Resilience Embodied in Conversations and Creativity During a Covid Context

Abstract

Many working-class, disabled, mature women face great adversity in the academy in their (in)ability to play the game. Lacking the necessary cultural capitals to feel at home in the spaces of higher education, the women returnees describe themselves as interlopers in the education machine. Yet this positioning was overcome in a collective community of creative resilience. It was one outcome of the author’s doctorial research at the institution in which the research was conducted, the University for the Creative Arts. Here the presentation of post-structural and postmodern lecture programmes encouraged new ways of knowledge production and meaning making. Again, this exploration of resilience was considered during the pandemic, as conversations between the researcher and the participants saw their resilient subjectivities changing. The physical containment in lockdown provoked new and innovative transformations in learning and development. Whilst a creative resilience prevailed, the confinements and constraints of freedoms were not without their challenges to their mental health and well-being. This paper explores the multiplicity of resiliencies as the women navigated their way in and now outside the academy in a covid context. Conversations continued as the artist-educator subjectivity triumphed during adversity in creative forms.