“Space as Reassurance: Navigating Identity and Access Needs in Creative Workplaces”, an Action Research Project (ARP) rooted in Creative Autoethnography, is designed to enact intersectional social justice within my dual practice as an artist and educator. Operating through an intersectional framework, the project synthesises (in)visible disability, faith, social class, and race. The inquiry is informed by my reflective insights from the Microteaching Task: Object-based Learning, alongside core resources and blog post tasks completed across the PGCert Theories, Policies and Practices (TPP) and Inclusive Practice (IP) Units.
Georges Perec – Approaches to What ? – Species of Spaces and Other Pieces (1974)
Topos (τόπος)
Drawing from Georges Perec’s Species of Spaces and Other Pieces (1974), I probe Perec’s yearning for “An idealised scene. Space as reassurance.” Within Higher Education (HE) learning spaces and creative workplaces, however, these environments often operate as sites of alienation rather than reassurance for those navigating non-standard identities and/or access requirements. In my role as a Diploma in Professional Studies (DPS) Placement tutor, I often encounter how physical objects and digital spaces mirror student and staff intersecting identities. For example, my own adaptation tool, the gym ball (disability); the student material practice prayer mat (faith, religion, and belief); and the institutional power dynamic, role-switching function on UAL Moodle (Race) may serve as live case studies of how ordinary objects and virtual learning spaces operate as nuanced material metaphors of identity, care, and embodied defiance. Here is a topos (τόπος) that merges Foucault’s spatial heterotopias (1984) with Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space (1958), transforming abstract accommodations into physical and digital sites of intersectional negotiation to navigate real-world workplace and institutional scenarios.
To enact this as an open-ended premise and co-learning process, the research builds an asynchronous peer support network via a collaborative UAL Padlet archive that shapes itself around the participants. This space brings together multiple cohorts across the CSM JTM Programme & Community – including BA Jewellery and BA Textile Design students preparing for their DPS year, those currently on placement activity (inter)nationally, returning final year students, alumni as well as UAL/CSM staff. Operating as a digital heterotopic repository, it captures live object-led reflections and informal discussions locally at CSM alongside photos shared in situ by participants, sustaining a collective connection across the physical distance of the placement year.
The Intervention: Approaches to What? The Curriculum Vitae of an Object – ‘Rendered Employable’
Centered on Object-Based Learning (OBL), participants are invited to select an everyday artifact (such as a tool, a pen, a water bottle, or a digital interface) as a physical prop to role-play workspace scenarios and draft a literal ‘Curriculum Vitae of an Object’ that mirrors their own spatial autobiographies within current, future, or imagined professional settings. By analysing how physical objects are ‘rendered employable’, participants are encouraged to bring their full selves into a collective space while dissociating the choice of object from direct intersectional identity disclosure. Projecting (un)protected characteristics onto non-human entities, the intervention brings into play a digital object archival parody, where the tension between the rhetoric of equity and the reality of exclusion echoes career trajectories of spatial precarity to its logical extreme. It sets in motion an impetus for participants to explore workplace adjustments through practical communication tools such as Access Riders (modeled on real-world Access Docs for Artists) to outline their intersecting identities and access requirements as a lived physical practice and human right.
Question your Teaspoons (Perec, 1974)
The scope of exploring Object CVs to be ‘rendered employable’ keeps the action research project in a constant state of flux – surprising, unpredictable, and open to the “not-yet” of future practice. It invites participants to embrace certainty as uncertainty, leaning into an open-ended query when counter-storytelling and lived experience unfold: “I wonder what would happen if…?” Integrating Paulo Freire’s critical pedagogy with Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed (1974), it operates as a theatrical dialectic stage where participants act as “spect-actors,” questioning the obvious, the infra-ordinary, the unspoken, the hidden curricula across the non-neutral structures of higher education and industry norms.
Challenging the unrealistic rhetoric of sudden systemic transformation within micro-spaces, the project explores how significant moments in professional practice can stem from mundane, everyday interactions in institutional and industry spaces. By shifting attention to the living ecology of “things thinging” (Heidegger, 1971), the movements and gestures of people, material artifacts, and virtual infrastructures continually correspond with one another to expose blind spots in institutional practices, bringing into view the very thing that slips seamlessly into the background noise of everyday experience within the university itself. Pointing directly to the “broken middle” (Armstrong, 2000), the inquiry embraces an ongoing, unstable process echoing Samuel Beckett’s ethos: Try again, fail again, fail better.
References and Further Reading:
Access Docs for Artists (2026) Access Docs for Artists. Available at: accessdocsforartists.com
Adams, C. and Thompson, T. L. (2016) Researching a Posthuman World: Interviews with Digital Objects. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Bachelard, G. (1958) The poetics of space. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
Barrow, M. (2006) Assessment and student transformation: linking character and intellect. Studies in Higher Education, 31(3), 357–372.
Beckett, S. (1983) Worstward Ho. London: John Calder.
Chee, L. (2021) ‘Affect’, in Practising Ethics. London: The Bartlett Faculty of the Built Environment, University College London. Available at: practisingethics.org.
Foucault, M. (1984) ‘Of other spaces, heterotopias’, translated by J. Miskowiec, Architecture, Mouvement, Continuité, (5), pp. 46–49.
Foucault M. (1988) Technologies of the Self. Technologies of the Self, a Seminar with Michel Foucault, pp 16-49. The University of Massachusets Press.
Freire, P. (1970) Pedagogy of the oppressed. London: Penguin Random House UK.
Ellis, C. S. and Bochner, A. P. (2006) ‘Analyzing Analytic Autoethnography: An Autopsy’, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 35(4), pp. 429–449.
Boal, A. (1974) Theatre of The Oppressed. London: Pluto Press.
Land, R., Cousin, G., Meyer, J.H.F. and Davies, P. (2005) ‘Threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge (3): implications for course design and evaluation’, in Rust, C. (ed.) Improving student learning: diversity and inclusivity. Oxford: Oxford Centre for Staff and Learning Development, pp. 53–64.
McNiff, J. and Whitehead, J. (2002) Action Research: Principles and Practice. London: Routledge Falmer.
Miller, D. (2010) Stuff. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Perec, G. (1974) Species of spaces and other pieces. London: Penguin Books.
Shreeve, A. (2008) Transitions: variation in tutors’ experience of practice and teaching relations in art and design. PhD thesis. Lancaster University.
Smith, L.T. (2021) Decolonising Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. 3rd edition. London: Zed Books.
Willcocks, J. (2021) Central Saint Martins Museum & Study Collection: emotional responses to objects. Available at: https://arts.ac.libguides.com/c.php?g=686452&p=4906489.