CURRENT RESEARCH INTERESTS Helen is currently involved in two research projects: * Evaluating the impact of a poetry programme on the wellbeing of dementia patients and their families, and on the practice of health care professionals and - * Exploring the experiences of young people, teachers and adult poet tutors in Apples and Snakes' youth poetry slam programme, The Word Cup. PHD THESIS Identity, Interaction and Influence: Poetry Slam Discourses in the U.K. and U.S.
Now available online here.
The central aim of this research was to explore how adult and youth poetry slam participants in the U.K. and U.S. construct narratives around slam and their identities as slam participants, producing a partial ethnography, rather than a definitive history, defence or critique of slam, and addressing the following questions:
1) What significance does slam have for its participants?
2) How is slam constructed differently in different geographical and social contexts?
3) How has slam evolved since its conception?
4) How is slam implicated in the construction of self and relationships for its participants?
5) In what ways can this micro-level analysis of slam shed light on wider social processes?
The project took an epistemological stance influenced by both micro and macro level social scientific approaches, including interactionism, social constructionism, discourse analysis, and the work of Antonio Gramsci and Pierre Bourdieu. It explored the ways in which slam participants based in New York, Chicago, Bristol and London actively work to construct narratives about slam and their identities within the slam world.
The intention was to locate slam within a wider context, both theoretically and practically. Thus, as well as researching the communities that shape slam poetry and poetry slams, the study explored the ways in which slam relates to other art forms like music, performance poetry and ‘academic’ poetry, and the relationship of poetry slams to other poetry events, such as readings, open mics and festivals.
This research drew on ethnographic tools of enquiry, including: the analysis of historical documents, to
trace the history of slam's development in England and the United States; participant
observation of slams and related events in these countries; interviews with slam
performers, promoters, curators and educators; and the analysis of secondary data sources, including DVDs, books, CDs, magazine and newspaper articles,
websites and radio broadcasts which seek to promote and/or discuss slam and slam events.
You can read the resulting thesis online here. You may also be interested in reading some of the articles referred to on the Publications & Presentations page of this site.
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PREVIOUS RESEARCH INTERESTS Prior to this, Helen's previous research tended to take a social psychological perspective. She has studied topics such as the role of familiarity in the fundamental attribution error and performance poets' professed motivations for performing their work. The latter study was conducted as part of her MSc in Qualitative Research Methods and presented at the University of the West of England's Psychology Postgraduate Conference 2006, under the title - Telling Tales: Performance Poets' Accounts of Why they Perform.