Methodology

My research utilizes an ethnographic interview process combined with a participatory and performative arts practice to explore the work above as well as the following questions:

• Can a participatory arts practice help veteran with moral questioning, future thinking, and self-representation through arts facilitated meaning making and imagination?

• Can performative outcomes of the above-mentioned arts practice both positively impact well-being in the veteran, while fostering empathy and peacebuilding in audiences?

My research will investigate the assertions that: personal perception is an expressive and creative instance; struggle and constraint are vital to the creative process; and people can find meaning through creative, experiential and attitudinal values.

My hypothesis is that one effective modality is finding unique narratives and transforming them into choreography to help people find a new embodied imagination, much like they did in military training, to move through the civilian world, in an Aristotelian-like way of underlining the connection between action and ethics.

My research will accomplish this through an interdisciplinary method that will take the theoretical texts of existential psychology and use a mixed method that relies on Erving Goffman dramaturgy that calls back to Ancient Greek dramaturgy, realizing theoretical frames through psychological texts and connecting those texts to the theoretical work of Viktor Frankl, Rollo May, and Marleau Ponty. Military service is a deeply embodied reality that places individuals on a personal existential journey.  As such, I believe research into the well-being of military and veteran communities requires an embodied methodology that explores well-being through the expansion of imagination.  In short, artistic performative practice as a way of integrating and rendering military experiences meaningful.  My methodology utilizes creative writing and dance to express and stage the existential journey of meaning-making and not only provides a novel means of embodied healing and has also shown positive results.