Chris Seeley

Dr Chris SeeleyDr Chris Seeley
Dr. Chris Seeley started life with drawing, painting, making - a childhood informed by creating - before studying graphic design, moving into a corporate identity and then industrial market research and new business development. She broadened her horizons at the turn of the century to encompass wider global issues and seeks to re-integrate her expressive creative life into her work as a response to sustainability and the current world situation.

Chris is an independent consultant working in the field of sustainability with various organisations and a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Action Research in Professional Practice (CARPP) at the University of Bath. 

She also works with public, private and educational organisations incorporating different ways of knowing beyond the intellect into an improvised, unmediated way of receiving the world, allowing spontaneous responses to emerge. 

She is an experienced international consultant having worked in Africa, Asia, Europe and North America. She is currently working in collaborative high technology and sustainability projects with clients that include the International Labour Organisation and the Welsh Assembly Government. 

Her involvement with sustainability issues foregrounded the need for our species to come to know the world in many different ways - including "presentational knowing" or arts-based practice. Increasingly, she has found herself using the visual arts, storytelling, clowning, improvisation and forum theatre (in Sri Lanka) in her educational, business and development work practices.

She is currently exploring Goethean qualitative science as a working methodology. This interweaving of her concerns was articulated in her unconventional 2006 PhD - "Wild Margins: Playing at work and life" which explores the overlapping relationship between purposeful work and the arts, and arts-based practice which holds intentions around sustainability issues.
To access Chris' PhD, see:  http://www.bath.ac.uk/carpp/publications/doc_theses_links/c_seeley.html  

Chris has been in intensive dialogue with Shelley for the past few years, exploring interconnections between cooperative enquiry, connective aesthetics, Goethean methodologies and the field of social sculpture. She is particularly interested in the role of 'the fool', which coincides with Shelley's long term performative and pedagogic practices involving 'the trickster'. Chris has been learning to embody the clown / fool archetype in performance and improvisation for the past 6 years.

She is now working as part of the SSRU's core group and in the Art, Culture and Sustainability research cluster, to develop projects with Shelley and other SSRU members, including a Connective Practices symposium and network centring on 'new methodologies of engagement'.