Dreaming fairness and re-imagining equality and diversity through participative aesthetic inquiry

Introduction

This article presents the findings of a participative action inquiry (Reason and Bradbury, 2001) into how arts-based inquiry can revitalise equality and diversity work. Our previous research with gender equality advocates and managers in public service organisations found that organisational responses to gender equality and diversity legislation had become tired, lacking in energy and had lost momentum (Page et al., 2007). This research article establishes the potential of arts-based inquiry for bringing new life to equality and diversity practice and for introducing different perspectives to the practice of diversity and equality in organisational contexts.

We selected participative action inquiry as our research methodology in order to explicitly engage with participants’ lived experiences and to facilitate the practical application of new understanding. Building on the extended epistemology developed by Heron and Reason (1997, 2001), we introduced three arts-based methodologies: visual inquiry (Page and Anon, 2012), poetic writing (Grisoni, 2012) and social dreaming (Lawrence, 2005). We will argue that engaging with ‘tacit’ knowledge (Tsoukas, 2005) within a community of inquiry can offer a resource for organisational learning by making what has not previously been thought available for discussion and interpretation. In our analysis of the research findings, we will demonstrate that the meanings and understandings held by participants in relation to equality and diversity were enlivened and changed.

Our research discussion engages with the wider question of how dreams and visions that inspire working towards a more just society be brought into institutional practice? The article’s originality lies in its analysis of poetic writings, dreams and visual materials created in the context of inquiry, extending current understandings of the contribution arts-based, aesthetic experiences bring to organisational practice and more specifically to restoring the transformative potential of practices for promoting equality and diversity and eliminating discrimination.

This article begins by setting the context for the research, introducing our argument that the transformative potential of equality and diversity practice in organisations has been lost as a result of over-bureaucratised compliance processes. We then introduce our methodological approach, beginning with the case for engaging with the aesthetic as a dimension of organisational experience and methodology for change, and then introducing the three arts-based inquiry methodologies. In the analysis of our findings, we demonstrate that liminal spaces were created within which predominant modalities of knowing were challenged and alternatives presented. We offer a critical reflection on the processes of engaging with arts-based inquiry, which discusses their transformative potential. In our conclusions, we make the case for further research into the potential of arts-based inquiry methodologies to transform equality and diversity practice in organisations.

The lost transformative potential of gender equality and diversity practice: How to translate dreams and visions into institutional practice?

Feminist visions and aspirations to create more equal and just organisations are not new (Rowbotham, 1992). Current institutional practices to promote gender equality and diversity in business and public service organisations have been shaped both by the ideals held by social movements of the 1970s and by economic imperatives (Walby, 2009, 2011). In this sense, gender equality and diversity practices are shaped both by dreams and ideals, and the harsh realities of social and economic context.

In the 1970s and 1980s, in Great Britain, second wave feminists, alongside other radical social movements, developed a politics aimed at transforming social and institutional relations (Lovenduski and Randall, 1993; Walby, 2011). The period was characterised by experimentation in arts and culture, political discussion, self-organisation and experiences of living life differently (Rowbotham, 1989; Segal, 2007). This wave of creative activity sustained individuals who sought to translate their new relationships and ways of seeing the world into political and business organisations.

Inspired by these movements, women and men within Western democracies have sought to embed requirements to promote equal opportunity and eradicate sex discrimination within government, and public service organisations (Eisenstein, 1991; Rees, 1998; Walby, 2011).In the course of the 1980s, this project was led and developed by politicians, members of public service organisations and independent campaigns (Lovenduski and Randall, 1993). During the 1980s and 1990s, international and regional networks were formed, and instruments for promoting gender equality were developed and taken up by governments within the European Union and more widely in Western democracies (Rees, 1998, 2005; Walby, 2005).

Within Great Britain, this apparent success has, however, led to a paradox. Visions and collective dreams produced through a dynamic process of political struggle and cultural expression are in danger of becoming ossified within regulatory frameworks designed to achieve compliance with legislative requirements (Page, 2009, 2011).This phenomenon is evidenced throughout the public sector where accounting practices for the implementation and measurement of the large number of change initiatives have predominated. Progress is evidenced, in the form of statistics showing progress towards race and gender in employment, salary differentials and services. There is, however, a sense of frustration and disappointment at the limited overall impact of equality legislation. Moreover, the centralising regulatory role of government is now itself under review by academics and senior managers in business and public services and with it the equality legislation, which has become regarded as too bureaucratic:

Bureaucracy and prescription are not routes to equality. Overburdening business benefits no one, and real change doesn’t come from telling people what to do. (Cabinet Office – HM Government, 2012)

If telling people what to do does not achieve change, what does? Seductive indeed as this statement is to anyone who is tired of bureaucratic overload, it remains the case that before being told to eliminate discrimination, the inequalities and possibilities of doing things differently were not ‘seen’, and are subsequently accepted within public discourse.

