Exploring the Impact of Participatory Post-Conflict Performance Arts Research: The Case of Kosovo

Recent works show that the study of art and post-conflict reconciliation requires a multidisciplinary approach, that it benefits from collaboration with practitioners, and that much of the reconciliatory potential of art lies in the process of creating it. However, little is understood about how such research impacts participants and the public, as well as how wide this effect is.
This project aims to define routes to impact by developing and testing an experimental approach to engagement with a non-academic audience (performing artists) and by developing an innovative framework for analysing impact. The project builds on the knowledge created by previous research in the area, particularly the ARHC “Art and Reconciliation: Culture, Community and Conflict” project, on which Dr Sokolić was a Research Officer. This examined the effect of art on post-conflict reconciliation in the former Yugoslavia, including through the commissioning of arts projects. Our proposed project aims to replicate this, by focusing on performing arts (which the original project ignored) and by examining the specific research impact of such projects.
The funding will be used to organise an experimental immersive drama workshop with artists from Kosovo, Bosnia, and Serbia, facilitated by the grant investigators in collaboration with UK playwright Sarah Hehir and Kosovo-based Qendra Multimedia. The aim of the workshop will be for artists to create a play. This interaction, imbued with reconciliatory potential, will allow the artists to reflect on inter-ethnic relations. The grant would facilitate a rapid response to this collaborative opportunity, creating both a play and a research project, whose impact can then be traced along micro and macro dimensions. The funding would enable the measurement of impact at the micro level through innovative sociological methodology yet to be applied to measuring research impact. We will video the workshop and the participants’ interactions. These interactions will be analysed using Conversation Analysis, a micro-analytic method for the study of turns in conversations, which allows us to examine the impact of the research on participants qualitatively. This approach, already used in sociology, linguistics and political science (including by Dr Sokolić), has yet to be employed in measuring research impact. The methodology will help define an original replicable route to creating research impact and measuring it. If successful, future funding will be used to show the play in Prishtina, and study its impact on audiences studied using said experimental quantitative research designs applied to study impact at a generalisable (macro) level.