Art-Based Research Community (ARC) Webinar

Session 4: Beyond Words

Speakers: Fabiola Camuti, Philippine Hoegen & Debbie Straver

Date: Donderdag 9 april 2026

‍Time: 15:00–17:00 (CET)

‍Location: Online via Zoom

‍

How can non-verbal and embodied research methods help us explore what cannot easily be spoken? Some forms of knowledge cannot easily be expressed in words. This session engages with non-verbal and embodied research methods — including performative, visual, musical, and movement-based approaches — and explores how they can help give form to affect, memory, embodied experience, and collective sense-making. Working at the intersection of art, research, and (health)care, we are interested in what these methods make possible: what they open up, what they make perceptible, and what kinds of questions they raise. The session will also address analysis, documentation, and ethics when working with non-verbal material.

‍

The webinar features three speakers whose work approaches this theme from complementary perspectives: Debbie Straver will provide  an introduction on Creating Cultures of Care, an eight-year SPRONG research network led by HKU University of the Arts Utrecht. Bringing together nine professorships and a broad range of partners in healthcare, wellbeing, the arts, and the wider social field, the network explores how artistic and practice-based research can contribute to new concepts of care. They will share how this network aims to support collaboration across disciplines and institutions, and creates space for new connections between arts education, healthcare, and societal transformation. Fabiola Camuti and Philippine Hoegen will speak from both academic and artistic/practice-based knowledge developed within their ongoing collaboration focusing on a shared project called Performing Consent where they discuss how ethics and consent are being developed within Philippine’s PD research project Performing Working, in which a central collaboration, Illness ⇔ Work, brings together people living with illness, informal carers, and educators to generate knowledge through shared creative processes. The collaboration makes visible the diverse forms of labour embedded in illness and care while questioning conventional research hierarchies. It proposes consent as an ongoing, relational practice grounded in care-based, co-created responsibility. Together, they will reflect on institutional collaborations and on how performative and co-creative methods can deepen research processes and create space for forms of knowing that are difficult to access through language or strict institutional frameworks alone.

‍

Would you like to join this webinar? You can sign up using the button below.

‍

Speakers

‍

Dr. Fabiola Camuti (she/her) is Professor of Critical Creative Pedagogies at HKU University of the Arts Utrecht. She conducts research, leads projects, and gives seminars on topics including artistic research, socially-just pedagogies and pedagogies of care, participatory arts, arts education and neurodiversity and has been a visiting artist-researcher in various countries and institutions (Italy, France, Denmark, UK, US, NL). Additionally, she serves as program leader Research in Education for the Arts Education (KUO) sector (Association of Universities of Applied Sciences), where she coordinates a national working group aimed at strengthening the knowledge ecosystem and research culture within art universities, and is chair of the HKU Research Ethics Committee. Since 2025, Fabiola is Comenius Leadership Fellow with the granted project ‘FRAME: Framework for Research Methods and Skills in Arts Education’. The project aims at creating shared artistic research languages – bottom-up, with various study programmes, course leaders and students. 

‍

Philippine Hoegen (she/her) is an artist and researcher based in Belgium and the Netherlands. Her practice focuses on performance both as an artistic medium and as a methodology for research. Through performance, she explores the shifting, constructed, and performed nature of the self, often working collaboratively and across disciplines. In recent years, her research has increasingly centered on the politics, visibility, and value of work, and on how performance can illuminate the embodied, relational, and often invisible dimensions of labour.

Hoegen is currently a researcher and Professional Doctorate (PD) candidate at the  HKU (University of the Arts Utrecht). Her doctoral project, Performing Working, critically examines how waged labour is idealised as the primary measure of participation and citizenship, and how this privileging produces social exclusion for many people, including those living with illness or disability. She explores undervalued, hidden, and unwaged forms of labour and the socially ingrained mechanisms that render them invisible.

‍

• ‍Portfolio and documentation: Research Catalogue‍
• Introduction page Performing Working at HKU

‍

Debbie Straver, with a background as manager and producer in interdisciplinary theatre, has been involved in artistic and practice-based research at HKU University of the Arts Utrecht since 2015. Currently she works there as policy and subsidy advisor for HKU research, and coordinator of the research platform kunst ≈ onderzoek. Together with Gjilke Keuning she’s leading the national expertise network Creating Cultures of Care. Out of professional interest and personal experience, she wants to contribute to the transition to a more caring society - wherein arts and artists play a valued role, in reciprocity with other people and domains.