Taking up the challenge, we ask, ‘How does one translate dreams and visions that inspire working towards a more just society, into institutional practice?’ and ‘Is it inevitable that legislation and compliance will kill the dream?’ It is our contention that breaking the patterns of collusion through which inequalities are reproduced may need to go beyond legislation and ‘raising awareness’. Arts-based methods encourage capacity among those responsible for implementing equality and diversity legislation to ‘hear’ and register the range of emotional responses towards equality and diversity issues among organisational members. Our previous research with gender equality advocates and managers in public service organisations began with an invitation from a local government equality manager, who was concerned that gender equality work had lost momentum despite the adoption of formal processes and procedures. The research workshop that followed was jointly sponsored by her organisation, and attended by managers, advocates and researchers in public service organisations and the university. Arts-based practices were introduced to explore concerns about the lost momentum to gender equality work, and participant feedback suggested that there was potential in developing this approach (Page et al., 2007).

In the next section, we introduce our methodological approach and the three workshops designed to explore these questions through participative action inquiry (Reason and Bradbury, 2001) using arts-based methods.

Methodology and epistemological approach: The transformative potential of aesthetic inquiry to investigate equality and diversity practice

In recent years, a growing body of organisational research has been concerned with rehabilitating and asserting the ‘aesthetic’ as a dimension of organisational life (Strati, 1999). Aesthetic inquiry taken back to the root meaning in Greek refers to an act of sensory perception, which in turn breathes new life and transformative potential into those who engage with both the process and the products of arts-based inquiries.

The aesthetic signposts the sensory, affective dimensions of lived experience, and organisational researchers are developing arts-based qualitative research methodologies, as a way of investigating these dimensions of lived experience in organisations (Anon and Grisoni, 2011; Grisoni, 2012; Warren, 2002). Alongside this, arts-based methods are increasingly used for the purposes of leadership development (Taylor and Ladkin, 2009), and for organisational learning (Broussine, 2008; Grisoni, 2009; Grisoni and Page, 2010).

These developments and applications are concerned with accessing knowledge in organisations that is ‘lost’ to view, yet holds a value. Variously theorised as modalities of knowing (Seeley and Reason, 2008), the ‘unthought known’ (Bollas, 1987) or ‘tacit knowledge’ (Tsoukas, 2005), arts-based methodologies claim to offer a means to arrive at what has not previously been thought, or which could not be thought because of what is already ‘known’.

Heron’s four modalities of knowing point to a privileging of the propositional mode, over and above the experiential, the presentational and the practical modalities. As a result, knowledge claims based wholly on the propositional are disconnected from and incongruent with the three modalities that make up our lived experience. Of these, presentational knowing refers to sensory, non-verbal forms of knowing that may be expressed in music, dance and non-verbal forms, and engaging with this modality can, as has been suggested, reintegrate aesthetic experience into propositional knowing (Seeley and Reason, 2008; Seeley, 2011).Grisoni (2012) develops this further by proposing that arts-based inquiry takes shape between public and private worlds; the presentational space of knowing is found both in the process of creation and its outcomes (p. 12).

The experience of dissonance between modalities of knowing can, we would argue, become a catalyst for seeking alternative understandings and new meaning. Organisational applications of arts-based research point to the unthinkable and inexpressible of what is ‘known’ but cannot be articulated within predominant organisational discourses (Broussine, 2008; Grisoni and Page, 2010; Page and Anon, 2007). The practices of drawing, painting, making artefacts or poetry and exploring the social meaning of dreams (Lawrence, 2005), within a context of inquiry, can help members of organisations remember the emotional quality of lived experience that could not be expressed in their organisational roles. Learning occurs in the processes of making, and through reflection on what is created (Gayá Wicks and Rippin, 2010; Grisoni, 2012; Grisoni and Anon, 2012).

