PhD researcher Xsara Helmi is pleased to welcome Dr Helen Kara as an external advisor to Xsara Helmi’s doctoral research at the University of Salford’s Leverhulme Trust-funded Aural Diversity Doctoral Research Hub.
Helmi’s transdisciplinary arts-based practice-as-research PhD explores autistic listening, aural diversity, and embodied sonic experience through transdisciplinarity, music phenomenology, composition, poetic inquiry, film, arts practice and autoethnography. The research explores how transdisciplinary arts-based research methodologies can offer new ways of sensory knowledge production through autistic perception, embodiment, and lived experience.
Dr Kara is an internationally recognised researcher, author, and educator whose work has made a significant contribution to creative research methodologies. She is the editor of a widely recognised book series on creative research methods, published by Policy Press, which has supported researchers across disciplines in sharing innovative approaches to knowledge creation. Her expertise in creative and qualitative inquiry, research ethics, and innovative methodologies closely aligns with the foundations of Helmi’s transdisciplinary arts-based practice-as-research approach.
This collaboration builds on Helmi’s contribution to transdisciplinary arts based research methodologies, including her first journal article, Hospital Noises: Sonic Autobiography and the Embodied Experience of Autistic Auditory Perception,” which was chosen as Editor’s Choice and published in the Journal of Creative Research Methods (Bristol University Press). The article explores autistic auditory perception through sonic autobiography and practice-arts-based research approaches.
Dr Kara joins an interdisciplinary external advisory network that includes Em. Professor John Drever (University of Cambridge) and Assoc Professor Jon Robson (University of Nottingham), bringing together specialism across sound arts, creative research methods, sound studies, aesthetics, philosophy, disability studies, and digital humanities.
Dr Kara is the founder and host of the International Creative Research Methods Conference, established in Manchester as an international forum for researchers across disciplines to explore innovative approaches to creative, qualitative, and radical methods. The conference contributes to the wider creative research landscape of Manchester and the North West, bringing together scholars engaged in developing new approaches to research practice.
The fourth conference will take place on 7–8 September 2026 at The Studio, 51 Lever Street, Manchester M1 1FN and tickets are still available to buy HERE
