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Qualitative Inquiry
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Post Philosophies and the Doing of Inquiry - Research Article
Sarah E. Truman: It’s past 10 pm here in Melbourne, so
to be coherent, I decided I’d start off by interviewing
myself, according to Viv and Candace’s questions. I
prepared some responses to their questions, and my
own questions that emerged from thinking about their
questions, and some exemplifications from my
research that will I hope help illustrate what I mean.
I’ll go through those questions and then can field fur-
ther questions.
For this self-interview, as an enabling constraint, I decided
to focus specifically on research-creation as it relates to my
book that’s just come out: Feminist Speculations and the
Practice of Research-Creation: Writing Pedagogies and
Intertextual Affects (Truman, 2021). It’s a methodology
book. Research-creation is growing in popularity in the
humanities and social sciences. It has been mobilized as a
methodology or a theoretical framework that informs
research, and a method or procedure for enacting empirical
research. The term/concept has a geographic affiliation with
Canada and was born from the idea that we need to acknowl-
edge research projects that occur at the nexus of arts prac-
tice, theory, and research; and from the necessity to affirm
the value of interdisciplinarity in the academy. Scholars
around the world now use the term including several other
speakers in this series: Stephanie Springgay, Erin Manning,
and David Ben Shannon, all of whom I’ve collaborated
with on research-creation projects. And since I’m acknowl-
edging people I’ve collaborated with who are part of this
fabulous series of talks, I also want to shout out to Elizabeth
de Freitas who I’ve been thinking with in an interdisciplin-
ary way around speculative fiction and how it can be mobi-
lized in/as qualitative research.
My background is transdisciplinary: I come from an
English literature and philosophy background—two
research areas that are generally considered part of the
humanities, as well as a background in curriculum studies/
education, which is generally considered part of the social
sciences. I also make art in the form of literary arts, music,
and curatorial work. The concept research-creation gave me
the permission to draw on my background in English litera-
ture and cultural studies, arts, philosophy, and so on, to
methodologically inform how I conceptualize and conduct
empirical research in the social sciences.
Research-creation is a meeting place of art theory and
research, yet as a term it’s not inherently aligned with a par-
ticular theoretical framework. That said, many scholars
who use the term, and many scholars that I have collabo-
rated with, draw from the “feminist materialisms” to think
about how art theory and research emerge. When I say the
word feminism in the feminist materialisms, I’m talking
about a feminist praxis and rigor informing the ethical, the-
oretical, and artistic engagements throughout the research
project, from planning to dissemination. As Natalie Loveless
1098380QIXXXX10.1177/10778004221098380Qualitative InquiryTruman
research-article2022
1The University of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Corresponding Author:
Sarah E. Truman, The University of Melbourne, 100 Leicester St Carlton,
Melbourne, VIC 3053, Australia.
Email: sarahe.truman@unimelb.edu.au
Undisciplined: Research-Creation and
What It May Offer (Traditional)
Qualitative Research Methods
Sarah E. Truman1
Abstract
As part of the Post Philosophies and the Doing of Inquiry interview series, Sarah E. Truman discusses research-creation
at the intersection of arts, theory, and research, and what it may offer traditional qualitative research. Truman gives a
theoretical orientation and talks through some research events as exemplifications.
Keywords
feminist qualitative research, feminist methodologies, methodologies, research-creation, arts-based inquiry, methods of
inquiry, queer theory, gender and sexuality, literature
2 Qualitative Inquiry 00(0)
the research-creation scholar argues: the practice of research
creation asks us to work in alliance with anti-racist, anti-
colonialist, and feminist interventions within the academy.
One of the questions that I was asked by Candace and
Viv for this talk was: how does your philosophical approach
influence your ways of doing inquiry?
And my answer is: my philosophical approach infuses
my way of doing inquiry throughout the process—particu-
larly research-creation which I’m focusing on here.
However, I also run projects that may be deemed more
“qualitative” in a normative sense, and while I’m not engag-
ing with those projects today, of course, my philosophical
approach still infuses them: I find it difficult to separate
myself from my philosophical approach because all research
is infused with theory and philosophy. Accordingly, I
thought that the next question that would follow from that,
if I were interviewing myself, which I am (ha!) would be:
what’s your philosophical approach? Or maybe I’d phrase
it, how is your philosophical approach?
My philosophical approach to conducting research is
influenced by the feminist materialisms which I mentioned
earlier. Feminism is the advocacy for equity and social jus-
tice across diverse sex, gender, sexualities, classes, races,
and abilities. The feminist materialisms describe feminist
scholarship that activates thought from fields as broad as
geophilosophy, queer studies, speculative pragmatism, and
affect theory. My invocation of these disparate theories
brings up another question that was posed by Viv and
Candace which was: What does this philosophical approach
make thinkable or possible for inquiry? To answer I’d say,
when activated in research practices these theories disrupt
common orientations to research methodology, in that: they
directly implicate researchers and artists in the event of
research (rather than as outside observers); they prioritize
affect and relationality; they disrupt representationalism;
and they recognize that thinking with theoretical concepts,
or the making and doing of art is also empirical research
(which the humanities and arts already recognize, but which
sometimes social scientists need to be reminded of!).