The research workshops were designed to investigate how recovering the emotional quality of lived experiences that could not be expressed in organisational roles could become a catalyst that enabled workshop participants to explore the transformational potential in equality and diversity practice and how to re-engage with it. Three research workshops were held for academic researchers and postgraduate students interested in using arts-based methodologies to explore aspects of their lived experiences of equality and diversity in organisations. Workshop participants were invited to bring the power of creative imagination to bear on the meanings we bring to equality and diversity work in organisations in a rapidly changing landscape. The workshops offered a space to explore how to get under the surface of given meanings, in order to creatively engage with conflicting messages and demands, and in order to revitalise practice.

Each one-day workshop was attended by 12 participants. A total of 24 people attended one or more workshops, with three participants attending all three and a further four attending two out of three. Participants included managers responsible for implementing equality and diversity services or human resource initiatives, management development consultants and academics from business schools. The majority of them were postgraduate students, colleagues and graduates of the University Business Schools where two of the authors are employed as academics, and one is doctoral student and organisation consultant. In each workshop, the inquiry theme was introduced followed by an introduction to the arts-based mode of inquiry to be worked with. Following this, participants worked together using the methodology ascribed to each workshop: visual inquiry, poetic writing and the social dreaming matrix. In the final part of each day, participants drew out meanings and insights gained from their participation and considered what actions could be taken back to the workplace. Artefacts created during the workshops were photographed, and a participant observer was nominated to take notes recording the reflective discussions that were developed during the day. The authors used these to identify themes relating to experiences of equality and diversity in organisations and relating to participant engagement with arts-based inquiry.

In the first workshop, a ‘visual inquiry’ led by the first author (M.P.) (Page and Anon, 2012) explored the meanings, dilemmas and demands that inform and sustain equalities and diversity practice. Working with collage, participants reflected on and sought meaning in the visual representations that they created of their experiences of equality and diversity practice (Rose, 2008). In three iterative cycles of making and reflection on artefacts produced (Taylor and Ladkin, 2009), they explored the meanings they brought to equalities and diversity, and contradictions and tensions between these meanings and their experiences of doing equalities and diversity work in their organisation. Through collaborative production of a collage made up of images taken from their previous work, they considered how they might re-imagine the practice of equalities and diversity work.

The second workshop on ‘transition writing’ led by the second author (L.G.) (Grisoni, 2009) worked with poetry and poetic writing. In this workshop, participants created haiku based on experiences drawn from critical incidents relating to equality and diversity (Grisoni, 2008). This was followed by a technique to create a ‘black out’ poem (Kleon, 2010) from an organisation’s Equality and Diversity Policy Statement. Finally, participants worked with free writing, a technique in which a person writes continuously for a set period of time without regard to spelling, grammar or topic (Cameron, 1992). The technique can be used to collect initial thoughts and ideas on a topic, often as a preliminary to formal writing.

The third workshop, led by Jacqueline Sirota, comprised a social dreaming matrix (Clare and Zarbafi, 2009; Lawrence, 2005). In a social dreaming matrix, dreams do not belong to the individual dreamer, but are seen as meaningful, shared experiences that are relevant to the whole group. Free association with dreams allows the emotional and thematic contents of the dream to be amplified. The workshop facilitator helps the group follow the guidelines for the matrix to enable allegories, associations, meanings and symbols to be identified. There is an underlying assumption that all organisational systems and processes include dreams and fantasies (the first level is practical and administrative, the second is visionary and ideological and the third level is dreams and fantasies). Following Lawrence, in this workshop, dreams were shared in two matrix sessions, and participants were invited to reflect on the changing meanings of diversity and equality suggested by dreams and emergent images and themes.

Each workshop produced rich data about how participants had engaged with the theme of equality and diversity in organisations, and about how the research methods used were experienced. In the next section, we analyse and discuss these findings. We introduce the concept of liminal space (Turner, 1974; Van Gennep, 1977) to explore how participants engaged and disengaged with the theme of equality and diversity practice and what new thoughts emerged. Finally, we reflect on what it would take to ‘convert’ these new thoughts into a renewed approach to equalities and diversity practice, in organisational contexts.

