Program statement
Photo: Börje Forsgård
Ingress
The work of INTRA is standing on two legs:
- An application of Expressive Arts
- A multi-perspective theoretical and philosophical approach
Aesthetic ways of expression, such as painting/sculpturing, dance/movement, sound/music, poetry/tales, psychodrama/theatre as well as interaction and dialogue as tools for communication in an exploration of life experiences and knowledge acquisition.
The work and empirical data of INTRA is built on 25 years of practicing EXA. It concerns traditional pedagogical practice such as teaching, but also other fields of work where a pedagogical approach is fundamental. We have worked with personal- and/or professional development with different groups in different contexts:
- Children in need of certain support and stimuli
- Socially vulnerable youths within the school system
- Young adults and adults, individually or in group, as a part of processing life experiences
- As a part of a university course about personal growth for social workers (PPU)
- Clients within the social service and within medical rehabilitation
- Staff within different occupations, in terms of staff workshops and coaching
- Groups within outpatient psychiatric care, staff and patients, psychotherapeutic work
- Refugees and unaccompanied refugee minors
INTRA emphasizes the interconnection between concrete practice in the everyday work and an academic anchoring. Experiences from practices faces theory and philosophy, and in this way, new knowledge emerges. Our interest spans from the inter-relational to the intra-relational, where our starting point has been inter-relations, that is, encounters and communication between human beings.
Today, the members of INTRA are widening and deepening our collective experience by being challenged by a post-humanist perspective (using Barad and Deleuze) and the notions and the research method that is developed in this perspective. The focus is aimed towards the materiality of the human being as well as the materiality of the verbal language, the nature, the societal structures and constructions such as things/tools. The developmental processes that are the basis of our empirical data contains entanglements between individuals and other matters such as different materials that are used. At the same time, there is a continuous intra-action between the participants, their bodies, language and implicit knowing. From here, the human being is involved in continuous encounters with societal structures and nature in all of their different forms.
The work of INTRA has resulted in several research articles.
Foto Börje Forsgård 
We want to…
… pave the way for new forms of research methods. We deepen our fundamental humanistic approach by recognizing the intra-activity in the becoming of human beings, where traditional dichotomies are abolished, such as body/soul, thought/emotion, human being/nature, we/them/it. We critically examine dominant notions and search for other notions that better specify collective and interconnected empirical and academic experiences. In this way, we want to put experiences that rise from praxis into notions.
… support practices such as education of different sorts, leadership development, social work in a wide sense, care, organization development and formation. Our ambition is to clarify the terms for an environment that is able to hold practices of the sort that we strive for; we search for the terms for the formal aspects of an environment, as well as the physical aspects – including the tools that are needed –, and the particular social terms, such as leadership and structures.
Our methods…
… focus on the communicative capabilities of the human being, verbally as well as with different aesthetic expressions, where notions such as ethics, aesthetics, materiality, play and change are pivotal.