And this relates to another question that Viv and Candace
asked. The question was: What are your perspectives on
methodologies and or methods, how do you envision that in
your approach to doing inquiry?
I’m going to spend a big chunk of time talking through
my answer to this. And this process is outlined in Chapter 2
of my book which was the suggested reading for this semi-
nar. My methodological orientation to research-creation is
assembled from a variety of sources that I draw together
under these terms: Situated Speculation, Rigorous
Activation, Emergence, Affirmation (and Refusal), and
More-than-Representation.
I built this methodological orientation for myself, draw-
ing on theories loosely aligned with the feminist material-
isms—and a whole host of other theories that I think with,
some of which may or may not seem to go together for you,
but make sense to me. Also, before I go on, in case it’s not
obvious yet, I want to draw attention to how in my writing
and thinking about methodologies, I engage with a lot of
different philosophers and scholars. Some of these philoso-
phers and scholars write about how the inorganic world
works, or how thought might work, or how language might
work, or how poetics might work, or how speculation might
work. And in my thinking and writing I engage with some
of these theories to explain how research works for me as a
process: I think it’s important to recognize a distinction
between theories that may seek to explain the world in a
geologic, or material, or physical, or literary, or abstract
sense and how I, as a researcher might appropriate a theory
to explain my own engagement with research in the arts, or
education, which many instances maybe metaphorical. Ian
Buchanan calls this a subjectification of theory in that the
theories from these disciplines have been subjectified by
the person who is utilizing them (me!). I was talking to Ian
about this as I was writing my book and he gave me some
feedback and I thought it was an astute phrase.
So, I’m going to talk to you through the concepts, or
“movements,” that I use to outline the stages of how I
approach research-creation as a method (and methodology).
As you’ll see, some of these movements draw from dis-
courses or lineages of thought that I hold together friction-
ally or take up metaphorically.
The first movement is Situated Speculation. Following
queer feminist theorists, what I call situated speculative
thought is an integral part to research. Research-creation,
like all research is creative practice, and it is also partly a
speculative process. As an artist researcher embarks on a
project, and throughout the project, they speculate about
different time spaces from a particular time space and so
doing shape or co-compose what could be. This differential
link between a situated curiosity and speculative potentiali-
ties fuels much queer thought and much feminist materialist
thought. Of course, this “situatedness” might mean the
actual physical location or context a researcher speculates
from (e.g. while strolling down the road during a lightning
storm or in a secondary English classroom). But mostly, it
refers to the larger context unique to the researcher that they
are situated in: including shifting, inherited, self-identified,
and externally enforced subject positionalities such as race,
gender, class, sexuality, ability, as well as their theoretical
positionality, for example the concepts that a researcher
speculates with. Scholars and artists in the fields of queer
and trans studies, critical disability studies, feminist studies,
Black studies, and Indigenous studies often mobilize a situ-
ated-speculative differential in their art and scholarship.
Feminist thought has always been speculative while remain-
ing politically contextualized. A researcher’s positionality
and intentionality have material affects/effects on what the
research process might generate. Simultaneously, this
Truman 3
positionality is constantly being modified by what we read
and encounter in the research event: making a new situation
or situatedness from which speculation continues to occur.
I draw on many theories to help build my understanding
of situated speculation including Deleuze’s differential
between the actual and virtual described in Difference and
Repetition, Donna Haraway’s situated knowledges, and
queer theory—specifically queer temporalities: where the
link between situatedness and speculation of what could be
an occupy a queer time space. Queer is a term that’s often
used as a noun or adjective to describe LGBTQ2IA+ sub-
ject positions, and a mode thought that scholars mobilize
when attempting to unsettle normative approaches to
method and methodology and the power structures that are
reproduced through them. Queer theory has helped me
think through my approach to research-creation projects
and methods as situated speculation, imbued with aspects
that unsettle linearity and occupy queer time spaces.
Furthermore, Whitehead’s idea of a proposition—or lure
which occupies a queer spatio-temporality; and affect the-
ory—which is often conceptualized as the capacity to affect
and be affected, that sticks to or glides past, or infects dif-
ferent research participants in myriad different ways.
Research-creation scholar Derek McCormack (2008) has
argued that the practice of research-creation is tethered to
an ethical commitment to learning to become affected. It’s
important to remember that this capacity to affect and be
affected can vary wildly in different circumstances and situ-
ations and for different subject positions in those circum-
stances and situations. As a scholar, or artist, or researcher,
I might pose the question: how can I prime myself to become
affected? while recognizing that my capacity to become
affected will be different from research participants’ (and of
course change in different situations).
