How to play in slow time: Embodying creativity literacies in digital learning environments

This article considers how the emergent digital pedagogies used in a new creativity course run at the Univeristy of New South Wales contribute to the building of sensed, intuitive and embodied creativity literacies. In doing so, it addresses questions around the function of tertiary education within an accelerated, digitised and COVID-19-saturated globe. For while creativity is being touted as what every student needs - and what every employer wants - there is little understanding of how this most mystifying of skills can be taught to students in broad disciplines. There is even less understanding of how full-bodied modalities of creative cognition can be leveraged as moments of deep insight in the socially distanced realm of the digital. Drawing on hands-on methods from ground-breaking musicians, performers, dancers and writers, this article shows how the neuroscience and psychology of taking 'beautiful risks', committing to uncertainty and paying attention can be harnessed in digital learning. These dynamic digital pedagogies are principled in embodied liveness, playful interactivity and generative curiosity. They support students with practical strategies to take risks with imagination, discover through collaboration and work responsively in relation to diverse situations.

Meaning-Making in the Face of Intersecting Catastrophes: COVID-19 and the Plague of Inequality

Beyond the enormous toll in illness and death, the COVID-19 pandemic unleashed multiple additional problems (job loss, evictions, hunger) that are disproportionately borne by those who were already vulnerable. In this essay, I reflect about these intersecting catastrophes, which I see as undermining the capacities of many to live meaningful and fulfilling lives. Symptoms of these problems are growing "deaths of despair" due to suicide, drug and alcohol addictions. Drawing on multidisciplinary science, I suggest that these widespread problems cannot be ministered to by focusing only at the individual level. Structural factors, including unfair distributions of resources and opportunities demand attention as well because they are fueling growing disparities between the privileged and the disadvantaged segments of contemporary societies. I examine what meanings and emotions are relevant responses to these troubled times, giving emphasis to the legitimacy of anger and outrage in the face of suffering and injustice. Further insight is sought in historical accounts of longstanding tensions between self-interest and the social contract. Going forward, I suggest that these turbulent times call for greater engagement with and scientific understanding of the arts and humanities in activating the deepest corners of our humanity. Examples from past and current art dealing with human suffering, inequality, and plagues illustrate their possible role in nurturing human capacities to understand, to care, and to act.

A Special Class of Experience: Positive Affect Evoked by Music and the Arts

A positive experience in response to a piece of music or a work of art (hence ‘music/art’) has been linked to health and wellbeing outcomes but can often be reported as indescribable (ineffable), creating challenges for research. What do these positive experiences feel like, beyond ‘positive’? How are loved works that evoke profoundly negative emotions explained? To address these questions, two simultaneously occurring classes of experience are proposed: the ‘emotion class’ of experience (ECE) and the positive ‘affect class’ of experience (PACE). ECE consists of conventional, discrete, and communicable emotions with a reasonably well-established lexicon. PACE relates to a more private world of prototypical aesthetic emotions and experiences investigated in positive psychology. After a review of the literature, this paper proposes that PACE consists of physical correlates (tears, racing heart…) and varied amounts of ‘hedonic tone’ (HT), which range from shallow, personal leanings (preference, liking, attraction, etc.) to deep ones that include awe, being-moved, thrills, and wonder. PACE is a separate, simultaneously activated class of experience to ECE. The approach resolves long-standing debates about powerful, positive experiences taking place during negative emotion evocation by music/art. A list of possible terms for describing PACE is proposed.

Psychosocial outcomes of dyadic arts interventions for people with a dementia and their informal caregivers: A systematic review