Analysis of findings: Creating liminal spaces by suspending from what is known

The Liminal spaces are between phases of estrangement/separation and integration/belonging. (Turner, 1974)

The concept of liminal space signposts the ‘in between’ qualities of social spaces, and the ambivalence and the risks of inhabiting them (Douglas, 1966; Turner, 1974):

During liminal periods of all kinds, social hierarchies may be reversed or temporarily dissolved, continuity of tradition may become uncertain, and future outcomes once taken for granted may be thrown into doubt. (Horvath et al., 2009: 81)

We will demonstrate that without seeking to replace existing hierarchies, our workshops created the conditions for a learning community to develop that could grapple with difficult and emotionally charged topics. This had much in common with Turner’s (1974) communitas, with its coming together of status-free individuals (albeit that ‘loss’ of status was temporary). The workshop participants became what Turner (1974: 121) would have called ‘threshold people’, who inhabit an unsafe world of doubt and ambiguity. Yet, it was this very ambiguity that led to clearer understanding as we worked together to discover and puzzle over art-induced discoveries relating to aspects of our lived experiences of equality and diversity. The creation of this ‘space’ produced a multilayered experience, freer from the shackles of formal organisation practices and formal learning.

The workshops made use of the idea that there are two types of society: first, formal, the organisations and institutions that we belong to, and a second, informal, where the confines of formal society are temporarily suspended. Workshop facilitators acted as ‘ritual elders’ (Turner, 1974) whose task was to oversee what Turner described as being ‘accompanied by experiences of unprecedented potency’ (Turner, 1974: 128). Using arts-based approaches, the researchers hoped to create a stable space where participants could experiment with unfamiliar methods and approaches. In attempts to attain mastery of a topic, the ‘learner’ can be exposed to what might seem like troublesome and unsafe journeys (Cousin, 2006: 139). The methodologies led participants to a ‘condition where the usual practice and order are suspended’ (Czarniawska and Mazza, 2003: 267).

The workshops were designed to enable participants to ‘hold lightly’ (Marshall, 1999) rather than be driven by uncritical adherence to the rhetoric of equality and diversity practice, and to access dimensions of their lived experience that might not otherwise be available for thinking (Bollas, 1987; Seeley, 2011; Seeley and Reason, 2008). They aimed to create a social space for collective learning (Lave and Wenger, 1991), which was neither reducible to the organisational contexts that participants and facilitators brought with them, nor reducible to the subjective worlds brought by individual participants (Ahmed, 2004). Rather, they were ‘in-between’ spaces to be entered and then left, and within which it was hoped some learning or transformation would take place, through practices of co-inquiry.

Participants were invited to suspend from what was familiar to them in order to enter and to ‘dwell in’ a place of not knowing. This referred not only to knowledge content but also to ways and modalities of thinking. They were invited to move from organisational discourse embedded in practice, to knowing in another modality: knowledge expressed in aesthetic form, accessed in embodied, sensory and affective lived experience. Other studies have found that entry into liminal space was perceived to carry risk and danger of pollution and potential subversion of established order (Douglas, 1966; Turner, 1974). There are inevitable risks associated with moving away from what is already known into unchartered territory that may bring unwelcome thoughts, feeling and insights:

I have been conscious that this has affected me on an emotional level … experiencing fear and disquiet amidst quiet! (Workshop Participant)

Similarly, participants experienced their entry into this liminal space as risky (Mack, 2012; Strati, 2007).Some referred to anticipated ridicule from colleagues, and family, should they discover how they had been spending their time. During workshops, we noticed expressions of doubt: questioning the value of what was created, the process that was followed and the direct application of any learning to organisational roles outside the workshop.

Nussbaum (2001) reminds us that emotions are a form of knowledge. She criticises the dichotomy between reason and emotion as an artificial divide and stresses the intimate relationship between emotions, ethics and aesthetics. Ahmed (2007) investigates strategies for reattaching the language of diversity to other words that evoke histories of the struggle for equality, as a solution to ‘equity fatigue’. Following Ahmed (2004), we are interested in what emotions do rather than what they are, dislodging emotions from the exclusive inner realm of the individual in order to concentrate on them as a pivotal means of social interaction through which we make sense of experiences. By encouraging participants to access and represent their emotional experience of equality and diversity through art-based forms, we were able to generate collective understandings from a place of connectivity. In the following section, we analyse and reflect on our findings.

Emergent themes: Reflections on our findings

The workshops provided a social space for collective learning (Lave and Wenger, 1991), which was neither reducible to the organisational contexts that participants and facilitators brought with them nor reducible to the subjective worlds brought by individual participants. Rather, they were ‘in-between’ spaces to be entered and then left, and within which, it was hoped some learning or transformation would take place, through practices of participative co-inquiry. Ways of engaging with the topic through the methodologies introduced had to be co-created and reinvented repeatedly within each workshop. This was manifested in a variety of ways, which we analyse thematically in the following.