I just went through a lot of concepts quickly. And I want
to say that situated speculation, and ideas like propositions
and even queerness are risky concepts in that a researcher is
never certain what’s going to emerge in an event. However,
I also want to stress that, just because I think with these
concepts I by no means think that research-creation is an
“anything goes” process. Like all research, there’s a plan-
ning stage—that is speculative—but also requires me as a
researcher, or artist to set some limitations or conditions of
constraints in advance and conduct research board ethics
and participant consent, and so on. And this setting of limi-
tations includes the ethical political feminist tendencies that
frame and infuse the project, r what Stephanie Springgay
and I call our (in)tentions (Springgay & Truman, 2018).
And these are active throughout the whole research process
from planning to dissemination.
Okay, so the next movement of research-creation I want
to talk about is what I call Rigorous Activation. How do I
get from situated speculation to enacting a project? In
research-creation, I’m proposing a way to artistically create
an event, or a song, or a text, or a cultural production of
what I’m curious about. I figure out how to make an artistic
event of what I want to research: that’s the creation part. So,
I’m not talking about investigating something that’s already
happened. It’s completely okay to investigate something
that’s already happened! But that’s not what I’m talking
about here. I’m talking about creating the thing that I want
to investigate. Sometimes these events occur with other par-
ticipants, such as my research in schools investigating liter-
ary education and youth cultural productions, or sometimes
it’s with larger publics, or sometimes it’s a solo project.
Curating or enacting any kind of artistic practice requires
artistic rigor, which usually comes from years of training or
practice for myself or my collaborators. And I want to stress
that the arts are undermined when they’re leveraged in
“anything goes” ways in qualitative research: I think we
need to push back against that if we want to be taken seri-
ously when mobilizing the arts as part of research (art has to
have the same kind of “rigor” we’d require of other ele-
ments of the research project—and of course I say that with
the understanding that euro-western understandings of
“value” and “rigor” also need to be troubled in the acad-
emy). And the same goes for the theories that are activated
in the project: when thinking about rigorous activation, I
foreground theory that will be embedded in the project and
explored through the project, from the beginning of the
project (and yes, something may arise in the project that
requires me to engage with different theories to think
through it, but I do also foreground theory from the
beginning).
As an example of this, I’m going to talk through a
research-creation project I curated which investigated the
pedagogical and material effects of marginalia (the notes,
and illuminations that readers sometimes add to the margins
of a text). The project was completed with 34 participants
and sought to explore how marginalia and other textual
interruptions and interventions might pedagogically affect
textual reception. The base-text I used for the project was a
composite I assembled of a few different writings by
Friedrich Nietzsche. The assembled writings are mostly
concerned with how he came up with the concept of the
eternal return (while walking), and the notion of the eternal
return itself—which is a significant philosophical concept
that’s kind of haunted me since I first encountered it when I
undertook my bachelor’s degree, and it still comes up in lots
of theory/writing I read today. So, in this project, the base-
text was composed by Nietzsche, but rearranged by me and
had theory embedded in it. This theory informed how I con-
ceptualized the project and then of course it suffused the
artists’ and scholars’ engagement with the project.
Participants explored the concept of the eternal return, and
other concepts in Nietzsche’s writings, through marginalia
and textual disruption in their creations. Some of their
engagements we more materially based, some metaphoric,
4 Qualitative Inquiry 00(0)
and some dissolved! See: http://sarahetruman.com/portfo-
lio/intra-textual-entanglements/. The arts practice, the the-
ory, and the research methods are co-located throughout the
duration of the project. And the project had many con-
straints: the texts used, the participants who were required
to re-engage with each other’s engagements, and because of
the kind of participants—most of whom were artists and
scholars—there was theoretical and artistic rigor embedded
in the process, and both artful and theoretical outcomes.
This takes me to my next movement for how I think
about research-creation, which is the concept of Emergence.
Now emergence is one of those words that can tip toward
sounding really new-agey or even like an “anything goes”
approach, or just plain obvious: of course, things are going
to emerge in a research event. I settled on the term because
I like how it invokes the idea of emergency, so I’ve stuck
with it, and I like to ask myself: what’s the emergency that’s
emerging in the research?
The theoretical framework I attempt to build myself to
explain emergence happens on a whole host of levels which
include the relations between bodies and social inheri-
tances, genealogies of thought, as and of course what
emerges in the time space of the research event. I call my
research-creation projects events as a way of acknowledg-
ing how research unfolds, in practice. I conceptualize an
event as a multitude of forces interacting and emerging in
situ, including the people involved. And I consider the
emergence of an event not just the materialization of an
object or subject, but also accompanied by an ethical politi-
cal tending—each moment becomes charged with potenti-
ality, and also a necessity to respond—this is the nexus of
where “emergence” meets “emergency.” In the event of
research, I as researcher might say: “what’s the emergency
here?” What I tune my attention to in that moment matters.
As a researcher, scholar, artist, and creator, I’m never going
to be able to turn my attention to everything, and at different
junctures different things might be considered more of an
“emergency” for various reasons. That said, asking what the
emergency is a practical and speculative question that keeps
the research event in tension.
As an example of this happening, I’m going to talk to
you through another research event. This project was four-
month-long in-school walking in writing creative project
that I conducted with year nine English literature students.
