A blog post from Amrita Puri, actor and student of the MSc in Global Mental Health and Society at the University of Edinburgh.
Apprehension flooded my brain and body when I was accepted for a placement-based dissertation in a participatory art-based research project with the Binks Hub and The Ripple Project. My role in the research was ethnographic, and I had no idea what that meant. According to Kwame Harrison “[e]thnography is research in that it describes a methodology (distinguished from a research method) usually conceptualized as involving participant-observation within a community or field of study”. But I had to figure out what this meant in practice. I was to observe and research a week-long ceramic workshop at a community organisation called The Ripple Project. The research involved understanding the entire creative process through informal conversations in the form of semi-structured participant interviews, whilst fully immersing myself in the experience. This meant that I was not just watching from the sidelines but participating in the art-making as well.
The Stage: Context and Setting
The Ripple is a non-profit organisation that works to support community members in the Restalrig, Lochend, and Craigentinny areas of Edinburgh. My placement was part of a broader project undertaken by the Binks Hub and the Ripple Project, titled Past, Present, and Future. The segment I worked on, Manifesting the Future, aimed to explore what individuals living in these neighbourhoods envisioned for their community’s future. These areas are among the most deprived in Scotland, with several data zones ranking in the top 5-10% of the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation (SIMD).
As an outsider – an actor from India researching a marginalised community in Scotland – I couldn’t help but reflect on the layers of complexity in my role. I was supposed to research the art-based research. I wondered about the philosophical implications – was I creating a layer of abstraction that distanced the research from reality? The irony wasn’t lost on me – an actor playing the role of an ethnographer, except that this wasn’t fiction. This was real life. Little did I know that this role would reveal striking similarities between the craft I knew so well and the academic pursuit I was embarking upon. As I delved deeper into my character – the ethnographic researcher – I began to uncover the common ground between these seemingly disparate worlds.
The Performance: Process and Participation
The heart of our research centred around a week-long ceramic workshop. The art-making involved participants using clay to model their future visions for the community into ceramic objects. Participants moulded their aspirations for their community into tangible ceramic objects – a literal manifestation of hopes taking physical form. The clay plaques represented what individuals, and in turn the community, needed to flourish. I watched as ideas evolved through the interactive nature of the process, with ceramic plaques often exchanging several hands from conception to completion. The process was flexible, sometimes just one person could have made a ceramic plaque from start to finish. Other times one person may have started off making a sketch of an idea, another person may have made that sketch into a ceramic and a third may have painted the finished plaque. Several stages were involved in the art-making and participants were free to join in at any point. The democratic and fluid nature of art-based research gave us (the researchers) the freedom to co-create meaning with participants. We moved fluidly between observing and participating, getting our hands dirty in the clay alongside community members. Through this immersion, I discovered that being an outsider was merely a temporary state.
Method Acting Meets Methodology: The Parallels
Both fields are centred around human beings and communication, and as far as my experience goes, the groundwork seemed to overlap in several ways. As I began my week of fieldwork observing the participants and the art-making process, I felt like I had done this before. What struck me most was how naturally I fell into the rhythm of the work. I had come across terms like “embodied experience”, “relational approach” and “dynamic approach” when studying art-based methods, but I only had a vague idea of what they meant. It was through the process of trying to make sense of these concepts within the community-based participatory research that I slowly came to understand the value of lived experience. By understanding the everyday realities of the participants in our project, these words began to take on real meaning. My own professional experiences and the soft skills I had acquired over the years helped me transition into the role of an ethnographer. Of course, the purpose and research setting differ greatly from the performing arts, but the aim was essentially the same: to understand a human experience and communicate this understanding truthfully.
It is interesting to note that when I began my MSc program in Global Mental Health and Society, I was under the impression that “good” academic research should be and is objective. Just as an actor brings themselves to every role, I learned that the notion of purely objective research is a fallacy. Our lived experiences inevitably colour our perspectives. You cannot take the artist out of the art, nor should we expect to remove the researcher from the research. Purists may say otherwise but we lose that objectivity, even with numbers and hard data when we choose to exclude or include data in our research. Our lived experiences inevitably shape our perspectives and the way we view the world. As an actor, there will always be parts of me in any role I play. In the same way, the way I think and analyse data will inherently have some degree of bias. There is no value-neutral social research. We are, after all, human beings.
Personally, I prepare for a role by imagining a character’s emotional and lived reality. I paint an entire narrative arc until I step onto the stage or the screen. Actors need to immerse themselves in the lives of their characters, painting detailed narratives that extend far beyond the confines of the script. We ask ourselves: What is their favourite colour? Their go-to comfort food, or favourite song? We delve into their nature, nurture, socio-economic background, personal style, and a myriad other preferences. Every detail matters in bringing a character to life. What makes them who they are? We need to become our characters. Similarly, ethnography demands deep immersion in the community’s context, understanding individuals’ lives within their broader social tapestry. In ethnography, individual narratives interweave with community, society, and state-level influences. By acknowledging and delving into these contextual layers, we uncover a richer tapestry of understanding that recognises the intersectionality of personal narratives and external influences.
In the fields of both acting and ethnography, context is everything. Both roles require a meticulous eye for the nuances of human interaction and environment. The key difference is that in life, there is no make-believe. People and their stories are real.
Conclusion: Two Crafts, Multiple Truths
Of course, there is the genre of non-fiction and at times as actors we take on real-life stories and events. But even when we play imaginary roles the aim is to tell stories about humanity that reflect human experience. Whether portraying characters on stage or documenting lived experiences in the field, both acting and ethnography explore the multiplicities of human experience. While the actor and ethnographer travel different paths, both grapple with the complexity and diversity of human perspectives. The ethnographer must never deceive, yet both roles demand a deep respect for the varied truths that emerge from different contexts and experiences. Through this unlikely role, I discovered that my acting background hadn’t just prepared me for ethnographic research – it had equipped me with valuable tools for understanding and representing human experience.
In both crafts, we strive to truthfully capture and communicate the complexity of human life, whether through performance or research.
Through this placement I also discovered something far more valuable than any roadmap or methodology – I learned to have more faith in myself.
Amrita Puri is a student in the MSc in Global Mental Health and Society program at the University of Edinburgh, as well as an established actor. You can find out more about her on her Instagram: @amupuri
For more information on our work the Ripple Project, read about our work and see some images of the artworks here and read in depth about the calls made by the community for action by policymakers here. The artworks produced by the community were exhibited for the first time at the Ripple Project itself in June 2024, and was written about by Rhiannon Bull here.