Remembering and forgetting the theme of equality and diversity

Despite clearly stated aims and objectives, participants frequently seemed to ‘forget’ that equality and diversity was the stated research theme, and once they started to engage in the workshop, they became entranced by their experience of aesthetic ways of doing inquiry using the methodologies introduced. It was as if, at times, the inquiry space became an escape from the pressures of their organisational worlds, offering an alternative playful and nurturing space. At other times, this pleasurable experience was ‘interrupted’ by the imagined risk of introducing – or not introducing – their experience of the workshop into their organisations. In the third workshop, the opening dream told of ‘a place I wanted to leave, but couldn’t without having to pay’. This led to a reflection, which questioned what and whether there was a price to pay for taking part in the workshop. The price was described as a ricevuta, Italian for an official receipt of payment, and the term used by the Mafia to refer to ‘payback’. In later dreams, there were references to guilt: holidays interrupted by reminders of tasks undone at work, pressure to return to work and the risk and danger of travelling in foreign lands. This movement between pleasure and anxiety and hope and fear, characterised each workshop.

Conformity and troubling established discourse

The idea that learners enter into a liminal state in their attempts to grasp certain concepts in their subjects presents a powerful way of remembering that learning is both affective and cognitive and that it involved identity shifts which can entail troublesome, unsafe journeys. (Cousin, 2006: 139)

During workshops, participants’ attention was interrupted at intervals by expressions of anxiety about diverging in some way from existing organisational equality and diversity discourse and practice. In the second workshop, for example, one participant worried that playful deconstruction of an equal opportunities policy statement was ‘disrespectful’. In the third workshop, one participant reported anxiety that the researchers leading the workshop might not be doing inquiry in the correct way. In this workshop, there were dreams of flying, accompanied both by exhilaration and delight, and a sense of anxiety at losing ground; glimpses of magical landscapes provoked a sense of wonder and of hope closely followed by a sense of intense anxiety and allusions to a cloud hanging over the group signifying something threatening and unsayable that could not be spoken or acknowledged.

It was as if it was difficult to hold onto permission to co-create something new. There was pressure carried into the workshops from organisational worlds to conform to what was already known in the orthodoxy of existing practice and norms. This anxiety was sometimes played out in relation to the methodology introduced, and sometimes by directly troubling the assumptions underpinning existing organisational discourses of equality and diversity. In the second workshop, one participant acknowledged concern over whether they would be able to write poetry to an acceptable standard, which they would not feel embarrassed by. They were subsequently surprised by the quality of what had been created. In the third workshop, a participant wondered whether it was acceptable or against the rules to offer reflections on the process of inquiry. A sequence of dreams was interrupted when a participant worried that she was taking part in a practice that was ‘excluding’ customers, clients and users of public services, who were not present, a paradox as all participants present were also actual users of public services.

The notion of ‘troubling’ established discourse was introduced by researchers interested in strategies for critically engaging with power regimes reproduced through discursive practice (Butler, 1990; Lather, 2007). In the practice of aesthetic inquiry in these workshops, it was as if the work of ‘troubling’ established discourse could not take place without reliving the experience of being troubled. One of the troubling aspects of participants’ experience was the contradiction between their evident pleasure in engaging in aesthetic inquiry and real or imagined disapproval from their managers. There were references at the beginning and end of each workshop to friends’, partners’ or colleagues’ imagined or real hostility to the inquiry activity. Not only were the processes introduced felt to be without value in predominant organisational narratives but also introducing them in organisational contexts was felt to be dangerous. In the first workshop, an image that appeared in two of the group collages depicted a line of uniformed armed police facing a crowd. This was interpreted by one group as oppressive crowd control, and by the other as useful protection. One of the dangers identified was of attack on members of equality groups participating in training events in organisations, should the ‘protective’ regulation established by equality and diversity practice be removed. An equal opportunities training commissioner who worked for a military defence organisation identified this potential danger to participants as a rationale for not introducing visual inquiry in his organisation.

Foregrounding emotions especially irony

Contradictory and ambivalent feelings about established equality and diversity practice and discourse emerged strongly in each of the workshops. In the first workshop, a participant spoke of his surprise at the anger he felt as he selected images for his collage. Another used juxtapositions of DayGlo colour to indicate dislike, anger and nausea in contrast to harmonised use of green and blue. Juxtapositions of images were used to suggest boredom and cynicism in relation to equality and diversity legislation, compliance and audit, and in discussion, this was taken up to develop a subversive sense of irony.

