This workshop will be held as the closing session for the network. The aim is to ‘bookend’ the network paper sessions with 2 active, collaborative workshops focusing simultaneously on creative research methodology and building a collaborative research community across all those colleagues who present within the network. The aim is thus to …

“try to coordinate actions in relation to a material and symbolic world of others. Through this exploration from a variety of viewpoints, validity, truth, generalisation and objectivity become issues to be debated as people search for ways of informing their decision making. (Shostak 2002 p79)

Within traditional paper sessions there can be a tendency to see the research we are engaged in as a series of individual, specifically located, research projects with little to connect them. We recognize the risks in seeing research in such a fragmented way. As Daniel Barenboim and Edward Said remind us,

The moment you start boxing people in, you give them a sense of insecurity and produce more paranoia. You produce … more distortions. (Barenboim and Said 2004 p27)

The session will engage all those who have presented to the workshop during the conference in active reflection and evaluation in order to make connections between our research and build future collaborations.

Daniel Barenboim and Edward Said (2004) Parallels and Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and Society. London: Bloomsbury Publishing Schostak, John (2002) Understanding, Designing and Conducting Qualitative Research in Education: framing the project. OUP: Buckingham