Dementia is a neurodegenerative syndrome that can lead to profound psychological and social challenges for people with dementia and their informal caregivers. Previous research has found positive effects of arts-based interventions for people with dementia and caregivers that have been dyadic in nature and the present article sought to review these findings. A systematic literature review was conducted to investigate psychosocial outcomes of dyadic arts interventions. PsychINFO, Medline, Web of Science and ASSIA databases (from journal inception to March 2020) were searched as well as Google Scholar and reference lists of relevant studies were searched. Interventions were delivered to people with dementia and their caregivers in community-based settings across five countries. Thirteen peer-reviewed journal articles met the criteria for inclusion in this review, six focusing on performing arts and seven on visual arts. The findings suggested that choral singing and visual arts interventions may have positive effects on psychosocial outcomes for both people with dementia and their informal caregivers. Improved well-being, quality of life, mood, enhanced identity and decreased social isolation were found in some studies. Importantly, across all studies, participants reported enjoying arts activities. This is the first review to systematically assess dyadic arts activities in a dementia context. These activities offer enjoyable and engaging experiences for many person with dementia and caregivers and were generally found to have positive results but mostly small sample size, lack of control groups and different outcome measures made comparisons challenging. Future research recommendations include further theoretical development, identifying key intervention components, and specifying relevant and measurable theoretically informed outcomes within dyadic interventions for this population.

The impact of COVID-19 on cultural tourism: art, culture and communication in four regional sites of Queensland, Australia

The arts, cultural and creative industries are among the most adversely affected sectors of the economy in the wake of COVID-19 social distancing measures, travel restrictions and prohibition of large gatherings of people. Focusing on Cairns, the Gold Coast, Central West and the Sunshine Coast – four regional areas of Queensland, Australia – this article provides an overview of impacts on cultural tourism and considers the prospects for regional cultural tourism as part of a ‘creative economy’ revival.

A Qualitative Study of the Views of Patients With Medically Unexplained Symptoms on The BodyMind Approach®: Employing Embodied Methods and Arts Practices for Self-Management

The arts provide openings for symbolic expression by engaging the sensory experience in the body they become a source of insight through embodied cognition and emotion, enabling meaning-making, and acting as a catalyst for change. This synthesis of sensation and enactive, embodied expression through movement and the arts is capitalized on in The BodyMind Approach^® (TBMA). It is integral to this biopsychosocial, innovative, unique intervention for people suffering medically unexplained symptoms (MUS) applied in primary healthcare. The relevance of embodiment and arts practices in TBMA are discussed in relation to the views of participants in the pursuit of self-management. If widely employed TBMA could have an enormous impact, reach, and significance for patients and global health services. This original pre-clinical trial of qualitative research reports on the perceptions of participant patients with generic MUS, a world-wide issue usually treated by either psychological therapy or physiotherapy. TBMA is not a therapy but a health education program founded upon the concept of an integration of psychological elements with physiological, bodily, and sensory experiences. Thematic analysis of qualitative data sets from open-ended questions in semi-structured interviews and a written questionnaire post intervention is presented. Five aspects which appear to be key to learning self-management were derived from analyzing the data: (1) body with mind connections; (2) importance of facilitation; (3) potential benefits; (4) preparedness for change; (5) self-acceptance/compassion. This article advances the discourse on the nature of self-management for MUS through changing the mind-set and the relationship participants have with their bodily symptom/s through employing embodied methods and arts practices, challenging current, and solely verbal, psychological conceptual frameworks. Rigor lies in the method of data analysis using cross verification of credibility between reported findings and scrutiny by stakeholders. We conclude that facilitated TBMA groups employing embodied methods and arts practices can act as a method for developing the self-management of MUS and improving wellbeing.

Nurturing Context: TRACE, the Arts, Medical Practice, and Health Literacy

This chapter builds upon prior research on the interconnectedness of context to content as it relates to health and health literacy. The authors focus on the use of the arts as a novel way to engage with and to promote health and health communication. Most published efforts exploring the humanities and health emphasize how healthcare practitioners can enhance their clinical skills, promote wellness, and prevent burnout through engagement with the arts. The current chapter adds how the arts inform us about health, and more broadly, the lessons to be learned from appreciating multidimensional contexts. The authors underscore the role of the arts to address context and introduce how the arts impact health literacy. The authors provide an overview of TRACE, a unique pedagogical program that explores both the content and context communicated via the arts, with a focus on lessons for medicine and health, including health literacy. The chapter suggests enhanced provider apperception via arts exposure has implications to improve clinical practice and health literacy.