Contrasts in emotional tone were conveyed through contrasts and juxtapositions of images, colour and sound in the first two workshops, and in accounts of embodied sensory experience present in the dreams shared in the third workshop. Several dreams described looking out from cramped physically confined spaces, or climbing up or out of smelly dirty staircases, to a view of expansive and magical landscapes where viewing was accompanied by a sense of delight and hope. In contrast, in one of the poems in the second workshop, reference was made to ‘a place that was hollow and floating, mixed with air’ that later became ‘no room, no space, no escape’. In the third workshop, one dream was offered where a comfort blanket covering the dreamer turned to a rock so heavy that movement was impossible.

In the second workshop, irony emerged as a strong theme and seemed to outweigh cynicism through engagement with a series of poetic writing exercises. In one poetic writing exercise, participants worked on creating ‘black out’ poetry (Kleon, 2010) from a public service organisation’s Equality and Diversity Policy Statement (Figure 1).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

‘Black out’ poetry.

In discussion, one participant reflected,

In some cases the words look right but the policy statements are vacuous and look odd. (Workshop Participant)

Questions of authenticity were raised, and the idea of ‘hollow words’ with no emotion, feeling and culture was raised. Have policies on equality and diversity been written in a ‘dead language’?

Irony and opposite meanings to those intended by the official policy were created. It seemed that participants had found a way of exploring the juxtapositions of positive and negative feelings associated with equality and diversity practice and through play with language were reworking their engagement with the discourse and rediscovering meaning. Was the counter-discourse of equality and diversity one of irony?

Finding new meaning in the mutability of opposites

Tell All The Truth

Tell all the truth but tell it slant,

Success in circuit lies,

Too bright for our infirm delight,

The truth’s superb surprise;

As lightning to the children eased

With explanation kind,

The truth must dazzle gradually

Or every man be blind. (Dickinson, 1955)

In this poem, Emily Dickinson spoke of truth emerging not through a direct gaze, but when things are approached obliquely. In her poems, as in our workshops, the process of meaning making is circuitous, returning to the same themes again and again, from different perspectives, with different metaphors, arriving at different conclusions.

In the workshops, new meaning emerged in glimmers; was hinted at; alluded to or signposted through a series of juxtapositions of images, poetic phrases, metaphors and dreams; and disappeared when attempts were made to address the research theme directly. For example, strong images of hope emerged in poetic writing in workshop 2:

In my heart there is a maybe.

Build this day with windows, not closed doors.

I am alive when I move, shift, change.

And in contrast, there were words that implied contamination and infection:

To be released from the disease, the straightjacket of structure.

The air feels so polluted, so smoggy … spitting up the phlegm of hollow words.

Listening, really listening is the most difficult thing to do. It means lowering your shields at the risk of getting infected.

Within each workshop, meaning was created collectively in the process of interaction between the ‘audience’ and the creator of the artefact or dream. In the visual inquiry workshop, the concept of ‘audiencing’ (Rose, 2008; Warren, 2002) was invoked to distinguish between the individual and collective sites at which meaning was made. Collages created individually or in groups were ‘read’ by an audience who were asked to reflect on what they ‘saw’ in the images created, and to reflect on thoughts provoked. In the writing inquiry, meaning was inferred by the inflection and timing brought to phrases in the process of reading aloud and listening; the oral sounds of some words such as ‘mesh’ and ‘soft’ brought a different layer of meaning to the literal. Word play and meanings were slippery, fluid, and meanings emerged that had not been intended and were not always ‘seen’ or ‘heard’ by the presenter: for example, a visit to the London Borough of Hackney in a reported dream seemed to pick up the theme of disillusion with practice that had become ‘hackneyed’.

