No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the authors.
The Intimacies of Doing Research-Creation: Sarah E. Truman in Conversation with Natalie Loveless, Erin Manning, Natasha Myers, and Stephanie Springgay
Abstract
The following roundtable conversation, initiated by Sarah E. Truman activates a discussion on research-creation’s potential and limitations as a research method/methodology, complicates cursory references to it, and demonstrates the already robust and nuanced theorizations of research-creation within Canada.
... I understand research-creation as the making of art as a way of doing and theorizing research (Truman & Springgay, 2015). The content or findings of research-creation are interrelated with its form (Loveless, interviewed in Truman et al., 2019;Truman & Shannon, 2018). In this way, research-creation does not seek to represent data extracted from an environment (Shannon & Truman, 2020); rather, the process of compositionin this case, the process of composing Walking through Leeds on a Windy Day-is the research findings. ...
... Nor did I eschew technique, canon, or the curriculum. Rather, research-creation is oriented primarily by its feminist, anti-racist and anti-ableist intention to method (Springgay & Truman, 2018;Springgay Shannon, Neuroqueer(ing) Noise CJDS 9.5 (December 2020) 491 in Truman et al., 2019). In this way, the project described in this paper was shaped by A written description is included for D/deaf readers: ...
Inclusion, as it is understood in a British education context, usually refers to the integration of children with dis/abilities into a mainstream school. However, rather than transform the school, inclusion often seeks to rehabilitate—to tune-up—the ‘divergent’ child’s noisy tendencies, making them more easily included. Music and the arts more broadly have long been instrumentalized as one way of achieving this transformation, relying on the assumption that there is something already inherently opposed to music—out-of-tune, or noisy—about that child. In this article, I think and compose with Neuroqueer(ing) Noise, a music research-creation project conducted in an early childhood classroom. I draw from affect and neuroqueer theories to consider how the instrumentalization of music as a way to include autistic children relies on the assumption that ‘they’ are already inherently unmusical. I consider how a deliberate attention to noise might help in unsettling ‘mere inclusion’: in effect, changing the mode we think-with in education, and opening us researchers and educators—to momentarily say “No!” to ‘mere inclusion’. This article is of relevance to teachers working in early childhood classrooms, as well as to educational researchers interested in affect theories, crip-queer and neuroqueer theories, and neurodiversity, as well as sound- or arts-based research methods.
... Problematising the conceived and perceived boundaries of analogue and digital spaces between: learner self and private self; present and future; or, classroom and bedroom became increasingly important to us as a dimension of multiplicity, not as 'a combination of the many and the one, but rather an organisation belonging to the many as such, which has no need whatsoever of unity in order to form a system' (Deleuze 1994, 182). We therefore wanted to expand the ways that we activate knowledge (Manning 2020) to make 'space in digital education for the impact that comes from engaging with the world and its messiness more creatively and critically, more imaginatively and inventively' (Ross 2017, 227). ...
The project featured in this article experiments with mapping methods as part of a research-creation approach to exploring spaces, times, and movements within materialisations of self. Bringing together adults and children across two cities during lockdown, the project problematises a stance on ‘learning loss’ during the pandemic and instead focuses on the potential of the experiential blurriness of analogue and digital spaces. Rather than seeking to control and structure online learning – thereby denying and limiting its possibilities, explorations, and senses of self – three researchers set out on a speculative approach that acknowledges the dynamic complexity of physical and virtual ways of knowing and being. The article discusses the affordances and challenges that the methodology offers and concludes with the broader implications of this research for reimagined post-pandemic pedagogies. In the end, we advocate for mapping as a way of generously creating spaces and activating meaning-making in diverse learning contexts.
... I understand research-creation as a way of researching socio-material processes as art practices. It's enacted as feminist, queer crip, and anti-colonial praxis (Loveless, 2019;Shannon, 2020;Springgay, 2020;Truman et al., 2019). Natalie Loveless (2019) describes research-creation as transdisciplinary: The disciplines that I operate across when doing research-creation are those of the artist, the researcher, and the teacher. ...
In this article, the author considers his ongoing experience as a PhD student to argue for the significance of “trajectory” toward doctoral and early career research. He suggests that his background in special education shapes his methodology (critical disability studies), his research-creation praxis, and his approach to theory. He exemplifies this through two research-creation projects: Neuroqueer(ing) Noise, which was an in-school project in an early childhood classroom, and Oblique Curiosities, which is an ongoing composition project. The author then offers four propositions for doctoral students interested in drawing from “post philosophies.” This article is of relevance to postgraduate students interested in post philosophies, research-creation, or arts-based early childhood educational research.