The project took place during school hours in an outdoor
“walking” classroom and comprised students from several
different mixed ability classes in the school who signed up
and were allowed to leave their regular English class to
work with me. The project included many different mini-
projects focused on walking, creative writing, and public
pedagogies. For my purposes here, I just want to talk about
how one thing that emerged in the event of research brought
up new questions, and new propositions, and a new focus
that the students and I then integrated into another
mini-project. As part of the study, the students went for
walks and composed Tanka poems about their experiences
in public space (a Tanka poem is a long line one line poem
of 31 syllables). A Tanka is supposed to capture ephemera,
or an affective moment. The students were instructed to
write about any affective puncture that caught their atten-
tion as a way of investigating the relationship between
movement and ideation.
The students not only composed their own poems but
also read a series of Tanka poems about walking in Los
Angeles by African American poet Harryette Mullen
(2013). One afternoon we were back at the school and the
students were walking outside in our “walking class-
room,” circumambulating rocks and picnic tables while
and reading Mullen’s poems, and their own poems aloud
to each other. And what kept emerging across these vari-
ous pieces of writing was a precise attunement to the
intersections of race and gender in public space: the stu-
dents’ own experiences, as well as what was coming up in
Mullen’s poems, and this coalescence wasn’t premedi-
tated. There’s plenty of Tanka poems in Mullen’s book
that were not directly talking about either race or gender,
but that’s what the students kept focusing on in her poems,
and that was what was coming up in the students’ own
writings as well.
Throughout the project we did a lot of walking and writ-
ing, and I was waiting to see what was going to emerge in
the speculative middle (Springgay & Truman, 2018) and
what emerged became the research focus for the next part of
the study. I was in a privileged position running that project:
as a former teacher at the school I was given time to be slow
and occupy that kind of speculative space or experimental
space with the students over many months (while of course
ticking curricular boxes of learning about poetry and liter-
ary devices, other forms of narrative, public pedagogy, etc.
in our outdoor English “classroom”). We had the time and
ongoing walking, writing, and reading practices and culti-
vated an experimental space where none of us quite knew
what we were looking for before it happened. But when
race and gender and the intersections of both in public space
kept emerging, it was obvious that they were the emergency
(in that particular emergence) and I as a researcher along
with the students responded to that. And so new research
questions emerged and were taken into the next phase of the
research-creation project which centered on more walking
and writing in public space.
That’s just a small example of that happening in a
research event, yet it did focus the project in an important
and significant way and does push back against forms of
qualitative research that insist we know research questions
before we start researching (which of course I agree with to
a point, I also want to make sure students know that things
can change in situ and responding to that is part of research
too—or what we affirm is part of research too).
Truman 5
So, this leads me to my next movement in research-cre-
ation, which I call Affirmation (and Affirmative Refusal). As
a researcher I’m a member of a research event—in combina-
tion with other forces and agencies and processes—and I
need to be accountable and attuned to what’s arising. To con-
ceptualize how I think about that accountability, I settled on
the term affirmation (I was going to use the term attunement
but then I decided to use affirmation). Similar to my writings
about the concept of the inhuman which I write about quite
a bit, I understand affirmation sort of paradoxically: there’s
a notion of negation inherent it because when affirming one
thing, I’m negating others, or not affirming something else,
or potentially deliberately refusing something else.
Theories that I think through to build this concept include
the affirmation of chance, Sedgwick’s weak theory, friction,
and slowness as put forth by Isabel Stengers and Kara
Keeling, and affirmative refusal, which has been theorized
by the Indigenous scholar Leanne Simpson who draws on
Jarrett Martineau (Keeling, 2019; Martineau, 2015;
Sedgwick, 2003; Simpson, 2017; Stengers, 2018). This
affirmation or refusal is about the distribution of attention in
the research event, and research write-up, and dissemina-
tion. It would include questions like: what am I paying
attention to? What am I foregrounding? What am I foster-
ing? We can think back to my example about the students:
what was emerging in their own writings as we were at
walking and writing and discussing Mullen’s writing?
Affirmation means thinking critically about the world-mak-
ing practices I participate in including research events, but
also the politics of how I distribute my speculative and
affective and scholarly attention. This also includes who I
cite, who I exclude, and who I think with in the write-up of
the research event (and the how of that practice of citation
and reading practices).
And this leads me to my last movement in a research-
creation project, which is More-than-representation. Plenty
of people discuss more-than-representation. For me,
research-creation is first concerned with the ways that I’m
generating rather than collecting or representing research
data. And second how what occurs in the event might
prompt further thought. And third, how reproducing those
events and the theories I think with might engender further
thought.
Writing about research projects is always more than and
less than the events that occurred. And writing also is an
event! Instead of that causing a crisis of recognition or rep-
resentation or a closing down of meaning, I think we can
view it as an opening.
