Developing a Toolkit for Interdisciplinary and Diverse Communities of Practice: Listening, Somatics, Presence, Wellbeing.

Funded by the AHRC/UKRI Impact Accelerator Awards KE Dialogues Scheme in 2023.

Our KE Dialogues project aims to create conceptual and practical bridges between diverse practices and contexts, and to simultaneously open new creative and technological possibilities.

Four of us – researchers Amanda Bayley and Ron Herrema, and practitioners Ximena Alarcón and Silvia Carderelli-Gronau – have come together from different countries (UK, USA, Colombia, and Brazil) and backgrounds, using the KE Dialogues scheme to explore diverse approaches to listening, presence, somatics and wellbeing within the broader context of diversities (e.g. neuro, ethnic, artistic, epistemic). We have been exploring ways to creatively ‘tune in’ to diversities, from interdisciplinary and cross-practice perspectives.

During our Dialogues, each researcher/partner has led a process of discovery within their respective practice. Through a series of workshops we have been exchanging knowledge on, for example, non-verbal communication, body movement, breathing, Deep Listening practices, migration, and co-regulation, as well as listening and sonic creative technologies.

Each workshop engaged in individual reflections and a 3 to 1 interview-led conversation and interactions which we documented in spatial audio. The audio material contributed to a podcast documenting our process. A further outcome of this process is establishing the foundations for a Toolkit for Interdisciplinary Communities of Practice.

Listen to the podcast