Dancing with Parkinson’s: co-creating knowledge with roots in participants’ bodily, sensory and aesthetic experiences

This presentation will present the collaborative research design of the project Dancing with Parkinson’s in which 43 participants in Parkinson’s dance classes, together with three university researchers, co-create knowledge with roots in participants’ experiences of Parkinson’s dance as an integral part of everyday life. Theoretically and methodologically, the project draws on the fields of (auto)ethnography, critical disability studies, narrative and graphic medicine and dialogic communication theory. The project employs ethnographic and arts-based research methods in the co- creation of knowledge in order to open up for visual, narrative, bodily, affective and aesthetic ways of knowing.
According to the literature, there are many challenges that arise from power-imbued tensions in relations between university researchers, people with illnesses, relatives and health care professionals when they create knowledge together.The aims of the project are to to generate knowledge about the participation of people with Parkinson’s, their families and professionals in research and research communication and to gain knowledge about dance and other art forms in Parkinson’s disease treatment.
A key focus of the presentation will be how the project tackled the tensions in research relations critically and reflexively in the ethnographic study that formed the first phase of the collaborative project.