Dr Clare Danek

Profile

My current role is as Postdoctoral Research Fellow on an ESRC-funded project developing a blueprint for a National Cultural Data Observatory; specifically, I am working as part of a team developing a qualitative case study focusing on ways in which communities are working with data as part of Bradford 2025 City of Culture. 

Prior to returning to academia, I held various arts and cultural sector roles for over twenty years, across a range of roles including (but not limited to) co-ordination for arts festivals, from the large – Liverpool Biennial – to the smaller – Skipton Puppet Festival; as a visiting lecturer on a photography degree; leading on creative programming and marketing for an innovative creative business centre; delivering communications for Europe-wide design advocacy organisations; and currently, as a trustee for a new local mixed-use cultural venue.

I completed my White Rose College of the Arts and Humanities-funded PhD in the School of Performance and Cultural Industries in 2024. In addition to my current role, I also hold a LAHRI Postdoctoral Visiting Fellowship, through which I am developing my doctoral work into new creative directions.
 

Research interests

My interests focus on experiential, embodied approaches to creative activity: in particular, how does it feel to learn to make, alongside others or alone? I am particularly interested in ideas about play, permission and becoming in these contexts, and in the use of creative methods at different stages of the research process. 

My PhD thesis ‘Working alone, working together: exploring craft learning in open access community making spaces’ involved autoethnographic research in two shared craft spaces. Through learning basic ceramics and printmaking skills alongside others, I presented the use of play as a lens through which to examine amateur craft learning; strategic learning as a key model for knowledge transmission within spaces of informal creative activity; ‘alongside’ as a theoretical position; and the notion of informal craft spaces as ‘permission spaces’, reflective of the tension between opportunities and constraints in such spaces. I also developed a ‘stitch journal’, a daily embroidered and appliqued document running over 735 days, as a reflective and reflexive device; this has since featured in various creative research methods publications and teaching. 

My current research builds on my PhD work to further explore how the maker develops their creative identity as they move away from ideas about play, permission, and creative identity. I am particularly interested in how playful, improvisatory and narrative textile-based methods (specifically embroidery, applique, and patchworking) can be used as reflective and reflexive tools in exploring and expressing this experience.
 

Qualifications

• PhD (2024), School of Performance and Cultural Industries, University of Leeds
• MA (2016), Culture, Creativity & Entrepreneurship, University of Leeds
• BA (1998) Fine Art (Painting), Norwich University of the Arts