Making problems: The inventive potential of the arts for alcohol and other drug research

The arts and arts-based methods are rare in critical studies of alcohol and other drugs. This article explores the potential role of the arts for allowing alcohol and other drug problems to develop in more collaborative (with participants, broadly conceived) and thus more generative ways. Following turns in the field toward the performativity of alcohol and other drug realities, this article instead asks: what happens if we take the 'experimentality of social life' (Marres, Guggenheim & Wilkie, 2018) as our starting point for research rather than our object? That is to say, how can we work with our already inventive alcohol and other drug worlds to know and intervene with them in closer, more intimate ways? Through ethnographic engagement with a community theatre group for people who identify has having experiences of dependency or addiction, the article looks at how they 'set up' and 'stage' the problem they seek to research and enact through embodied, sensorial and relational modes of knowing that are created speculatively together and with the audience and environment. As we now accept that our methods in critical drug studies are entwined with the realities they make, this article intends to awaken our methodological imagination and attentiveness to the arts as the discipline that has always made things to know things, in order to enable problems to not only be known in new ways but to emerge in new ways.

A visit to The Doctor

This article was migrated. The article was marked as recommended. Whether the arts have any value in the medical curriculum continues to be debated. This article presents the author's views on the use of the arts, the principal contention being that the arts (the humanities) can teach us a lot about the art of medicine. In this article, Thomas Fildes' painting, The Doctor, and Randa Haines' film of the same name are referenced to demonstrate how the arts may be utilized in order to create broader awareness and understanding and ultimately, transformational learning and change, two quite powerful outcomes. How the arts should be incorporated into the medical curriculum and how they should be taught are definite issues. This article makes recommendations with respect to some of the difficulties associated with both.

Pleasure junkies all around! Why it matters and why 'the arts' might be the answer: a biopsychological perspective

Today's society is pleasure seeking. We expect to obtain pleasurable experiences fast and easily. We are used to hyper-palatable foods and drinks, and we can get pornography, games and gadgets whenever we want them.

THE PROBLEM

with this type of pleasure-maximizing choice behaviour we may be turning ourselves into mindless pleasure junkies, handing over our free will for the next dopamine shoot. Pleasure-only activities are fun. In excess, however, such activities might have negative effects on our biopsychological health: they provoke a change in the neural mechanisms underlying choice behaviour. Choice behaviour becomes biased towards short-term pleasure-maximizing goals, just as in the addicted brain (modulated by the amygdala, posterior ventromedial prefrontal cortex' (VMPFC), striatum, nucleus accumbens; 'A-system') and away from long-term prosperity and general well-being maximizing objectives (normally ensured by the insula, anterior VMPFC, hippocampus, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), anterior cingulate cortex (ACC); 'I-system'). This paper outlines, first, what 'pleasure' is and what 'pleasure-only' activities are (e.g. social media engagement, hyper-palatable eating). Second, an account is given of the type of action that might aid to maintain the neural systems underlying choice behaviour balanced. Finally, it is proposed that engagement with the arts might be an activity with the potential to foster healthy choice behaviour-and not be just for pleasure. The evidence in this rather new field of research is still piecemeal and inconclusive. This review aims to motivate targeted research in this domain.

Eudaimonic well-being, inequality, and health: Recent findings and future directions

The theoretical and philosophical underpinnings of a eudaimonic model of well-being are examined and its empirical translation into distinct dimensions of well-being is described. Empirical findings have documented aging declines in eudaimonic well-being, but there is considerable variability within age groups. Among older adults who remain purposefully engaged, health benefits (reduced morbidity, extended longevity) have been documented. Eudaimonic well-being also appears to offer a protective buffer against increased health risk among the educationally disadvantaged. Neural and genetic mechanisms that may underlie eudaimonic influences on health are briefly noted, and interventions designed to promote eudaimonic well-being are sketched. Needed future research directions include addressing problems of unjust societies wherein greed among privileged elites may be a force compromising the eudaimonic well-being of those less privileged. Alternatively, and more positive in focus, is the need to better understand the role of the arts, broadly defined, in promoting eudaimonic well-being across all segments of society.