Richard Wainwright

Educational Background

• PhD, Faculty of Education, University of Victoria, 2022 Arts-based research methodologies, collaboration, posthumanism.
• M.Ed., Educational Studies, University of Victoria, 2010 Arts-based research, online critical pedagogy.
• BSW, Social Work, McGill University, 1992.
• B.Ed., Education, McGill University, 1991.

I serve as Research Director at the Vancouver Art Therapy Institute, where I coordinate inquiry design and mentor practitioner-researchers. I helped found VATI’s Research Ethics Board and I continue to cultivate ethics as a facilitating environment rather than a research gate. I supervise doctoral students at EGS-AHS and have advised students in the MA program since 2014. I have also taught in the M.Ed. program at Thompson Rivers University, linking classroom learning to international partnerships. As Executive Director of Art & Possibility Society, I co-develop grassroots initiatives in Kamloops with peer facilitators and local agencies.

I care about collaborative authorship in art and academic writing, where voices meet and make something neither could make alone. My research focuses on arts-based inquiry, research methodology, and posthumanism. I am developing ethical approaches that use aesthetic tools to clarify consent, risk, and care, and I work with AI as a flexible, adaptable toolkit that can support, question, and extend our research.

Expressive Arts practice is intermodal. In a recent project for example, we reclaimed panels from abandoned cars and co-created designs with graffiti artists, then laser-etched them as an aesthetic response that holds the metal’s history. With youth, I build low-barrier studios oriented to play, witnessing, and the poiesis of making together. I use drones to read the city cartographically and to guide site-specific work as civic practice. A recent trash-bin mural project with street-oriented youth functioned as ensemble work, drawing steady participation, and changing how these alleys are used and cared for in Kamloops, Canada.