H8.2
Wednesday 10th December
Session H
9.30 -10.00
Programme number: H8.2
Research Domain: Student Experiences
Olivia Sagan
University of the Arts, London, United Kingdom
Anxious Enclosures and Open Disclosures : Researching Lives - Learning, Creativity
and the Passage of Mental (ill) health in Higher Arts Education (0005)
This paper will report on research currently being undertaken into the experiences of mentally
ill students of art and design in Higher Education.
The aim of the paper is two fold. Firstly, the research project ‘Researching Lives: Learning,
Creativity and the Passage of Mental (ill) health’ which began in 2007 at a large Higher Arts
Education institute will be described. Full account will be given of the methodology chosen
through which to explore a complex and notably under-researched area of Higher Education.
The paper makes a case for the use of long term biographic studies, informed by the
Biographic Narrative Interpretive Method (BNIM) of Wengraf (2001) and also for an
interpretive framework which is broadly psychosocial (Holloway and Jefferson 2000; Hoggett
2004).
The findings, at a primary stage of analysis, will be presented for discussion. Questions of the
use (Sagan 2007) to which learning and creativity have been put by the students will be
raised. An exploration of the deeper meanings of learning, creativity and auto/biographic
(Stanley 1992) pursuit, from within the experience of mental illness, will be undertaken.
A parallel aim of the paper is to raise some of the ethical and organisational issues
encountered in undertaking research with students with mental illness within the HE context.
Questions will be raised regarding how the ‘anxious enclosures’ maintained by structural
aspects of the university often appeared to contrast with the open disclosures of the students
themselves.
Hoggett, P. (2004). Strange attractors: politics and psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis, Culture
and Society 9: 74-86.
Holloway, W. and T. Jefferson (2000). Doing Qualitative research Differently: Free
Association, Narrative and
the Interview Method. London, Sage.
Sagan, O. (2007). An interplay of learning, creativity and narrative biography in a mental
health setting:
Bertie's story. Journal of Social Work Practice, 21:3, 311-321
Stanley, L. (1992). The auto/biographical I. Manchester, Manchester University Press.
Wengraf, T. (2001). Qualitative Research Interviewing: Biographic Narrative Semi-structured
Methods.
London, Sage.