In some research-creation projects, I have been part of
the arts practice is both the project and the more-than-repre-
sentation of it. For example, David Shannon and I as
Oblique Curiosities wrote a song called Cosmic Beavers
based on a proposition by our friend the Inhuman Geography
professor Kathryn Yusoff (who also narrates the song). It’s
a song about giant, trans-dimensional beavers who control
time dams and then they shred Lewis and Clark when Lewis
and Clark try to carve a path and survey Turtle Island. We
wrote this song as a speculative intervention into the future
past. The song is the art and the research representation of
it: it’s imbued with theory. We have also written about the
song (under review). And this is a component of research-
creation as well. I am an academic and so there’s usually a
layer of scholarly writing and engagement that occurs as
part of a research-creation project (otherwise it’s just an art
project, which is fine, but not what I’m talking about here).
And these written “outputs” are interpretive in many
instances, and engage with theory, and are also more-than-
representational. In academic writing I think with aspects of
research events (or “data”) in relation to theory, and rather
than closing down meaning, through this writing propose
further things to think about rather than just report on
events.
As such, I think it’s important for qualitative researchers
and humanities scholars in general to recognize that we’re
all creating while we’re writing. Research events are of
course empirical work but the writing we do radically
empirical too. So, in the act of thinking with theory, or writ-
ing we’re researching and creating worlds—and we should
take that seriously.
So that leads me to the final question that was posed to
me by Viv and Candace: What mechanisms can be put in
place at universities to help supervisors and or committees
support students doing “post philosophy” inspired ways of
inquiring?
I don’t really think my philosophies are “post philoso-
phies” (although I guess I do engage with a lot of post struc-
tural work and as you’ve configured “post” in the
introduction to this seminar, I suppose I do engage with
some “post” philosophy). Post or not, I engage with a lot of
philosophers and philosophical thinking.
The first thing I want to say about that question is that
everyone should read Harney and Moten (2021) on super-
vision and the factory of the academy in All Incomplete.
It’s great: it posits if supervisors are supervising students
into the existing factory model, we’re kind of already
doomed.
But let’s see how we might institute some mechanisms in
the university as a hopefully-not-factory space, in terms of
your question. First, I am a strong advocate of reading: we
need to allow students time to read, we need to encourage
reading deeply and broadly and across disciplines, and we
need to understand how long it takes to read, and read well.
We need to model reading practices, have reading groups,
block out time in class for reading instead of making stu-
dents do silly assignments to meet even sillier assessment
criteria.
Second, model the kind of research and thinking the
scholars and researchers in this seminar series have put
6 Qualitative Inquiry 00(0)
forth, in action. As a graduate student, I was very fortunate
to be part of research-creation projects being enacted in
schools and in other publics, and part of reading groups—
all through graduate school. Also, I think we have to factor
in time for graduate students to experiment with methodol-
ogies, methods, and theoretical thinking. If they’re not
taught or allowed or trained to experiment during graduate
school, when do we think they’re going to start? When
they’re precariously employed? When they’re on the tenure
track and having to tick particular boxes around outputs and
publications? Also, we have to change the structure of what
“counts” toward those benchmarks—particularly around
interdisciplinary work.
We’re in a system that claims to value interdisciplinarity,
but then scholars who manage to stay in the system are
often punished for being interdisciplinary. So, I really think
we need to push back on that and help graduate students
cultivate the skills to be interdisciplinary while in graduate
school.
In the social sciences we should help students learn to
think more with theory and understand that empirical
research doesn’t always need to include working with other
humans. Now I know that not all qualitative research
requires this, but I’ve noticed a trope in graduate research,
particularly in the field of education: there must be an
“empirical study” with some students in some school, or
other participants in an educative setting, or it’s not deemed
an “Educational Research Project.” Of course, some schol-
ars do policy work, or curriculum analysis and things like
that, but there does seem to still be this belief that empirical
work in education requires an in-school research project.
And so we have these projects that students complete to
find out things they already know: we already know that
schools are racist and ableist and heteronormative and
socially reproductive. So why are we making students do
these little projects to find out what we already know? What
if we let them do something else that is bit more theoretical?
In the social sciences we could cultivate ways of engaging
with theory, like how the humanities work, and that could
be a good skill to be developed during graduate school. And
perhaps the student could then get on a larger research proj-
ect that’s doing more traditionally “empirical” research.
The need for this has become clear during the COVID-19
pandemic: we must acknowledge other ways of conducting
research for graduate students. I know a lot of students and
researchers in Victoria, Australia where I currently work
have had their projects stopped because we’re not allowed
to research in schools right now. This has been the case for
more than 2 years, off and on.
Accordingly, I’ll talk you through a solo project I con-
ducted as part of my PhD. It’s an example of a research-
creation project that helped me think with theory and
investigate the relationship between movement and ide-
ation: it was creative empirical research that I did by myself.
