roanne thomas ~ scholarly work

My scholarly and artistic work are woven together, based in similar lines of inquiry. As a former Canada Research Chair in Creative Practices and Well-being, I explored the ways in which creativity supports meaning-making and connections to self and identity, as well as providing opportunities to build community.

In 'Situating our Selves', co-authored with visual artist, Mary Pfaff, one of my research groups turned to mixed media to explore our experiences of witnessing peoples' experiences of cancer. We worked from poetic transcriptions I created from participant data. Moving beyond conceptualizations of art therapy, this article uniquely focuses on researcher self-inquiry and includes photographs of the artwork we produced.

More recently, I led a SSHRC-funded project inviting women living with cancer to engage in collective art-making. The women were never asked about their illness experiences directly. Rather, those experiences surfaced through making art together and the sense of community this process helped to create. The resulting short documentary can be viewed here.

The thread that joins all of my work, scholarly and artistic, is the idea that art and making are themselves ways of knowing. What surfaces in the hands often arrives before it does in words.

For additional publications or more information about my scholarly work, please send me an email.