... I understand research-creation as the simultaneous intersection of art, research, and theory (Springgay, 2021;Truman, 2021;Truman & Springgay, 2015): note that research-creation as I understand it is not the post hoc artistic representation of qualitative research-for instance, singing an interview transcript-but rather the doing of the research and the theory as the making of art (Loveless, interviewed in Truman et al., 2019;Truman & Shannon, 2018). In this way, as Stephanie Springgay (interviewed in Truman et al., 2019) contends, "art instantiates theory". She writes: "[some works of art] are not metaphors, nor representations of theoretical concepts; rather, some works of art event concepts" (p. ...
In this paper, I propose "A/autisms" as an organizing concept for considering the complex intersection of Autistic identity, autistic disability, and the contingency of the diagnosis "autism" in educational research. I draw from Neuroqueer(ing) Noise-my doctoral research-creation project in an integrated, mainstream early childhood classroom-to consider how this intersection might help us orient towards A/autisms as artists, researchers , and teachers. Moreover, I suggest that A/autisms might be understood as a methodology for reorienting toward the human subject in the ontological turn. This paper is of relevance to researchers in the field of critical autism studies, as well as educational researchers interested in "post"-humanism, feminist materialisms, and arts-based research.
... One of the propositions that initially drew me to research-creation, and the approaches developed by Erin Manning and Brian Massumi (2014) in particular, is its refusal to cleave the activities of thought from the activities of sensing, feeling, moving, making, and living. In attending to the tendencies, differentials, and potentials that emerge through divergent modes of creative activity, research-creation is invested in the proliferation of techniques that re-invent themselves through the expression of a living process (Loveless, 2019;Manning & Massumi, 2014;Truman et al., 2019). Technique, in this sense, describes an intersect or "nexus" where bodily practices and theoretical concepts co-emerge through a particular set of conditions. ...
... Research-creation is the doing of art as research and theory (Truman & Springgay, 2015) rather than the use of artistic methods to disseminate traditional research. Natalie Loveless (in Truman et al., 2019) has described "imbricated relationships between form and content" (p. 230) as central to research-creation. ...
In this article, we take up feminist new materialist thought in relation to our music research-creation practice to problematize the white, en/abled, cis-masculine, and Euro-Western methodological orientation often inherited with sound methods. We think with our music research-creation practice to activate a feminist new materialist politics of approach, unsettling sound studies' inheritances that seek to separate, essentialize, naturalize/neutralize, capture, decontextualize, and represent. We unsettle these inheritances with six propositions: imbricate, stratify, provoke, inject, contextualize, and more-than-represent. These propositions, and this article's uptake of research-creation, hold implications for scholars interested in critically enacting sound studies research as well as qualitative and post qualitative research in general.
This paper explores the transformative potential of feminist research-creation through the lens of krisis and collaborative world-building, positioning research-creation as both a method and an ethic of care. Revisiting the ancient Greek concept of krisis—a moment of judgment and discernment—as a framework for inquiry, the author contrasts her prior scholarly work embedded in traditional frameworks of critique, often rooted in metaphors of violence, with the reparative methodologies developed through her work with the Decameron Collective. Over four years of iterative collaboration, the Collective produced award-winning multimodal digital projects Decameron 2.0 and Memory Eternal, which use storytelling, co-creation, and curation to respond creatively to crises from the pandemic to climate change. This paper argues that research co-creation can redefine krisis as a site of generative potential, where making and theorizing intertwine to produce new forms of knowledge and connection. By centering relationality, materiality, and feminist ethics, the Collective’s work moves beyond solitary modes of inquiry to establish a collaborative, care-driven practice. Situating research-creation within philosophical traditions of theoria and contemporary feminist thought, the paper highlights a number of ways such collaborative creation and curation can sustain communities, foster epistemological innovation, and offer reparative responses to crises. The paper ultimately positions research co-creation and co-authorship integrating storytelling, digital design, and collective reflection in slow scholarship as a vital methodology for navigating complex global challenges and reimagining the role of scholarship in a world facing ongoing crises.