A theme that emerged in reflections in each of the workshops was the mutability of opposites, one thing changing to another, creating a sense of fluidity, of changing meaning, in contrast to fixed structures, obstructing movement. In the third workshop, the phrase ‘flip flop’ emerged from one of the dreams, ‘you can’t walk unless you flip and flop’, so that walking is a constant state of movement between two different states of equilibrium. This referred to the difficulty of holding two opposite states in mind alongside each other, both the idea of ‘ricevuta’, where debt is clear and rules are known, associated with existing organisational practice, and the landscapes that opened up new perspectives, glimpsed unexpectedly and in one dream through ‘shards of glass’, evoking a sense of undefined possibility for learning and change. A link was made between the challenges of holding onto both of these contrasting states of mind and the concept of ‘negative capability’, a concept first developed by Keats (Keats, 1899) and taken up in contemporary literature on leadership capacity (Simpson et al., 2002). In the workshop reflections, this was described as a desirable state of mind in which good and bad could be held in balance, but the thought was swiftly followed and shattered by a reference to remembered rage, a desire to machine gun colleagues at work.

A clearer sense of what was being learned through the inquiry emerged more clearly for the researchers, and for participants who had attended all of the workshops, in shared reflections as the workshops progressed. One point of tension that was worked throughout the workshops was between the pressure to ‘know’ what to do when responsible for implementing and working with equality and diversity as organisational members, and the permission to ‘not know’ in the workshops. In workshop 1, a sense of helplessness about how to engage with the task of implementing equality and diversity policy was expressed as a long list of questions emerged: ‘Who will help me with my task?’ ‘Where are the boundaries?’ and ‘What is the end game?’ and ‘How will I know when I’ve got there?’ It was as if having disconnected with established practice, participants who were expected to be familiar with equality and diversity practice had ‘forgotten’ what was expected and no longer ‘knew’ what to do. Or as if, in order to be open to not knowing, and to learning something new, it was necessary to ‘forget’ what was known. This ‘something new’ emerged through the lived experience of the workshops, and was felt to be embodied in ways of relating that had developed through the inquiry. Participant reflections at the end of the second and third workshops suggested that a democratic approach had been taken, encouraging everyone to take part in a way that was consistent with the subject of equality and diversity and that equality and diversity was felt to have been embodied in the processes of the workshops. In each workshop, there had been a sense that daring to challenge established regulations and codes of practice was powerfully cathartic of negative feeling, and that collective engagement with these emotions had led to re-energised commitment to engaging with equality and diversity practice. Several participants declared their intent to introduce arts-based inquiry within their organisational roles as managers, educators, early career researchers and consultants. Two took part in subsequent social dreaming events, and a further two offered opportunities for further action research work to be developed within their organisations. One of the participants, a postgraduate student, was able to facilitate a workshop herself as part of her dissertation research.

Transferability and development challenges

In discussion of the transferability of arts-based inquiry to their organisational contexts as a methodology for revitalising equality and diversity practice, participants drew attention to vulnerabilities, and the risk and difficulty of creating safe spaces for learning. Loss of meaning, ambivalence and disillusionment with existing practices, alongside commitment to promoting equality and diversity, were powerfully illustrated and explored in the making of collages and discussion these provoked in the first inquiry workshop. In the second workshop, playful irony and a spirit of iconoclastic delight emerged as participants deconstructed organisational artefacts claiming adherence to equal opportunities. In the final workshop, a ‘flip flop’ metaphor referred to in one of the dreams signalled a dynamic and continuous play of balanced movement, which was taken up by participants and seemed to signpost the possibility and difficulty of connecting organisational and aesthetic inquiry worlds. The metaphor pointed to the dangers of getting stuck in one or the other modality of knowing, losing the capacity for fluidity.

The exhilaration and risk of ‘troubling’ established discourse was illustrated in the contrasting emotional tone in many of the collages and dreams, and the playful and iconoclastic quality that we have described in the writing workshop. Participants noted that the methodologies encouraged thinking across boundaries, and several commented that they were surprised by the feeling of lightness that they experienced at and after the workshop.

A profound scepticism about the organisational project of promoting equality and diversity had been shared in the workshops. Was this an expression of cynicism, or was it more about use of irony to promote the spirit and intention of equality and diversity policy and practice? Was there a desire to disassociate from the vision and values that had created the equality and diversity project, or from the effectiveness of the practices and mechanisms developed?

Some clues were offered in dreams from the third workshop, referring both to hope and to danger:

The dreamer had been invited to a palace for a meal – outside there were street kids. She bags up scraps from the table and shares them with others who were not invited – trying to feed the uninvited street kids with scraps. Another commented that this seemed to capture the dilemmas of being an Equality and Diversity practitioner – the impossibility of feeding all who expected and needed to be fed.

