After the first three weeks of the mixed methods course at Oxford, I began to actively rethink the structure and method of my PhD thesis. The course gave me a clearer language for what my research already needs: practice-led ethnography as the core, with only light mixed methods added in a careful, minimal way.
This has shifted how I understand my thesis design. My artistic and performative practice will remain the main site of knowledge production. Movement labs, site-responsive performance, rehearsal processes, material experiments, and studio translation are not illustrations of theory, but where thinking happens. Writing and analysis will follow from these embodied processes, rather than directing them in advance.
Ethnography will be embedded in the work through sustained presence in sites and communities: participant observation, fieldnotes, sensory attention, and dialogic encounters with collaborators and participants. Performances, choreographic scores, drawings, installations, and movement labs will function as both data and argument. The final performance outcomes will operate as ethnographic “texts” — situated ways of thinking through embodied folklore, gesture, ritual objects, and everyday acts of care.
I plan to use light mixed methods only where gentle structure helps me see patterns across sites and encounters, without flattening lived complexity. This includes short elicitation conversations, co-created visual and sensory maps of movement, space, and atmosphere, and brief post-performance prompts with simple intensity scales (for example, noting which moments stayed with participants and how strongly they resonated). These tools will be embedded into workshops and performances, not added as separate evaluation tasks.
This reframing helps me redesign my PhD as three interwoven strands rather than linear phases:
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Practice as the primary way of knowing
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Ethnography as sustained, relational engagement
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Light mixed methods as small supports for noticing patterns and shifts
Analysis will move cyclically between field, studio, and writing desk. Visual tools (site maps, layered scores, rehearsal timelines) will function as analytic devices, not decoration. Theory will be woven into scenes of making and performing, allowing the thesis to show how cultural memory, gesture, ritual objects, and acts of care operate as living archives through embodied practice.
This shift allows my PhD to remain deeply embodied, relational, and practice-driven, while making the methodology more legible within qualitative and mixed-methods research — without turning the project into a survey-based study.