Our aim for moving the iacat Journal online with POLYPHONY is to provide a more acessible, vibrant, dynamic platform for contributors to share their personal and professional journeys of discovery as they learn, teach, develop and pioneer new knowledge. We seek with the POLYPHONY project to provide an online space for creative arts therapists in Ireland and beyond to share key insights and innovations, as part of enhancing the profession and practice of the arts therapies.
We follow the iacat mission and vision statements. We also seek to advance an understanding of how the arts therapies contribute to enriching individual’s lives and environments. We believe that evidence based research, demonstrating how the arts therapies work and what they can achieve, is key to this mission.
POLYPHONY also offers an important resource for getting to know each other’s work and contributing to a strong community of arts therapists in Ireland, as well as for presenting our work to arts therapists in other countries, and getting to know more about their work as we invite them to publish with us. We also seek to explore the proven benefits of arts therapies when applied in interdisciplinary settings.
Hand in hand with these goals, using POLYPHONY we are dedicated to supporting our authors at every step of the writing process. We recognise that many arts therapists are so passionate, dedicated and hard-working in their practice, that they may find it difficult to put aside valuable writing time. We also acknowledge that writing academically about their work is not every arts therapist’s first love.
Our dedicated team of editors, advisors and reviewers are on hand to chat about any questions that arise, and to help authors and prospective authors to develop ideas at every stage. We believe strongly in the value of your knowledge and experience and we want to help you to share that. We also understand that writing is a very personal endeavour, and with that in mind we value empathy and support in all our communications.
With this in mind, we call on colleagues to submit work for peer review and publication on this new online resource.
Whether this is research or evaluation papers, case studies, theoretical articles, survey based papers, project reports, reflective papers and interviews, all are invited, provided papers have a sound conceptual or evidence base. We promote a diversity of methodologies, including arts based research, as a way of examining and understanding experience.
Check it out POLYPHONY.iacat.me