Creative practice is increasingly gaining traction as a method of research in law, policing, and criminology. To explore what that looks like on the ground, the Mapping the Arts and Humanities team spoke with three scholars working across these fields: Professor Jacqueline Hodgson (Centre for Operational Police Research, School of Law, University of Warwick), Dr Nicole Bögelein (Institute of Criminology, University of Cologne), and Sophie Marois (Department of Sociology, University of Toronto). The three joined us from a conference in Germany, where they are co-editing a special issue on creative methods for the Journal of Creative Research Methods. Their collaboration grew out of a workshop the three convened at the University of Warwick last year. Hodgson explored this work and the Warwick workshop in an earlier post for this blog.

Their work spans theatre, visual art, creative writing, and film. What connects these diverse practices is a conviction in the analytical depth these methods provide and how they can help researchers break through traditional disciplinary barriers by generating empathy, centring voices that formal procedures often leave out, and encouraging powerful institutions to reflect their own practices. As the conversation made clear, that collaborative work can be demanding but it is also essential, forcing a reckoning with unequal power dynamics and requiring careful attention to the profound ethical responsibilities inherent to co-creation.

This piece accompanies the latest episode of the Mapping the Arts and Humanities Podcast – listen above, then read on for the fuller conversation.

Building empathy and vulnerability through creative practice

For Dr Nicole Bögelein, creative practice began close to home. She told MAHP how her project brought together a transdisciplinary group of academics from across the humanities and social sciences who, she felt, were working in isolation and rarely talking to one another. The group worked with an actor who ran workshops designed to push them out of their comfort zones. They did role-plays, said yes to one another’s suggestions, and, in Bögelein’s words, “made a fool of ourselves.”

Stepping into performance-based exercises spurred the participants to drop their professional guards. Having seen each other uncertain and a little silly, the researchers found it easier to admit the doubts and insecurities that are so often masked by professional academic norms. The encounter created a rare opportunity to address the quiet, largely unspoken anxieties of academic life, such as whether a researcher feels like they truly belong in the room. That shared vulnerability opened a deeper conversation about their actual research that the group had not reached before. The creative work, Bögelein said, “really facilitated a communication we couldn’t have had without it.”

Professor Jacqueline Hodgson has taken a comparable approach with a very different group: the police. Creative methods have most often been used with what are termed seldom-heard communities – groups whose voices are rarely amplified by the powerful systems that affect their lives. Hodgson’s current project turns that lens around, using creative practice with the police themselves. Working with a director, a dramaturg, actors, and creative facilitators, her team draws on forum theatre and creative writing in anti-racist training. Crucially, they ask the officers to actually create something themselves – such as a short dramatic dialogue – as a core part of the research and learning process.

Policing, Hodgson explained, is characterised by a culture of solidarity and machismo, and by real and frequent danger. Officers have little space to discuss emotion or vulnerability. By creating “a safe space, a space without judgment,” the workshop allowed for difficult and complex conversations that a standard interview would not have elicited. The aim is a kind of “walking in someone else’s shoes” – building the emotional engagement that can underpin empathy for the communities officers police.

Representing the human reality of the courtroom

Where Bögelein and Hodgson use creative practice to change how people relate in a room, Sophie Marois’s work asks what a courtroom record leaves out, and who is missing from it.

Marois’s project grew out of the trial that followed the 2017 mass shooting at a mosque in Quebec City. Alongside three sociologists taking ethnographic field notes, the team was joined by a visual artist, Sarah Arnal, who drew the proceedings from the vantage point of the public gallery.

Official transcripts capture the procedural text of the law. What the artist captured a vantage point entirely different from what usually makes it into the legal record: things like the physical atmosphere of the room, the interactions in the public gallery, the intimacy and shared mourning of families who had lost loved ones. “Whose experience of the court system are you choosing to represent?” Marois asked.

What Marois and her team chose to foreground were the victims, their families, and a wider Muslim community that felt silenced and sidelined by the proceedings. This critical shift is explored further in their recent co-author publication, “An ‘unfathomable hatred of Islam’: Ethno/graphing the trial for the Québec City mosque massacre” (2024). The drawings, she added during our conversation, have become an enduring record that “re-places us in those moments in the courtroom,” serving as a visceral memory that routes the procedural mechanisms of the law back into the deeply human reality of sorrow and solidarity experienced by the audience.

