This edited volume explores the role of arts and meditation within educational settings, and looks in particular at the preventive and developmental function of the arts in educational contexts through different theoretical perspectives. Encompassing research from an array of disciplines including theatre, psychology, neuroscience, music, psychiatry, and mindfulness, the book draws insights relevant to a broad spectrum of interdisciplinary fields. Chapters are divided into thematic sections, each outlining praxes and emphasising how educating within and through the arts can provide tools for critical thinking, creativity and a sense of agency, consequently fulfilling the need of well-being and contributing towards human flourishing. Ultimately, the book focuses on the role the arts have played in our understanding of physical and mental health, and demonstrates the new-found significance of the discipline in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. With its interdisciplinary and timely nature, this book will be essential reading for scholars, academics, and post-graduate researchers in the field of arts education, creative therapies, neuroscience, psychology, and mindfulness.

Researcher and educator of the arts Dr. Valerie Flamini is your expert guide for meaningful conscious experiences. Her research in the areas of flow theory and mindfulness revealed ways to foster elevated conscious experiences with the arts. This book may be useful to the typical person who appreciates the arts as well as those who are creators and performers of art. The chapters in this book progress from a novice approach of mindfulness during artistic engagement to activities which require more conscious control and creative output. A variety of activities are included such as sound meditation, crafting, and even cloud gazing! Chapters are rich with examples and context. Da Vinci to the Grateful Dead will inspire meaningful experiences with personalized intention. The idea is for the reader to build skills of conscious control necessary for optimum experiences as they progress through the guide. As a result, the reader may be able to foster flow in everyday activities by exercising the necessary skills in a pleasurable way, through art! Acquiring these skills may bring more enjoyment and general happiness to your everyday experiences. Inside you will discover: ~ Researched skills for bringing more flow to your daily experiences. ~ Engaging narrative about art, architecture, and music including context for indigenous, ancient, and modern artistic practices. ~ Encouraging ways to bring more self-awareness, compassion, conscious control, somatic awareness, and mindfulness to any creative endeavor.

Today more than ever, our world needs creativity and innovation as key pillars to drive growth, face challenges, and stand out in a competitive and demanding world. It has become pressing to reflect on how creativity and innovation can be fostered in society, especially among the younger generation who will be the protagonists of inevitable changes in the future. This book focuses on the intrinsic and fruitful link between creativity and innovation. It encompasses a set of reflections, experiences, and insights on how these two concepts become effective levers of each other. It also focuses on how to foster creativity and innovation in people, organizations, and communities, as well as how creativity and innovation can effectively make a difference for the better in a world that increasingly needs new and innovative solutions to increasingly complex problems. From diverse cultures and scientific fields and dissimilar research methodologies, the contributions that make up this book present an integrated approach to creativity and innovation as central concepts to contribute to a better society and better world. We believe that creativity and innovation are indeed the forces that drive progress, expression, and discovery. Investing in them is investing in a better, more balanced, and sustainable world.

The Collaborative Body in Qualitative Research challenges normative philosophies that have frequently neglected the body’s place in research and then illustrates how the body is essential for all meaning making. By ‘voicing the body’, the first part of this rebellious book problematizes how the body is used/assessed, yet often silenced in academic writing. This book then fluidly moves to celebrating the body through discussing taboo topics like sex/sexuality in friendship, underwear (knickers), ageing, and death, as well as how a non-binary body moves in a heteronormative world. Through the lens of Bodyography, this book does research differently – illuminating how the body flourishes, excites knowledge, and is complicated when placed on a ‘screen’. This book celebrates a collaborative and arts-based approach. This book is a dialogue between The Bodies Collective, with dialogic resonance sections between each chapter and art pieces throughout. This book will encourage all scholars to do research differently. Anyone with a thirst to challenge normative practices in academia and who wants research to be inspiring and playful will fall in love with this book.

There is a lack of control that exists when managing a chronic illness, just as there is a lack of autonomy when one finds themselves living within the confines of a correctional facility. How does one address these two precarious circumstances when they collide? Research has revealed that incarcerated populations have a higher rate of infectious disease and chronic health issues than their non-incarcerated counterparts. How is this reality translated in a way that others might understand? As an avenue to gain a new perspective, this book provides a glimpse into the world of incarceration and health care management, using art to translate this experience. Activist art is effective and powerful for both the audience and the creator. By revealing the reality of living with a chronic illness and how social determinants of health significantly impact one’s status and start in life, art holds the power to shift perspectives and deepen understandings not only of health care and incarceration but also to agitate for societal changes.

This book provides perspectives and insights across the educational system for how we might move toward living out this wish in all schools. The chapters provide perspectives on fundamental questions that have been guiding recent research on wellbeing in schools: How do school communities flourish together? How does supporting educator wellbeing connect to teaching, learning, leading in schools? What characteristics, qualities and strategies support the wellbeing of the whole school community? This book is unique in that it answers these questions from the perspectives of teachers, students, administrators in K-12 schools, as well as from university and the wider community. Importantly, these chapters provide a repertoire of varied answers to the question that underpins this shift in research toward a positive organizational perspective: How can we leverage what works well to grow more, to instill in each community member a sense of their value and capacity to contribute? These chapters serve as examples, invitations, and inspiration for readers to notice in their own contexts ways they can grow wellbeing through a focused attention on building appreciative, strengths-based, positive approaches to teaching, learning, and leading in all schools.

Sounds of the Pandemic offers one of the first critical analyses of the changes in sonic environments, artistic practice, and listening behaviour caused by the Coronavirus outbreak. This multifaceted collection provides a detailed picture of a wide array of phenomena related to sound and music, including soundscapes, music production, music performance, and mediatisation processes in the context of COVID-19. It represents a first step to understanding how the pandemic and its by-products affected sound domains in terms of experiences and practices, representations, collective imaginaries, and socio-political manipulations. This book is essential reading for students, researchers, and practitioners working in the realms of music production and performance, musicology and ethnomusicology, sound studies, and media and cultural studies.

Substantially revised to include a wealth of new material, the second edition of this highly acclaimed work provides a concise, coherent introduction that brings structure to an increasingly fragmented and amorphous discipline. Paul R. McHugh and Phillip R. Slavney offer an approach that emphasizes psychiatry's unifying concepts while accommodating its diversity. Recognizing that there may never be a single, all-encompassing theory, the book distills psychiatric practice into four explanatory methods: diseases, dimensions of personality, goal-directed behaviors, and life stories. These perspectives, argue the authors, underlie the principles and practice of all psychiatry. With an understanding of these fundamental methods, readers will be equipped to organize and evaluate psychiatric information and to develop a confident approach to practice and research.