IMPR 6030: Research Methods Symposium

Please join us on Wednesday, November 27, from 1:00 PM–3:45 PM for the “IMPR 6030: Research Methods Symposium,” with Simon Flint, Mark Leroy, and Georgia Simms.

This event will take place in person at MacKinnon Building, Room 203 at the University of Guelph. Light snacks and beverages will be provided. The Symposium is free and open to everybody!

More About the Event

The University of Guelph’s newest IMPR cohort—Georgia Simms, Mark Leroy, and Simon Flint—have been hard at work this semester thinking and writing their way through their research topics, questions, and methodological frameworks. A significant part of research, especially in its early stages, is to come together to listen, share ideas, locate convergences, offer critique, and grow together as a supportive scholarly community.

Each week this semester we have been engaged in such activities. Now, we are pleased to invite the wider research community to join us for a few hours as the three present their work. Presentations will be twenty minutes with an additional ten to fifteen minutes allotted for Q&A.

Following is a list of presentation titles:

1. Simon Flint | “Stitching Queer Narratives: A Practice-Led Exploration of Improv Quilting”

2. Mark Leroy | “Ordinary Boy: Writing a Fictive Coming of Age Memoir based on Familial Intergenerational Trauma as a Rite of Passage”

3. Georgia Simms | “We Might As Well Dance: A Research Creation Case Study”

Feel free to reach out to their instructors, jashen and Lauren, if you have any questions: [email protected] , [email protected].

More About the Presenters

Simon Flint, originally from Calgary, Alberta, has received both a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Performance Production and Design, and a Master of Arts in Fashion from Toronto Metropolitan University. Simon is a practicing textile artist and designer; whose work explore craft, experimental design, and sustainable practices interwoven with queer and feminist theory. Throughout his career he has worked in an assortment of roles within theatre, both as a designer and a technician, as well as in academic institutions as a teaching assistant, costume coordinator and social media specialist. Presently, On top of his Ph.D. studies Simon is the Program Costume Coordinator for School of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph.

Guided by attunement and awe for the beauty of the human condition, Mark LeRoy, in artistic and collectivistic collaboration, attempts to allow space and time for the unimagined, unthought, and unspoken in the hope that we may become witnesses to stories no longer lost in time or veiled by shame but voiced by aesthetic compassion and grace.

As a PhD student exploring how Bildungsroman memoirs—coming-of-age stories of initiated personhood—may help free the grasp of intergenerational trauma, Mark’s yearning for our culture is that we may find the courage to lay down our certainty for wonder as we are reformed into ourselves by that of which we have been entrusted and freed to give of ourselves for a time we will not live to see.

Georgia Simms is a performing artist, educator and facilitator. Her dance performance career spanning 25 years, both as an apprentice and company member with Dancetheatre David Earle and as a freelance artist, has taken her to stages in different parts of Canada, France and South Korea.

Since 2005, she has hosted technique classes for adults that honour the lineage of modern dance offered to her by David Earle (co-founder of Toronto Dance Theatre in 1968), with strong ties to the work of Martha Graham, José Limón and other leaders of American Modern Dance (1930-1960).

Sensing the edges of a ritualized technical practice, both for herself and her community of students, she began an investigation of improvisation in 2006 as part of a Guelph-based collective, Fall on your Feet, with Janet Johnson, Catrina von Radecki, Lynette Segal, Tanya Williams and Kelly Steadman. Finding ongoing astonishment and discovery in this realm, she established a class in dancetheatre improvisation in 2014 with musician Adam Bowman which continues to grow. The group explores an ever-evolving syllabus of tasks and parameters that provoke a generous investigation of the responsibilities and consequences of individual and collective choice-making.

She remains grateful for the opportunity to have been an artist-in-residence with Guelph Dance in 2020-2021 and for ongoing involvement as a guest choreographer and teacher with the Guelph Youth Dance Training Program.

Alongside her dance career have been academic pursuits including a Bachelor’s Degree in International Development and Environmental Studies, a Master’s Degree in Geography with an emphasis on environmental governance, and an integration of her worlds through arts-based community engagement through various projects. A long time member of the University of Guelph professional community, she has worked as a practitioner-in-residence with Community Engaged Scholarship Institute, a facilitator with ReVision: The Centre for Art and Social Justice, a workshop leader with the International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation, and a Sessional Instructor with the former First Year Seminar Program.

Georgia also weaves movement and improvisation into methodology, program design, evaluation and group facilitation as an invited consultant and workshop leader for regional arts organizations and universities, most recently with Art Not Shame, Guelph Youth Music Centre, Elora Centre for the Arts, and McMaster University.

She lives in Guelph, Ontario, with her husband, Adam, and their six-year old daughter.