by Tom Delahunt (the #hobopoet), and Carrie Jackson (Honorary Senior Fellow, School of Health Sciences)

#HOBOPOET

The arts have often been treated as the playful outlier of academia—a collection of feathers and glue, cobbled together for a fleeting performance, laughed at until it suddenly becomes a lucrative commodity. This playful framing feels apt as I reflect on my work as a poet and author, my collaborations with researchers like Carrie Jackson, and Dobson & Clark’s (2024) incisive exploration of hybridity in arts-based research. Their article, Embracing Hybridity: The Affordances of Arts-Based Research for the Professional Doctorate in Education, challenges the boundaries of traditional academic structures, offering a framework for transformative, hybrid work that resonates deeply with my own emancipatory journey.

Hybridity in Arts-Based Research

Dobson & Clark (2024) position hybridity as a necessary and liberatory approach for professional doctorates, where arts-based methods dissolve rigid silos between disciplines. This resonates with my work as the #hobopoet, where poetry and art become bridges between the personal and the academic, the imagined and the real. Whether working with children in forest schools or collaborating on exhibitions exploring trauma and social justice, I find that hybridity not only enriches the research process but also fosters human connection and understanding. It is through these fluid, interdisciplinary spaces that the arts prove their worth, beyond the glue and feathers.

The Marginalised Arts: From Dismissal to Commodification

In higher education institutions (HEIs), the arts often walk a precarious line. Dismissed as frivolous in one moment, they’re heralded as vital revenue streams in the next. The pivot is stark, yet it underscores the paradox of how value is assigned in these spaces. Recent critiques, including articles from Times Higher Education, warn that arts programs are increasingly under threat, with funding cuts and closures creating a chilling effect. The arts are often the first to suffer in the name of financial austerity, despite their transformative potential. My postdoctoral aspirations—to secure an arts fellowship—are rooted in the hope of anchoring the arts not as an accessory to academia but as its core.

Dr Mark Ingham, the “Nomadic Detective,” emerges as a light of change amidst this bleak landscape. His work transcends binaries of good and evil, right and wrong, and reflects Nietzschean themes of disruption and renewal. Ingham’s ability to carve spaces for curiosity and exploration within rigid structures serves as an inspiring counterpoint to the erosion of arts programs, embodying the essence of rebellion and innovation.

Rebellion as Freedom

Albert Camus once wrote, “The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.” This quote has become a mantra for me, a guiding light in my journey as a neurodiverse academic and poet. The #hobopoet in me celebrates the act of wandering—through ideas, landscapes, and systems— as a form of resistance against the oppressive boxes that society and academia construct. There is an emancipatory joy in this rebellion, a reclaiming of the right to dream and create outside of prescribed norms. Yet, this freedom is not without its challenges.

Protected Characteristics and Toxic Boxes

Two recent job applications ended in rejection; a reminder of the systemic barriers that persist even within frameworks designed to protect diversity. While facilitating a session on the 2010 Equality Act and indirect discrimination, I couldn’t help but wonder: Are we creating systems that truly foster organic and humanist freedom, or are we reinforcing increasingly harmful, toxic boxes? The arts, with their openness and fluidity, offer a counter-narrative—a way to imagine and enact more inclusive spaces. But this requires a shift in mindset, a willingness to embrace the unpredictable and the imperfect.

Dancing Through the Glue

Carrie Jackson
Honorary Senior Fellow, School of Health Sciences

Returning to the metaphor of feathers and glue, I imagine a dance—a creative movement that resists stagnation and celebrates hybridity. The arts, laughed at for their apparent frivolity, have the power to challenge oppression and inspire freedom. As Dobson & Clark’s (2024) work reminds us, the affordances of arts-based research lie in its capacity to dissolve boundaries and reimagine possibilities. For me, the journey of the #hobopoet is one of continuous motion, finding joy in the rebellion of creativity and the hope of a freer, more humanist academia.

I first met Tom when I was co-founding Director of the England Centre for Practice Development, a national centre for applied health research. As a practice developer and embedded researcher, I had spent many years of my career co-designing advances in health and social care with people (patients, communities, professionals) focused on what matters to them. Indeed, the outcome of practice development is human flourishing through enlightenment, empowerment, and emancipation, helping people to be the best they can be. Practice developers, in my almost 40 years’ experience, are a little bit different from your traditional academic who might lead a Faculty, a School, or Department or a programme of learning. We tend to be transformational rather than transactional leaders, less concerned by the tick-box mentality of meeting targets and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and more focused on innovation, encouraging people to think and act in person-centered ways that support each other, encouraging collaboration and positive relationships rather than competition.