Our oceanic swimming practice began as part of the project of doing scholarship differently in contemporary South African post-apartheid contexts. Swimming-writing-reading not only enables different ways of doing inquiry but also prompts new ways of communicating environmental injustices as we face them in/with/through the ocean. We argue the value of this practice, and the writings we generate and share, for a rethinking and reframing of environmental communication through practices of care. "Slow swimming" in the ocean brings one into intimate, affecting encounters with the ocean and its multiplicities. Porous to fluid temporalities, oceanic swimming-writing-reading becomes a hauntological place-space-time-mattering practice of swimming as we become aware of sedimented crimes of slavery and colonization, and confront the ghosts of apartheid and colonial violence. As we meet disasters of present and future, polluted and violated seas, our affective relational watery encounters with more-than-human species sharpen our response-ability to and responsibility for anthropocentric damages to the ocean and planet. We suggest such practices of affective wit(h)nessing, relationality, and care as a productive resource for communicating current environmental challenges that are consequences of certain human hands, as well as our mutual entanglements and response-abilities on planet Earth. ARTICLE HISTORY
This paper becomes a mapping of a PhEmaterialist research project, an apparatus entangled with re/making the world that applauds difference in education. Feeling-thinking-making with critical posthumanist work, we affirm that school climate matters and encourage educators’ attention to the fluxing materiality of school climate created through everyday schooling events. Daydreaming aptly accounted for our slow PhEmaterialist-inspired theoretical work, a transgressing and transversing of conventional conceptions of ‘school climate’, ‘methodology’ and ‘pedagogy’. Our school climate project emerges as an experimental mapping of eventful research, a slow research creation process where we attuned to emergent affirming pedagogical relationalities. Students worked alongside researchers over six weeks at an Australian community school, enacting research creation in the making of school climate. Da(r)ta created include voice recordings, reflective notes, written responses, photographs, narratives, soundscapes, zines, posters, drawings and maps.
As the world experiences the end of the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown era, I have been conducting a project that investigates the function and meaning of the creative making process. Using the steps to making as the research focus, I ask: why does designing and crafting feel and function like a change-making ritual, more than a routine? What evidence of the metamorphic energy of making lies within each finished creation? Through a review of other scholars’ work, from fields including ritual study, psychology, art and pedagogy, I began to understand the process of creation, and how it can promote positive transformation. Most important of all is the transformation of materials, ideas and inspiration into millinery. To begin, I found that the art of creative research propels the maker into a liminal stew of ideas and actions, where only the forces for and against the act of making are evident. The choices of materials and applications gather increasingly on the studio table, and the question of the meaning behind the process grows curiously deeper…
Corona Walker lived and died in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia at the end of the 19th century. Her headstone records that she died on 11 January 1889, at the age of 18 years, coincidentally less than a year before the Russian Influenza pandemic. There is no memoir, diary, obituary or other first-hand account to be found for her. Walking and writing in the neighbourhoods of her resting place is a method of simultaneously imagining the past and bringing Corona into the present. In this speculative biography, the imagined female protagonist assembles, disassemblesand reassembles as she moves through the city. This work of research creation is situated within spatial, walking-based visual arts practices and is grounded in multisensory experiences of sites, weathers and bodies. The compassionate imagining of Corona Walker affords glimpses of a future to be realised in the aftermath of tragedy.
Feminist Speculations and the Practice of Research-Creation provides a unique introduction to research-creation as a methodology, and a series of exemplifications of research-creation projects in practice with a range of participants including secondary school students, artists, and academics.
In conversation with leading scholars in the field, the book outlines research-creation as transdisciplinary praxis embedded in queer-feminist anti-racist politics. It provides a methodological overview of how the author approaches research-creation projects at the intersection of literary arts, textuality, artistic practice, and pedagogies of writing, drawing on concepts related to the feminist materialisms, including speculative thought, affect theories, queer theory, and process philosophy. Further, it troubles representationalism in qualitative research in the arts. The book demonstrates how research-creation operates through the making of or curating of art or cultural productions as an integral part of the research process. The exemplification chapters engage with the author’s research-creation events with diverse participants all focused on text-based artistic projects including narratives, inter-textual marginalia art, postcards, songs, and computer-generated scripts.
The book is aimed at graduate students and early career researchers who mobilize the literary arts, theory, and research in transdisciplinary settings.
This paper reflects on a research-creation project that investigates the ways in which surveillance is experienced by youth as an embodiment that might be difficult to articulate in words but rather expressed affectively, through emotion and social practice. Our argument is that the aesthetic intervention provoked by research-creation can instantiate encounters that capture surveillance as an ineffable experience of everyday life. We situate our methodological claims in a concrete case study that considers youth engagement with a commissioned contemporary art project. Drawing on the writings of child and youth psychoanalyst W.D. Winnicott, we theorize the importance of a facilitating environment to create the conditions for young people to freely and playfully express meanings they make in their encounters with art. Research-creation suggests a perspective of resistance and failure as productive and constitutive of the possibilities of coming to know, both for the research subjects and ultimately for the authors in their orientation to research inquiry.
ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any references for this publication.