Knowledge Translation Takes Progressive Turn, Mapping New Terrain Through Critical Realism and the Arts

We have been pleased recently to report on the cutting edge creative projects and research currently underway across the country by the respected members of our Canadian Creative Arts in Health, Training and Education Journal Advisory Board.

Today we feature recent work by Pia C. Kontos, Research Scientist, Public Health Sciences, Toronto Rehabilitation Institute and Assistant Professor University of Toronto, who has worked in the areas of research based theatre in traumatic brain injury, embodied selfhood, caregiving and "expressions of personhood" and Alzheimer's Disease.

New work by Pia Kontos Ph.D. and Blake D. Poland Ph.D. (Critical Social Theory, Qualitative Methods, Social Geography) recently published at Biomed Central examines
how, through use of critical realism and the arts, "knowledge translation" can take place in an entirely different way. The paper explores how the arts can offer important and exciting new research and learning possibilities for progressive approaches to KT.

Excerpt from the paper posted at "Implementation Science":

"Mapping New Theoretical and Methodological Terrain for Knowledge Translation: Contributions From Critical Realism and the Arts"

"This paper presents a KT model, the Critical Realism and the Arts Research Utilization Model (CRARUM), that combines critical realism and arts-based methodologies. Critical realism facilitates understanding of clinical settings by providing insight into the interrelationship between its structures and potentials, and individual action. The arts nurture empathy, and can foster reflection on the ways in which contextual factors influence and shape clinical practice, and how they may facilitate or impede change. The combination of critical realism and the arts within the CRARUM model promotes the successful embedding of interventions, and greater impact and sustainability.....CRARUM has the potential to strengthen the science of implementation research by addressing the complexities of practice settings, and engaging potential adopters to critically reflect on existing and proposed practices and strategies for sustaining change."

For full paper visit