.
Contributors to our SIG work with all the above scenarios. What can we learn from each other? How much do our practices have in common? How do we navigate ethics and agenda setting? Which additional trajectories will emerge as we engage in focused conversation?
As an experimental session, our Forum convening will use sequenced one-on-one and group conversations to initiate spatial mappings of our facilitation practices. We will have simple materials such as paper, pens, tape, fabric, string, and some furniture at hand. For those who cannot be in Galway, we will design opportunities to contribute by proxy. We solicit your prompts, suggestions and digital materials so that those in the room can react to, animate and incorporate them. While we ask that participants will spend the full session with us, we can also imagine improvising introductions and tours to those dropping in, incorporating their comments and additions. With permission, photography, video and notes will serve to co-create a Research Catalogue project following the event.
Biography
At our inaugural meeting at the SAR Forum in Tilburg in 2024, contributors moreover shared a realization that facilitating asserted itself at a central position in our practices, even before we recognized and named it.
Facilitating practices can be identified widely in interactive and community-based art, and in theater and the performing arts, for example using games, props and improvisation. There are intersections with pedagogy and didactics, with professional facilitation and coaching, and with therapeutic work. In comparing notes, we find that we locate facilitating in conjunction with ethics and agency, with vulnerability, joy and communitas.
What does it mean to facilitate in the context of artistic research? How is facilitating integral to designing and conducting studies and research in the sciences and humanities? What is the role of a facilitator? Who agrees to participate in a facilitation setting, and why?
Can facilitation be embedded in an object, a structure, a notation, or an algorithm? Which literatures and theories, which artistic practices are currently being articulated? Why is this focus emerging now? How are we drawing on a greater web?
If your practice contains elements of facilitation or is driven by it, this SIG can be a forum to share questions, techniques and observations. We are interested in research and exposition approaches and in developing publication opportunities.
You may access our detailed schedule for the SAR Conference in Porto 2025 and projects on the online repository via the link below.
Facilitating practices can be identified widely in interactive and community-based art, and in theater and the performing arts, for example using games, props and improvisation. There are intersections with pedagogy and didactics, with professional facilitation and coaching, and with therapeutic work. In comparing notes, we find that we locate facilitating in conjunction with ethics and agency, with vulnerability, joy and communitas.
What does it mean to facilitate in the context of artistic research? How is facilitating integral to designing and conducting studies and research in the sciences and humanities? What is the role of a facilitator? Who agrees to participate in a facilitation setting, and why?
Can facilitation be embedded in an object, a structure, a notation, or an algorithm? Which literatures and theories, which artistic practices are currently being articulated? Why is this focus emerging now? How are we drawing on a greater web?
If your practice contains elements of facilitation or is driven by it, this SIG can be a forum to share questions, techniques and observations. We are interested in research and exposition approaches and in developing publication opportunities.
You may access our detailed schedule for the SAR Conference in Porto 2025 and projects on the online repository via the link below.