I have followed Tom’s journey of transformation and human flourishing now for many years, and the metamorphosis from caterpillar to butterfly has been an inspiration to me. Our first conversation in my office many years ago is an indelible memory. Helping Tom to find his purpose and focus at the beginning of his journey and make sense of being and thinking differently was a real privilege. He felt at home in the space we co-created together because he knew he was with someone who would support him to be brave in exploring his thoughts, his ideas, and make sense of them. In one of our early conversations, I used the metaphor of “glue and feathers” to show that it is okay to be different, to embrace that difference and explore what that means in order to create something stable and lasting in his future. With a background in leadership, culture change, and workforce development as a senior academic leader, I was seen to be different by my peers and often ostracized or ridiculed for being the woman who uses “glue and feathers” in her work. Yet these peers really missed the point.

The “glue and feathers” metaphor is critical in health and social care. Without being flippant, sometimes things stick together in life naturally when there is no glue involved. This is about human connection and finding your tribe, people who get you, where there is mutual reciprocity and understanding and a commitment to the same cause. For me, my glue is the international practice development community, which has made huge impacts on quality, safety, and evidence-based practice over many decades around the world. They are the right glue for the right job and are fit for purpose. However, that road is not an easy one to travel because we often work in the messiest of contexts in the most challenging of situations tackling issues that most researchers and academics pay little attention to, yet it is the most influential and impactful—the microsystems of health and social care—the relationship between patients and practitioners. This is where change and culture are most experienced and felt. You can plan the biggest reforms at the top of an organization, but if you don’t involve the people that really matter, your reforms will fail, and change will not be sustained.

Feathers have many different meanings but have always been associated with freedom, transcendence, and communication with another realm, a symbol of flight and freedom. Feathers, for me, symbolize the ability to move beyond our mental barriers and limitations to see the larger picture and understand what really matters. It is a metaphor for our lives; while we are blown around by the wind, we have a choice in the way that we respond to whatever life throws at us.

Embedded within critical social theory, practice developers use a wide range of art and science-based strategies and interventions to get the best out of people, to free them from the obstacles and barriers that might constrain their thinking. Our work starts with looking at self, understanding our values and beliefs and how that impacts our behaviours and relationship to the world. Art helps to facilitate emotional catharsis and empowerment and connection to others and is such an important part of supporting the development of future health professionals. It helps to strengthen concepts of the inner self and emotional resilience much needed in the challenging health and social care environments we find ourselves in currently in practice settings. The art-making process itself is both a mode of personal inquiry and a vehicle for change. It has a vital role to play in the education of our workforce to help people explore thoughts, feelings, and actions creatively. Without freedom to think differently and creatively, the scientific basis of our practice will not move forwards; we will be constrained by an inability to take risks, and the foundations of what is unique about nursing, for example, will crumble, as indeed many argue is already happening with the erosion of professional identity and an inability to articulate the value of the profession to society.

Tom’s work transcends these barriers through creative writing and poetry integrated with art and music. He is a role model to us all, an inspiration that enables us to have the space to connect and think differently, to be brave and express ourselves in a safe space that facilitates our potential emancipation from the overbearing influences of the world around us, helping us to explore being the best we can be and to truly flourish.

Conclusion

#HOBOPOET

The journey of the arts in academia and society at large is one of profound challenges and immeasurable potential. Community remains at the heart of hope for the future. It is in our shared connections, our mutual passions, and the collaborative dance of feathers and glue that we create spaces for freedom and transformation. As Alain de Botton suggests,

“A good conversation is not about arguments being won, but about understanding being fostered.” This meeting of minds and hearts reminds us that we are not alone in our struggles or our dreams.

In our shared spaces of creativity and rebellion, whether through poetry, art, or practice development, we find hope. It is a hope born of collaboration, of stepping outside traditional boxes and embracing the unpredictable. Together, we can build communities where transformation becomes possible, where freedom is not just an aspiration but a lived reality. Through this ongoing dance of feathers and glue, we can nurture a world that celebrates the beauty of difference and the power of collective action.

‘SEND YOUR DREAMS WHERE NOBODY HIDES

GIVE YOUR TEARS TO THE TIDE

NO TIME’…

References

1. Dobson, T., & Clark, V. (2024). Embracing Hybridity: The Affordances of Arts-Based Research for the Professional Doctorate in Education. Journal of Arts-Based Inquiry, 15(3), 125–145.
2. Nietzsche, F. (1887/2023). On the Genealogy of Morality. Translated by C. Diethe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
3. Times Higher Education. (2023). The Arts Under Threat: A Crisis in Higher Education. Retrieved from www.timeshighereducation.com.
4. Rubin, R. (2022). The Creative Act: A Way of Being. New York: Penguin Random House.
5. Billington, P. (2021). Paths to the Green World: Druidry and Environmental Consciousness. Glastonbury: Green Man Press.
6. Tolstoy, L. (1897/2023). What Is Art?. Translated by A. Maude. London: Penguin Classics.
7. Dass, R. (1971/2022). Be Here Now. New York: HarperOne