Co-creating knowledge dialogically. Dancing with Parkinson's: A dialog/collaborative research project

Conducting research that crosses the arts with health care involves building bridges across disciplines, practices and forms of knowledge. According to the literature, there are many challenges that arise from tensions in relations between university researchers, citizens with illness, relatives and professionals, when they create knowledge together.

This presentation will discuss these tensions in the light of relational ethics and knowledge, and present a collaborative research design that addresses the arts and the power dynamics between different knowledge forms. We will also discuss how the arts in research can create space for the experiential knowledge of patients and relatives rooted in sensory, aesthetic and bodily knowing. We use a dialogic communication theoretical framework that combines Bakhtin's dialogue theory and Foucault's theory of power / knowledge. We also draw on the fields of narrative, graphic medicine and critical disability studies.

The research design that we will present is a collaboration between Roskilde University, the Danish Parkinson's Association and Tivoli Ballet School and is supported by the Velux Foundation's HumPraxis program. It is a collaborative design in which people with Parkinson's disease and relatives, researchers, and dance instructors will co-create knowledge on the basis of experiences in dance courses. Their dance experiences will form the basis for the co-creation of knowledge through the use of creative methods that open up for visual, narrative, bodily and aesthetic ways of experiencing and knowing. The co-created knowledge will be communicated through graphic stories as well as other forms of (academic) writing and research dissemination.