Navigating the ethical minefield of co-creation

A recurring theme throughout the discussion was that because creative methods are so evocative, there’s a temptation to over-idealise their impact. All three guests were clear that they should not be treated as a quick fix. Bringing academics, artists, communities, and powerful institutions into one room does not automatically dissolve the ingrained hierarchies between them; in fact, without careful navigation, it can sometimes reproduce existing power dynamics. As Marois put it, there is a risk of “romanticising the potential effect of creative methods” and using them as a symbolic substitute, a band-aid for deeply rooted inequalities, as opposed to enacting actual structural change. Instead, Marois advised, they should be used alongside other socio-legal approaches to tackle broader systemic issues and support genuine conflict resolution.  

Several practical and ethical considerations ran through the conversation:

• The risk of extraction. Bögelein cautioned against the trap of treating a creative partner as “a tool for the group.” She emphasised the importance of equitable collaboration, where artists are engaged with an equal stake in the project rather than simply being brought in to bring to life the researchers’ pre-existing vision.
• Ownership of what gets made. Hodgson raised the question of who owns the resources produced in a project – in her case, material created by police officers with the support of actors and facilitators. As her team weighs up the creation of a public toolkit or resource bank, they are grappling with a few complex questions: Where will these resources live? How can the team maintain the integrity of the work once it is out in the world? And crucially, how do they ensure the materials are not co-opted or misrepresented by others?
• Unequal resources. Marois and Hodgson both pointed to the precariousness of freelance creatives working alongside well-resourced institutions. Academics, Hodgson noted, “hold power and resource,” and there are persistent questions of unequal access to funding and status.
• Building lasting relationships. Hodgson remarked that the creatives she works with are people her team has worked with over several years, learning gradually how to make things together. “You don’t just pick up a creative,” she said. Co-creation, in her account, is hard, slow work that takes time and trust to do well.

Mapping the wider ecosystem

Questions of representation, ownership, and benefit are deeply pertinent when it comes to the task of data collection and classification. One of MAHP’s areas of interest the past year has been exploring how data schemas can actively empower diverse cross-sector partners – specifically by enabling them to input their own information in ways that best suit their needs. By reimagining traditional classification systems and standard data taxonomies, the project examines who is made visible and how collaborative infrastructures are categorised and understood. This focus on equitable, community-led data practices becomes especially resonant when applied to the Law and the Humanities Map.

LHub’s interdisciplinary approach – bringing law into conversation with creative practice, performance, literature and other humanistically informed fields – served as the catalyst for exploring how to accurately record the diverse, cross-sector partnerships that fall outside traditional boundaries. Speaking directly with the practitioners and researchers navigating this work on the ground brings the lived realities of co-creation into focus, revealing the gap between what is currently recorded in institutional systems and the more nuanced, creative work happening outside of them. As the conversation with Bögelein, Hodgson, and Marois made abundantly clear, fostering meaningful discovery and collaboration requires everyone to have a voice in how their own expertise is represented.

Over the past year, the map has been building a picture of how law and the humanities meet across the UK – and, as Hodgson observed, the question of who benefits from being mapped is not the same for everyone. Universities have clear reasons to take part: they want to find collaborators, take stock of the field, and evidence the impact of their work. For the creative partners and communities those projects depend on, the motivations and perceived benefits may be quite different.

Right now, much of the data is university-centric, as is to be expected. The academic in collaboration is easy to find; the creative practitioner working alongside them is often visible only through the academic, if at all. When Hodgson’s team needed creatives for the next phase of their policing project, they assembled a group by word of mouth and web searches. A map, she suggested, might one day make that kind of expertise discoverable in its own right.

Marois pointed to a further gap: the independent scholars, activist researchers, and social-justice organisations who use rigorous methods, and sometimes work with creatives, entirely outside the university. They are already getting in touch, looking for ways to do this kind of cross-sector, creative work – and they are among the hardest to represent on a map built around academic infrastructure.

The challenge when it comes to mapping is to record that breadth and represent it through nuanced data schemas and responsive visualisations that align with the complexity of cross-sector work. In previous reflections, we have briefly touched on the fact that datasets are never neutral; the way they are structured inevitably carries assumptions about what counts as “legitimate” research and who belongs.

Representing this collaborative ecosystem well will mean more than adding fields and tags. The conversation must expand to involve communities in conversations, workshops, and research groups, ensuring that the way their work is recorded serves them as much as it serves the academy, and so that the artists, activists, and community partners who shape essential research are never left off the map.

Further reading and resources

You can follow our guests’ work through the following links:

• Professor Jacqueline Hodgson: Warwick Profile, Centre for Operational Police Research (COPR)
• Dr Nicole Bögelein: University of Cologne Profile and True Criminology Podcast
• Sophie Marois: University of Toronto Department of Sociology Profile

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