The Tavistock Institute’s unique archive is a body of mainly written documents including project reports, fieldnotes, letters, and other records from 70 + years of multi-disciplinary relational studies.  It contains a history of action research, offering accounts of some key innovations in management thinking and change-making in organisational culture such as socio-technical systems theories (Trist, 1981).It tracks the development of multi-modal research methods and practices such as systems psychodynamics and Group Relation Practices. As such it contains evidence pointing to ways that the perception, meaning and values of work and care, have been understood, challenged and changed. 

Ive started with the question What critical thinking can emerge about the materiality of labouring bodies, as relationships between work, care, systems of production and desire for productivity are revealed through re-reading this archive from the perspective of lived experience?

Drawing on my participatory performance work over 25 years I am engaging embodied practices as research (PaR) through a subjective lens. My PaR, is about attending to and applying movement processes as a body that has a history and acts within a set of conditions, and encountering the bodies of knowledge that comprise TIHR’s archive. I am undergoing multiple series of encounters and navigation processes with selected archive materials,  accompanied by a growing collection of collaborators, participants and audiences.