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PDW 07 – Activist Scholarship via Creative Works: Workshopping the Possibilities [09:00-11:00]

Convenors:
Omer Nazir
Massey University, New Zealand
Janet Sayers
Massey University, New Zealand
Nancy Harding
University of Bath, UK
Majid Khan
Massey University, New Zealand
Suze Wilson
Massey University, New Zealand
Hasibe Aysan
Ostim Technical University, Türkiye

Call for Applications

Facilitators

Nitha Palakshappa, Massey University, New Zealand
Ozan Nadir Alakavuklar, Universiteit Utrecht, Netherlands

Purpose

This proposed professional development workshop (PDW) aims to support the development of activism and activist scholarship across the Organisational Studies community.  The workshop, conducted in four sections, will focus specifically on the use of creative works, such as films, plays and art exhibitions, as a means of performing activist modes of research inquiry. The first, introductory section, presents and discusses the various types of critically orientated creative works recently produced and how each might be evaluated as pieces of activist scholarship. The second presents or performs identified examples of creative scholarly activist works in short form and invites participants to engage immersively, aesthetically, critically and collaboratively with each via group discussion. The third offers participants a set of tools for undertaking video/visual works.  In the fourth section, participants will be invited to develop potential plans for making creative works part of their critically engaged teaching and scholarly inquiry. The final section will include short commentaries and feedback from the workshop contributors (see list below). One of the wider aims of the workshop is to help develop further a community of critical scholars undertaking creative works which will feature in future critical organisational studies workshops and symposia.

Relevance to EGOS

The proposed workshop is highly relevant to the general theme for EGOS 2026, “Reframing Organizations in More-than-Human Society”. It provides a forum for new and existing members of the division to discuss creative scholarly activist works that incorporate more-than-human techniques and technologies as a platform, method and means of developing activist interventions and scholarly activist research formats. In this sense, the proposed professional development workshop supports the EGOS theme of reframing existing models, methods and practices.  The EGOS’s introduction to this year’s theme notes the importance of sharing and communicating scholarly knowledge with new audiences in formats that fit with the life worlds of those audiences. Particularly, the call highlights reframing by developing new narratives, new words, new grammars, and new vocabularies that amplify diverse voices speaking from unexplored methodological positions. Both the content and processes used in our workshop proposal seek to address these concerns.

Description of the Workshop

Organizational studies research appears to be developing a stronger activist counter discourse. Perhaps spurred by the activism of feminist scholars or by the sense that the current ‘publishing game’ is overly careerist and instrumental, this counter discourse recommends activist forms of engagement and performativity (Leca et al., 2014; Spicer et al., 2009; Wickert & Schaefer, 2015; King, 2015). While some of this work originates in the desire for research and teaching that contributes to alleviating ‘real’ world problems (a desire at core of Critical Organisational Studies), it also derives from various theoretical tributaries that assume a performative ontology (Barad, 2003; Gond et al., 2015). Put simply, such an approach regards research not as a practice of attempting to represent the real world, but as a set of actions that perform that world in new ways.  In this proposed PDW we seek to present, investigate and discuss the role of creative works as a means undertaking and performing activist scholarship and engaging with audiences in new ways.

Our proposed workshop aims to develop and extend the appreciation of creative works, such as film, theatre or sculpture, as a means of undertaking critical scholarship. Along with others (Hietanen & Rokka, 2018; Rokka & Hietanen, 2018; Wood & Brown, 2011; Wood et al., 2018), we argue that the potential value of creative works as a mode and means of critical scholarship is currently undervalued and underdeveloped. Of course, visual methods of representation such as images, photographs and graphics are commonplace scholarly artefacts. However, scholar-produced video, for example, has yet to be fully developed as a means of undertaking scholarly and activist scholarly work, despite the availability of the technology, its ease of use and its centrality to everyday storytelling.
That said, in recent years a small number of such works have appeared, most in the documentary vein, some of which have garnered widespread recognition and awards.  These examples include the mining disaster documentary Black Snow. This multi-award-winning 2017 film, written and directed by Steve Linstead, forms part of a broader effort to remember and critically engage with the nineteenth-century Oakes Colliery disaster in Yorkshire, England, which claimed the lives of more than 350 miners, many of them under the age of fourteen. Alongside Black Snow, we draw on Martin Wood’s short film 600 Mills, which, inspired by Gilles Deleuze’s theorisation of space, examines the reconfiguration of Melbourne’s garment industry. This work builds on Wood’s earlier documentary Lines of Flight, which explores rock climbing as an extreme experiential practice set against the highly organised and disciplined character of contemporary work and everyday life. In a similar vein, Of Labour and Love, a documentary film by one of the facilitators, offers a further example of critical scholarship articulated through the video medium, foregrounding questions of labour, debt, and ethical engagement.