In a second, dream, she was searching for a ‘Villa Velasquez’ in a rough part of town – she tries to ask where the villa was but doesn’t speak Spanish and is told to ‘leave the place, you stupid tourist’. An old lady waits to tell her about his [Velasquez] life and more people join and share stories and although she never gets to the Villa ‘it was very good’.

In a dream about the Occupy site, and a pyramid of the top 1%, the 10% underneath the top 1% could only overcome them serving those lower down, building up and reinforcing the base. There was a feeling of discomfort – and a participant said that she and her husband represented the 1% and felt excluded – how could she be involved? In response, there was a reminder that everybody dreams, a reference to power differentials dissolving and the humanity of dreams.

In the dream dialogue and discussion, at the end of the third and final workshop, the social dreaming matrix, there was a sense of excitement and of tiredness. It was difficult to know what to do with what had been experienced. Some dreams took participants into what seemed to be a dangerous shadow land. There had been a reference at the end of the first dream matrix to ‘something hanging there that can’t be spoken about’, a cloud at the end of the first session. There had been strong and beautiful dreams in contrast to worry about the technical aspects of inclusions/exclusions, concerns about having the right to go back and tell colleagues about the workshop. A sense of richness, emergent meaning, of not getting what you expect, by being adventurous, the impossibility of translation and the work of conversion was signposted, as a necessary task that could not be undertaken within the workshops.

The findings demonstrate the strength of the methodologies in creating a liminal space within which it was possible to suspend from what was known in order to learn something new. The liminal space took on the qualities of a different landscape, a parallel universe and state of mind, to be visited and dwelt in for a time and then left. The experience of dwelling in the space had qualities of exhilaration and risk, and our findings demonstrate that the methodologies did breathe new life into participant engagement with the diversity and equality project. Further research with participants is planned to investigate potential of the methodology to sustain participant engagement within organisational contexts.

Closing reflections: The transformative power of arts-based inquiry

In this research, participants were invited to explore how arts-based inquiry could revitalise equality and diversity practice through participative inquiry into aesthetic dimensions of their lived experience. How could arts-based inquiry restore lost meaning to practice that had become ossified, stifled by performance and compliance culture? A wealth of data was generated that evidenced a deep sense of injustice, rooted in awareness of inequalities and experiences of discrimination, and a deep sense of the failure of organisational strategies and practices to deliver more equality. These data emerged in the process of creating artefacts together, in writing and sharing dreams and through collective meaning making within the social space of the inquiry. Our findings demonstrate that many aspects of the lived experience that emerged within the inquiry were tacit, unavailable for learning or thinking within organisational contexts.

The analysis in this article has focused on the qualities of the liminal spaces for inquiry created, using arts-based methods to explore issues of equality and diversity. We have demonstrated that in these collective and social spaces, new meaning can be created through play and dreaming together, new thinking generated and creative vitality nourished. Through participative arts-based inquiry, participants were able to access what they knew but had not yet been fixed in ‘thought’ or organisational discourse and practice. These ways of knowing were embodied, sensory and presented in aesthetic form. They were drawn upon in the workshops to develop collective reflection on how they might be converted back into learning appropriate to organisational contexts.

Contrasts in emotional tone were conveyed through contrasts and juxtapositions of images, colour and sound, and in accounts of embodied sensory experience present in the dreams. These contrasts, and juxtapositions of emotional tone characterised the slippery and elusive quality of meaning making through reflection on dreams and artefacts created, and illustrated the intimate relationship between emotions, ethics and aesthetics (Nussbaum, 2001). By encouraging participants to access and represent their experience of equality and diversity through arts-based forms, we were able to generate insights into the social and collective meanings of emotion provoked within the inquiry process (Ahmed, 2004, 2007).

Participants described a sense of enjoyment of the workshop activities, characterised by purposeful yet playful creativity that allowed exploration of lived experience without pressure to produce solutions. They discovered new ways of engaging with equality and diversity, but these did not easily fit their experiences of existing organisational practice. We conclude that fixed definitions, regulation and compliance regimes created in order to bring about justice and freedom cannot replace the dreams and vitality that fuelled them, and may paradoxically contribute to stifling the vitality needed to continue making them meaningful. Our findings demonstrate the transformative potential of arts-based inquiry, and make the case for further research into the potential of arts-based inquiry methodologies to transform and enliven equality and diversity practice in organisations. Moreover, our findings point to the wider question of how can dreams and visions that inspire working towards a more just society be brought into institutional practice?