Kip Jones

KIP JONES, an American by birth, has been studying and working in the UK for more than 20 years.
Under the umbrella term of 'arts-led research', his main efforts have involved developing tools
from the arts and humanities for use by social scientists in research and its impact on a wider
public or a Perfomative Social Science.

Jones was Reader in Performative Social Science and Qualitative Research at
Bournemouth University for 15 years.
He is now a Visiting Scholar and and an independent author and scholar.

Kip has produced films and written many articles for academic journals and authored chapters
for books on topics such as masculinity, ageing and rurality, and older LGBT citizens.
Jones' most recent work involves working with Generation Z youth to tell their stories using
social media.
His ground-breaking use of qualitative methods, including Auto-fiction, biography
and auto-ethnography, and the use of tools from the arts in social science research
and dissemination are well-known.

Jones acted as Author and Executive Producer of
the award-winning short film, RUFUS STONE, funded by Research Councils UK.
The film is now available for free viewing on the Internet
and has been viewed by more than 14,000 people in 150 countries.

Areas of expertise
• Close relationships, culture and ethnicity
• Social psychology, sociology
• Ageing, self and identity
• Interpersonal processes, personality,
individual differences,
social networks, prejudice and stereotyping
• Sexuality and sexual orientation
• Creativity and the use of the
arts in Social Science

Media experience
His work has been reported widely
in the media, including:
BBC Radio 4,BBC TV news,Times
Higher Education, Sunday New
York Times, International
Herald-Tribune
and The Independent.

Monday 13 September 2010

Negative Space and Chance Movement

This short film tells a story of the Bournemouth University
8th International Qualitative Research Conference, September 2010.


The brief to the filmmakers was to tell the 'B" story, the in-between, the over-heard, the negative spaces of the conference. Negative space involves concentrating on the background—an excellent exercise in observation and listening.


This film represents the activity between events and the inter-connectedness of these negative spaces. The delegates at the conference turn out to be the subject of the film. The soundscape becomes the dialogue.


Fluxus is intermedia. Fluxus creators like to see what happens when different media intersect. They use found and everyday objects, sounds, images, and texts to create new combinations of objects, sounds, images, and texts.


‘Creativity is that uncanny ability to work within rule boundaries while, at the same time, changing them’.—Kip Jones



BU Qualitative Research Conference 2010 from Kip Jones on Vimeo.


Producer/Director: Rob Jones

Sound: Henrietta Rowlatt and Mog McIntyre

Camera: Yasir Khan

Editor: Chris Taylor

Executive Producers: Kip Jones and Trevor Hearing

Thursday 9 September 2010

Prime Cuts

Prime Cuts from Kip Jones on Vimeo.

By means of a short auto-ethnographic use of stock film clips, Prime Cuts creates a battery of visual memories which have become recurring themes in my own productions. They are, in a way, false memories that are created through the montage, collage and ‘mash-up’ of memory.

These visualisations have morphed and warped into what is now part of my personal visual arsenal of accumulated pictorial memories. These images form my personal visual biography and influence my visual work, directly and indirectly, consciously and subliminally.

As we observe throughout life, certain cultural images become private and iconic. They twist and turn and eventually morph in various ways to be included as our own graphic memories. These images are truly Ethno-Graphic. These visual memories become imbued with both intense cultural and personal meaning.
Godard is often credited with having once said, "It's not where you take things from—it's where you take them to."

Originally screened at Bournemouth University's conference on Qualitative Research, Sept 2010 in a gallery-like setting with other works of art. I wanted to see how visitors to the gallery space would engage (or not) with the continuously playing video on the large screen.

What are your Prime Cuts?

Music used in the Mash-ups:
Max Richter
Morgana King
Kylie Minogue
Rufus Wainwright

Wednesday 1 September 2010

He didn't leave a note.



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Sometimes, when children are ‘rough-housing’, mothers will warn them, 'It will all end in tears'. What sound advice for life's emotional journey.


Exit: stage right. A haughty exit. The kind only dancers can make. There was not even a furtive glance in my direction in the audience. This is how the beginning of the end began.

I didn’t want to live in a dacha outside of Odessa anyway. I am not fond of borscht or pickled anything. I don't want to spend my last years hearing about your glory days on the stage and then watch you go off to work in an office in your brother’s start-up Russian construction company. I hate the cold.


I have always seen myself retiring to a Bedouin tent in Morocco—an air conditioned one. I would watch the goats all day. A young man, my ‘companion’, will bring me tea. Non, merci. Je préfère un jus d'orange, s'il vous plait’. A boy like the ones in the beach scene in Death in Venice. Young men who naturally put their arms around one another and give each other a kiss on the cheek. Not a French baiser, stylised and studied, but a natural, heart-felt kiss.

In my letter to you I said that I wished you had learned bravery from Masha.

When I was still at Art College, I was offered a job designing sets for a start-up dance company, The Pennsylvania Ballet, in its infancy. How different my life might have been if I had been brave enough then to take that gamble. It would have meant having to drop out of art school (which I did eventually, anyway). I wasn’t fearless enough, however. Or like the time Florence Dorn (of husband, Joel, who helped make Bette Midler famous) asked me to accompany her to London to buy a hat. She said we could stay with ‘the Harrisons’ (George and Pattie). I thought these were things other people did, not me. I wasn’t brave enough.

I was striking as a young man. I wish I had capitalised on my looks. Not in a calculating way, but in an intelligent one. I was too busy wallowing in my own emotional turmoil to see the potential of making the right choices and the right connections, and using my natural assets to help manage that.

So I wanted you to be brave. I wanted you to bridge the age difference, overcome the cultural and language barriers, and manage the impossible ever-changing geography of it all. I wanted you to believe in the potential of our connection.

In the end, your fears took over and made your decision for you.

Perhaps you and all of this so late in life were just cruel reminders of my own past mistakes.

Part of travelling again and seeing you for what I now know was the last time was to have some time away to contemplate my mother’s death. I wanted to be near you when I did that and to buffer any pain with your warmth. That never happened.

Instead, I wrote you a letter (in English and Google Russian) and left it with a book of photographs of you dancing that I had made. I came to your last performance (for me), sitting in the second row. I waited until you were a few feet in front of me, then stood up and exited ... stage right.

In terms of my mother’s death, I came to the realisation that no one would help me with that. My work colleagues mostly ignored it. The ones who did say something saw it as some kind of opportunity to talk about deaths in their own lives. Why do people think that this is comforting? Not one person mentioned ‘compassionate leave’. One insensitively suggested that I watch a documentary on Brian Epstein, ignoring the fact that the question pervading the film is, ‘Did Epstein take his own life six weeks after the death of his father?’

We will never know. He didn’t leave a note.