In addition to clips from these films, the PDW will include a short reading from a play by Taylor (2025), that critically examines managerial control and organisational power through performative and narrative means, and from an article written in part as a script for a play (Wilson et al., 2022) which imagines what various philosophers would say if they attended a conventional leadership development course. We will also provide photos and video footage of a sculptural installation (Wilson et al., 2025) produced as part of a research project which was inspired by the conceptualization of misogynist attacks on women leaders as akin to a glass cage (Wilson & Julian, 2023), surrounding them with hostile surveillance and impeding their agency. Together, these examples of activist scholarship via creative works will be used as provocations during the workshop to stimulate collective reflection on such modes of inquiry and activism and to explore how such alternatives can unsettle dominant textual and managerial modes of knowing in organisation studies.

Format

The workshop is structured as follows:

Introduction and key questions:
We present and discuss the current state of scholarly activist creative work, and present a set of questions and issues that could be used to critically evaluate critical-orientated projects of this nature.

Illustrative examples:
This section involves the experience of engaging with segments of the examples noted above, followed by a short critical review of these works by Professor Nitha Palakshapa.

Group-based Critical Reviews:
Next, participants in small groups will discuss their responses to the works observed and identify the questions that arise regarding the why and the how of using creative works for activist scholarship, before reporting back to the whole group.

Tools for creating video:
In this section the organizers will offer a set of tools for producing critically-orientated videos or other visual works. They will discuss the theory that guides them, the practices they find useful, and some of the key structural formulae and technical shortcuts to success.

Creative works Plans: 
In this section of the workshop, the contributors  (working as group facilitators) will encourage the participants to offer short summaries of their current scholarly and activist work and to develop and discuss draft plans of how (and to what extent) creative works might be used to enhance and develop this work.

Contributor’s commentary: 
The session will end with short verbal presentations from each of the contributors (group facilitators). They will reflect on the critical questions raised at the beginning of the session, their response to these, discuss any plans they have to use creative works in their own work. Furthermore, they will discuss some of the ideas and plans that participants from their particular groups (with their permission) came up with that address the various challenges and issues the revolve around critical scholarship that uses creative works.

Note: Organizers and facilitators will organize and support participants groups and offer short verbal presentation both on creative works scholarship and their group’s plans for creative works in the final workshop section.

Application

To be considered for this PDW, applicants should submit a single document (.docx or .pdf) via the EGOS website that includes:
  • A cover page with full details of name, affiliation, and email address.
  • A brief motivational statement outlining why they would like to participate in the PDW, what they hope to gain from it, and one question they would like to pose to the panellists as part of the opening discussion.
Please note: All participants are request to view some selected creative works (e.g. short films/videos) that will be a core content in preparation for the workshop. Access links to the creative works will be provided by the organizers after the registration period.


