ABSTRACT

Creative identity is emerging as a crucial issue for the women’s agency, above and beyond limiting notions of its personal or therapeutic benefit. Collaborative research project shines light on the importance of negotiating authorship and identity for the creative work of marginalised people. Conducting creative research in collaboration with people living with serious social disadvantage and the impact of past trauma is unchartered academic territory. Creative researchers hover in an array of indeterminate fields, such as artist and scholar, individual entity and member of a collective, a producer of ideas and the subject of others. Measuring the prospective researcher’s practical experience is a crucial barometer in assessing the capacity of that researcher to meet ethical and relational challenges of community-based research, in processes that some universities already deploy. The Memory Project has received serial state and federal arts funding and been awarded competitive research grants.