The project was a long-distance walking and postcarding
event that took place along St. Cuthbert’s Way, which is on
the border of Scotland and England. I conceptualized the
project around the historical practice of letterboxing, which
is a precursor to geocaching. In the practice of letterboxing,
people used to leave postcards for themselves hidden on the
moors and other people would find them and then post them
back to whoever wrote them. So, people would write a post-
card for themselves, and a stranger would find it and post it
back. I walked St Cuthbert’s Way and inscribed postcards to
myself. I wrote to myself, and I thought about and per-
formed my own ideation process. As an enabling constraint,
I limited my writing to one side of a postcard (30 postcards
in total), and I also took My D-SLR camera which had a
pinhole aperture on it and took pinhole photographs. I fore-
grounded the project using a queer theory, and Derrida’s
postcard ontology of non-arrival. The project helped me
think through how movement links with ideation and inter-
secting theories including queer theory, non-arrival, and
hospitality—and what arrived (or emerged) during walk,
including confrontations with whiteness, inheritance, and
belonging in the British countryside, for myself. After com-
pleting the project, I further engaged with theory to think
through some of what emerged, and it’s written up as a the-
oretical chapter in my book. I think it’s an example of some-
thing of graduate students could do, a project like that is a
way of enacting “empirical” research just by yourself. I
know autoethnography and other forms of narrative and arts
research do this, but I just want to affirm that we should
allow this kind of research for students.
Although I’ve been focusing on research-creation, as
you know, I conduct qualitative research studies with stu-
dents and teachers and my research right now is mostly
around English literary education: English literature in
schools, and my forthcoming DECRA project is on science
fiction with youth in mining and metropolitan communities
focused on sustainability, technology, and social justice in
Australia, Canada, and Wales. The project includes an inter-
disciplinary panel of experts who use speculative thought in
their own fields such as geoscience, technoscience, and
social justice. While educational research is often deemed
“social science,” English literature is very much a humani-
ties subject. English literature is inherently intertextual, and
much of my research explores how if I’m reading fiction or
poetry, or my current project on climate fiction, there’s so
many other disciplines that are at work in the process of
reading and engaging with a text. It’s bizarre how siloed
disciplines are in the field of education. So, a lot of what
I’m thinking about theoretically in my research is how to
build transdisciplinary links in the university, in other pub-
lics, and in schools: to be undisciplined as it were.
Viv Bozalek: Thank you so much, you have covered a
lot of the questions. There were a couple of things
Truman 7
you left out, which I was particularly interested in
one was your little blurbs on citations and the
hyphen in your book. And also, speculative fiction
and how that relates to research methods, and if
you wanted to say something about hospitality and
quite interested in that.
Sarah E. Truman: Well, the book (Feminist Speculations
and the Practice of Research-Creation) is a method-
ology book with exemplification chapters. But the
book also has a series of Interstices, which you’re
referring to, and they are small pockets between chap-
ters—concepts that were on my mind. One was And
and how it operates; another was Citations and the
concepts that I think of when considering citational
practices; and another was Hyphens. Research-
creation is a hyphenated word and there’s a conjunc-
tion implied in it. I’ve been thinking about how a
hyphen is a kind of forced milieu. You can force con-
cepts or ideas or people together with a hyphen—
which could be aggressive as an action. Some things
that get hyphenated might not want to be. And I was
thinking about the ethics of that and how we as schol-
ars (particularly white scholars) might tether our-
selves to a concept or a movement or an idea when
it’s going well, and we want to be carried along with
it. In the example in the book, I’m talking about Black
arts practices and Indigenous resurgence, and White
people tethering ourselves to such things when they’re
going well or we can gain something from being
aligned with them—which is how whiteness and cap-
italism functions. This kind of self-hyphenation hap-
pens in the academy with queerness too—where
scholars who have nothing to lose, and only things to
gain by aligning with movements that make them
look better without accounting for the real struggles
of people who occupy those subject positions. So, my
proposition to the reader is to think about what they’re
hyphenating to and why: it can be a mutual implica-
tion, but it should not be a convenient hyphen or
forced milieu. Also, for the reader to consider what’s
hyphenated to them and whether they want to stay in
hyphenated to it, or perhaps refuse that hyphenation
or break that hyphenation. The various functions of a
hyphen were just something I was thinking about in
how research operates, because it can be capitalistic:
a conceptual capitalism, or artistic capitalism. But it
also can be a meeting space of co-implication, care,
and action.
Viv Bozalek: What about responsibility, situated
speculation, and speculative fiction too?
Sarah E. Truman: Well, when we speculate we are
doing it from somewhere. That’s why I put the word
situatedness the phrase. And we’re speculating, but
we’re changing as we do it, and through what we
encounter so in that regard our “situatedness” is also
changing—that’s the differential at work. Also, many
scholars including me have written about the need for
responsible speculation. In terms of speculative fic-
tions, they operate in similar modes, and some draw
attention to this as part of the narrative. In a paper de
Freitas (2021) and I wrote, we were thinking with a
few books including Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis
trilogy, Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti trilogy, and Jeff
Vandermeer’s Southern Reach trilogy—specifically
his first book in the trilogy Annihilation. Everything
in Area X in Southern Reach is refracting and mutat-
ing and affecting each other—every single person and
thing is undergoing change—toward annihilation. In
that paper we talk through some aspects of the narra-
tive to consider how social science research and even
the scientific method operate.