References
  • Barad, K. (2003). Posthumanist performativity: Toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter. Signs, 28(3), 801–831.
  • Bell, E., Warren, S., & Schroeder, J. E. (Eds.). (2014). The Routledge companion to visual organization. Routledge.
  • Cabantous, L., Gond, J. P., Harding, N., & Learmonth, M. (2016). Critical essay: Reconsidering critical performativity. Human Relations, 69(2), 197-213.
  • Davison, J., McLean, C., & Warren, S. (2015). Looking back: Ten years of visual qualitative research. Qualitative Research in Organizations and Management: An International Journal, 10(4), 355-359.
  • Denzin, N. K., & Lincoln, Y. S. (2008). Strategies of qualitative inquiry (Vol. 2). Sage.
  • Gond, J. P., Cabantous, L., Harding, N., & Learmonth, M. (2015). What do we mean by performativity in organizational and management theory? The uses and abuses of performativity. International Journal of Management Reviews, 18(4), https://doi.org/10.1111/ijmr.12074
  • Hietanen, J., & Rokka, J. (2018). Companion for the videography ‘Monstrous Organizing—The Dubstep Electronic Music Scene’. Organization, 25(3), 320-334.
  • King, D. (2015). The possibilities and perils of critical performativity: Learning from four case studies. Scandinavian Journal of Management, 31(2), 255-265.
  • Leca, B., Gond, J. P., & Cruz, L. B. (2014). Building ‘Critical Performativity Engines’ for deprived communities: The construction of popular cooperative incubators in Brazil. Organization, 21(5), 683-712.
  • Meyerson, D. E., & Scully, M. A. (1995). Crossroads tempered radicalism and the politics of ambivalence and change. Organization Science, 6(5), 585-600.
  • Rokka, J., & Hietanen, J. (2018). On positioning videography as a tool for theorizing. Recherche et Applications en Marketing (English Edition), 33(3), 106-121.
  • Shortt, H. L., & Warren, S. K. (2017). Grounded Visual Pattern Analysis: Photographs in Organizational Field Studies. Organizational Research Methods, 22(2), 539-563. https://doi.org/10.1177/1094428117742495
  • Spicer, A., Alvesson, M., & Kärreman, D. (2009). Critical performativity: The unfinished business of critical management studies. Human Relations, 62(4), 537-560.
  • Taylor, S. S. (2025). Profile and creative work in organizational aesthetics and theatre. Organizational Aesthetics, 14(1), 9-26. https://oa.journals.publicknowledgeproject.org/index.php/oa/article/view/282/330
  • Wickert, C., & Schaefer, S. M. (2015). Towards a progressive understanding of performativity in critical management studies. Human Relations, 68(1), 107-130.
  • Wilson, S., Lee, H., Ford, J., & Harding, N. (2022). If philosophers went on a leadership course: A (serious) farce in three Acts. Leadership, 18(4), 471-497. https://doi.org/10.1177/17427150221083428
  • Wilson, S., & Selman-Julian, D. (2025). Inside the glass cage: Online misogyny in Aotearoa New Zealand. https://www.ncwnz.org.nz/glass_cage_exhibition
  • Wood, M., & Brown, S. (2011). Lines of flight: Everyday resistance along England’s backbone. Organization, 18(4), 517-539.
  • Wood, M., Salovaara, P., & Marti, L. (2018). Manifesto for filmmaking as organisational research. Organization, 25(6), 825-835.

Omer Nazir Omer Nazir is a Lecturer in Management at Massey University, New Zealand. His work focuses on activist and critical scholarship on labour, debt, and modern slavery, using visual ethnography and creative methods.
Janet Sayers Professor Janet Sayers work is grounded in a longstanding engagement with video, images, storytelling, and performance as central modes of inquiry for organizational studies. Across her research and teaching, she has used visual media to explore organisational life as embodied, affective, and politically situated, treating video and images as ways of thinking, knowing, and intervening. Her approach foregrounds visual practice as a feminist and activist methodology that can surface marginalised experiences and challenge text-dominant traditions of organisational scholarship. She has published articles on film, video, and storytelling in journals such as Academy of Management Learning and Education, Journal of Business Ethics, Gender, Work and Organization, Culture and Organization, and others.
Nancy Harding is Professor of Human Resource Management at the University of Bath’s School of Management, UK. Her research and teaching focus on critical approaches to understanding organizations, particularly working lives, gender and the performative constitution of identities. Her papers have appeared in many of the expected academic journals, and she has published two sole-authored books, two joint-authored books and several edited collections.
Majid Khan Majid Khan is a Lecturer in Management and Sustainable Business at Massey University. His research advances critical understanding of sustainability, ethics, and labour relations by examining how organizational practices reproduce or contest systems of exploitation and inequality. His work is grounded in ethnographic and visual methods.
Suze Wilson Suze Wilson, PhD, Fellow and Director of the International Leadership Association, is an Associate Professor at Te Kunenga Ki Pūrehuroa, Massey University, where she researches leadership and teaches on this topic and issues of diversity, equity and inclusion in the workplace. Her research examines issues of power, identity, gender, ethics, discourse, practice/s, context, character, communication and crisis as they pertain to leadership and its development, as well as the history of leadership thought, informed by Foucauldian discourse analysis and historiographic methods of inquiry, feminist theory and creative methods of inquiry. She is the co-lead of a project which won a prestigious Marsden Fund grant.
Hasibe Aysan is an Assistant Professor at the Department of International Trade and Finance and Chair of this Department at the Faculty of Economics and Administrative Sciences, Ostim Technical University, Turkiye. Her research focuses on management and organization. She has authored a number of research papers published in international peer-reviewed journals like the 'Journal of Management', 'Organization Studies', and 'METU Studies in Development'. She is working in the fields of organizational theory, legitimacy, professional division and history of business administration, strategic management and innovation and technology management.