Sarah E. Truman: What was the other question?
Derrida’s notion of hospitality?
Viv Bozalek: Barad’s (2019) take on entangled
nuclear colonialism in their article on the Marshall
Islands, discusses and interrogates Derrida’s
notion of hospitality, who can play host and who
can be host.
Sarah E. Truman: Yeah. It’s a difficult notion and I
don’t know if I settled on whether I liked it or not.
And that’s where refusal might also come in: by that I
mean, who has the capacity to sit back and say “I’ll
say yes to whatever turns up” or watch things unfurl,
like Derrida does. There’s a privilege in that. In terms
of the postcard project, I wanted to be open to (non)
arrivals—to affirm what arrived, but also, I think
there’s a necessity for criticality and refusal if that’s
what needs to happen in such a situation.
Viv Bozalek: Okay I’m going to turn it over to
Candace now because I’d like to give other people
an opportunity to engage with you.
Sarah E. Truman: I just want to tell everybody that it’s
almost 11 pm here now. I’m going to turn into a
pumpkin in four minutes.
Candace Kuby: We have a question from the Q/A
(box on the webinar platform): Can you talk a lit-
tle bit more about the problems of process without
constraints?
Sarah E. Truman: Oh. Okay. Enabling constraints—we
need them. If you don’t have any constraints when
you’re trying to write a song, there’s no scale and
everything but the kitchen sink is in the “song.” As
pedagogues we do it for students—give them some
guidance on scope of what they will produce and
how, as artists we do it, as researchers we do it.
Erin Price: So I think that ties back to two things you
mentioned as I was making notes, it was funny
because then you went there on so many things;
8 Qualitative Inquiry 00(0)
like enabling constraints, so you asked “How do I
prime myself to be affected” and I had jotted a
little side note to myself, enabling constraints, but
I’m wondering if the person who asked that was
maybe talking about how you mentioned not hav-
ing an “anything goes” approach and basically
that framing for emergence. So, the person who
asked it is it visual artist and . . .
Sarah E. Truman: I’m sure they know exactly what I
mean. Like when you set about doing your visual
art—I’m not a visual artist—but probably you have a
pencil or a pen, but you’re not going to have a pencil
and paint brush and everything all in one hand are
you? I guess Jackson Pollock appears to just squiggle
paint around: but in his work there’s enabling con-
straints, there’s gravity there’s the paper, there’s a
couple different colors, there’s years of training—
there’s a lot of enabling constraints—it’s not anything
goes, at all.
Erin Price: The next question is how you’re thinking
that the eternal return might be related to return-
ing to the body and nature, or maybe just how
you’re thinking about eternal return and why it
haunts you?
Sarah E. Truman: Well I don’t really think about it as a
“returning to the body,” but that could be how some-
one thinks about it. It comes up in Zarathustra, “what
if a demon a demon came up to you and your loneliest
lonely and told you that your life as you’ve lived it,
you’re gonna live it again eternally forever . . . etcet-
era.” And then do you go all nihilistic with that
knowledge? Do you accept or affirm that great burden
as it’s posed to you—which can be read as a kind of
overcoming. It does raise a question of responsibility
in that moment, and perhaps a peace that comes with
that—the affirmation of the burden and taking respon-
sibility of my what my life has been up to now and
moving on from that—that’s the Amor Fati of it. I
talked about that actually in the methodology chapter
of my book—Amor Fati—regarding the theorists I
draw from. As a scholar, I’m always reading new
things and say to myself, “man I wish I knew this
when I did that two years ago.” But I really feel like I
need to just take responsibility for where I was at that
time, and where I am now, but also my inheritances—
my scholarly inheritances which are very Euro west-
ern, except I did study Chinese Buddhism and yoga
and lived in China for three years and an ashram for
three years. I do notice that it infuses my thinking, but
I haven’t really written about it lately. Anyhow, if we
think of the eternal return as this moment of recogni-
tion of recurrence, I have ability to change or do
something different than that’s also going to eternally
return. I think about it quite a bit in all sorts of differ-
ent ways, but yeah probably I’m more a stoic than
nihilist.
Erin Price: There was a question to expand on issues
of ethics and politics of representation and how
research-creation may disrupt normative colonial
logics of representational research, but also for
collective research-creation it is still the individu-
als who author and represent and build their
careers on research with others. So, could you
speak to how that’s negotiated?
Sarah E. Truman: Yeah, I can’t speak for whoever
might be doing that, but I’d say in larger research-
creation projects that I’ve been involved with,
WalkingLab for example, if we’re working with art-
ists they’re paid and that’s upfront and if something
is used again later—for example a piece of art—
they’re paid more. My work at the Literary Education
Lab we pay authors and scholars to be involved with
symposia or talks. Smaller projects that I’ve done
with students in school (I call such projects research-
creation because there’s cultural production there)
are like a researcher going into school and doing a
study with the students. There’s Ethics, and there’s
Plain Language Statements, and there’s benefits and
risks outlined beforehand and opportunity to with-
draw at any point, until representation usually: the
students may benefit from doing things differently in
class that they’re going to be in class anyway, and
there’s scaffolding and an intention there, so no stu-
dent is going to “fall behind” by being involved. I
don’t feel like that’s an inherently extractive mode of
working with young people, but of course it could get
extractive depending on who’s doing it and how
they’re doing it. We do need to think about payment
and participant voice and how things are rendered
and represented. Academics do build their careers on
all sorts of other people’s suffering, and sometimes
on other people’s victories, and certainly other
scholar’s ideas. And reporters build their careers
describing disasters around the world. Of course,
we need an ethics of engagement when we’re doing
research with people or texts—whether its artistic
or ethnographic or anything—and I think that ethic
goes through the project, even in how we engage
with other scholarly work and its representation:
like what I was saying about hyphens. As far as the
Academy, and what it values, it really does just
seem to value “top tier” journal articles more than
other outputs—and there’s a multinational publish-
ing racket that supports that, which many of us buy
into. So, there’s that crisis of representation and
that’s a setback for research-creation and other
Truman 9
modes of non-traditional social science research
representation.
Candace Kuby: I would love to hear you just talk a
little bit about writing your book. Your footnotes
and the chapters were just these raw, vulnerable,
kind of transparent and kind of risky comments. I
felt like I was at a coffee shop at a table, and you
were giving me the side conversations about what
was in the more formal part of the text. I would
love to hear more from a writing stance, like how
you approached it and what you were hoping that
this chapter and book would produce in the world
through the way that you chose to author it.
Sarah E. Truman: Yeah, that’s how I write. Also, I had
graduate students in my mind while I was writing
it—I dedicate the book to graduate students—so I felt
like I was sort of talking to them. That’s nice to hear,
thank you for that, and I think people should write
like that more if they want to. I’m constantly ques-
tioning myself as I’m doing research and writing and
so sometimes, I would acknowledge that in the foot-
notes, sometimes it’s in the in the main text too. What
I haven’t done is read my book for a while, because
I’m sick of it, but I did I did enjoy writing it, ha!
Candace Kuby: I think what I appreciate about that
writerly move is that you especially think of grad-
uate students as kind of an audience. It does show!
I think a lot of times we try to clean up academic
manuscripts and there’s like a tightness and clean-
ness to it, we don’t always hear the backstory or
the complexity, or the things that somebody is still
wrestling with, and so I appreciated that transpar-
ency in your writing. I am not sure that we always
see that in top academic publishing places where
reviewers really want us to know what we’re say-
ing, and why. You really showed that messiness of
thought, and so I really, really appreciated that
move you made.
Sarah E. Truman: Oh, thanks hope it’s not so messy it
doesn’t make sense!
Erin Price: Perfect.
Sarah E. Truman: So messy it’s “anything goes,” ha!
Viv Bozalek: It’s not “anything goes,” you made that
point a lot in the book saying that anything doesn’t
go.
Sarah E. Truman: Yeah.
Erin Price: So that does kind of segue into our last
question, which is how do we determine quality—or
some might say rigor—in research creation if work-
ing against that “anything goes” approach? I would
also extend that by saying how do we make distinc-
tions or recognize “good quality” (and this person
asking the question did put it in quotes) work when
we’re looking at the written product or the report
or the sharing of that research-creation?
Sarah E. Truman: That’s a really good question, and
yeah I don’t know if I have an entire answer for it. As
I say in the book, artistic rigor is important. Just like
David Shannon and I joke in an article that you don’t
just decide one day you’re a biologist and “do para-
meciums” (Shannon & Truman, 2020, p. 2). Or just
decide to chuck a bunch of paint on a wall and say
you’re a painter. I think we should take artists and
musicians and writers and people who have training
and experience seriously for their art, just like we do
for scientists or teachers. And then obviously I don’t
want to only support some White-Euro-western
notion of value and art and aesthetics, so I think
there’s ways of pushing back on that as well. I also
feel like the ethical political orientations to what’s
being conducted and how it’s being conducted matter
in a research project: like are the research participants
being taken care of even if the art isn’t “perfect?” This
might mean another kind of feminist register of rigor
and value and quality that could be happening. And
research-creation is interdisciplinary: it’s theory, and
it’s the research process, and the art all happening
together, and perhaps needs to be “assessed” wholisti-
cally in that regard.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with
respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research,
authorship, and/or publication of this article.
ORCID iD
Sarah E. Truman https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1466-8859
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Author Biography
Sarah E. Truman is Senior Lecturer at The University of
Melbourne and co-director of the Literary Education Lab. From
2022-2025 Dr. Truman is an Australian Research Council DECRA
Fellow whose project focuses on youth cultural productions (sci-
ence fiction) in mining and metropolitan communities in three
commonwealth countries (Australia, Canada, and Wales).
Truman’s latest monograph is Feminist Speculations and the
Practice of Research-Creation: Writing Pedagogies and
Intertextual Affects (2022). See www.sarahetruman.com for more
projects and collaborations.
