FEMINIST SPECULATIONS

AND THE PRACTICE OF

RESEARCH-CREATION

Feminist Speculations and the Practice of Research-Creation provides a unique intro-

duction 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, textu-
ality, 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-crea-
tion 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.

Sarah E. Truman is Senior Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne,

Australia, where she researches English literary education and speculative fic-
tion at the Literary Education Lab. Sarah is co-director of the international
research-creation project WalkingLab, and one half of the electro-folk duo Oblique
Curiosities. Her projects and publications are detailed at www.sarahetruman.com
FEMINIST
SPECULATIONS AND
THE PRACTICE OF
RESEARCH-CREATION
Writing Pedagogies and
Intertextual Affects

Sarah E. Truman
First published 2022
by Routledge
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© 2022 Sarah E. Truman
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record has been requested for this book
Cover image by Yam Lau and Daniel Barney as part of Intratextual
Entanglements, a project curated by Sarah E. Truman (2014-2015).

ISBN: 978-0-367-61263-4 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-0-367-61262-7 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-10488-9 (ebk)

DOI: 10.4324/9781003104889

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For all the graduate students out there reading, thinking,
and creating.
CONTENTS

List of figures viii

Acknowledgementsx
Interstice I: Andxiii
Preface: ‘What do Books have to do with Education?’ xv

1 Theoretical precursors: Tracing my methodology

for research-creation 1

2 Minor interferences: Marginalia as research-creation 31

Interstice II: Citations61

3 Affective public pedagogies: Youth writing the

intersections of race-gender-power 65

4 More-than-linguistic rhetorics: Writing (speculative)

mappings of place 92

5 Postcards from strangers: Queer-non-arrivals on

a long-distance walk along St. Cuthbert’s Way 110

Interstice III: Oblique Curiosities139

 Contents vii

6 Tweets & critiques from @postqual diffractor bot 141

7 Undisciplined: Reaffirming transdisciplinarity in

social science and humanities research 151

Interstice IV: Hyphen158

Index161
FIGURES

The base text for marginalia project. Assembled by me from Nietzsche’s

writings in The Gay Science and Ecce Homo33
Cartoon marginalia. By Joe Ollmann.41
Shattered mirror marginalia. By Rosina Kazi and William Goodall.42
A pencil drawing of a wheelchair in the margin of the base text.
By Daniel Barney.44
Examples of recursion in marginalia. Top: Origami frogs made out of
intertexts by Taien Ng-Chan and Kwoi Gin. Bottom: Nest and poem
by Christine Brault and Kent den Heyer.49
Clock camera with intertexts. By Julian McCauley and Shannon Gerard.50
Nihilist Broth in a mason jar. By Stephanie Springgay and John Weaver.51
Diffracted, sprouted, living text. By Yam Lau and Daniel Barney.53
Blackboard repetition. Still from Kai Woolner-Pratt’s 22-minute
performance where he writes the phrase, ‘all prejudice comes
from the intestines’ on a blackboard in chalk.54
Threaded intertexts. Marginalia on the base-text in embroidery
thread by Mary Tremonte and the phrase ‘To be born again’
embroidered as a response by Emilie O’Brien.57
Student poem. The photograph shows a hand-written poem that was
‘published’ by being pinned to a telephone pole. The writing in the
photograph is too small to read. Graffiti and an urban street can be
seen in the background.87
 Figures ix

Student map of school (a) By Dylan and Dewy. The linguistic map,
created in pencil shows a variety of school places and ideologies as
experienced by the students.100
Student map of school (b) By Rhian and Sikeena. The linguistic
map, created in pencil shows a variety of school places and
ideologies as experienced by the students.101
Pinhole photograph in Lindisfarne. The pinhole photograph
shows the shadowy image of me standing in front of a shadowy
cross. Photo by Sarah E. Truman.110
Tweets from PostQual Diffractor Bot and Sarah E. Truman.
Bot’s tweet reads: ‘Process: for a post-meaning-led
conceptualization of ethico-politicality.’ Truman’s response reads:
‘Post-meaning indeed.’ Bot’s response reads ‘Onto-epistemological
lines of f light into the actual: a postqualitative proposition.’142
Tweets from PostQual Diffractor Bot. This list of eight
assembled tweets by the bot read: ‘Floating data-assemblages
in the Chthulucene: affirming minor politics,’ ‘Experiment-
with attaching a Go-Pro to your grandparent: world the
postqualitative turn,’ ‘Diffracting more-than-humanism in
thick time: the ethico-political cleaving of the future of mobile
architectures in kindergarden,’ ‘Rhizoming the future of
rhizomatic research: Deleuze and the rhizome,’ ‘Mapping the
conference presentation: why postqualitative research needs data
haecceities,’ ‘Boil and drink your interview transcripts: queer
the postqualitative turn,’ ‘Visceral methods: a landing site for
affirming capitalism,’ ‘An affective sense of post-politics.’143
Tweets from PostQual Diffractor Bot. The list of three assembled
tweets read: ‘Newness’ as method: postqualitative research for
graduate students,’ ‘Endless propositions for data-assemblages:
atmospheric data of data play through neo-liberalism,’
‘Animacies of shredded data: against a postqualitative inquiry.’146
Tweet from the PostQual Diffractor Bot. The tweet reads,
‘The onto-epistemological whiteness of postqualitative research.’.147
Tweets from the PostQual Diffractor Bot. The tweets read:
‘Neoliberalist postqualitative research – a lure for feeling,’
‘Anti-colonialist post-qualitative research – a lure for feeling.’149
Alphabet with ampersand (Moore, M., 1863, p. 5).151
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Many people have inspired and supported me through both enacting the research
projects in this book and through the writing this book.
Principally, I want to thank the inimitable Stephanie Springgay who intro-
duced me to research-creation and the transdisciplinary potential of research
in the academy during my graduate work at University of Toronto. Stephanie
has been a feminist force through all my thinking-feeling-making these many
years and continues to inspire me in our ongoing collaboration at WalkingLab.
I worked with many excellent scholars and students as part of the collaborative
program of Curriculum Studies (OISE) and Book History and Print Culture
(Massey College) at Uof T. I want to specifically thank Peter Trifonas and Rob
Simon for their generous work as part of my committee at OISE; and Thomas
Keymer for his support at Massey College.
I have had the opportunity to collaborate with and read alongside curricu-
lum scholars, research-creation scholars and artists from around the world for
many years, all of whom have helped shape my thinking. This has included my
work with the Hamilton Perambulatory Unit which I co-founded with Donna
Akrey and Taien Ng-Chan; editorial collaborations on the book Pedagogical
Matters with Nathan Snaza, Debbie Sonu, and Zofia Zaliwska; SenseLab events
organized by Erin Manning and Brian Massumi; affect symposia with Andrew
Murphie and Lone Bertelsen; queer bush salons, reading groups, and other
research collaborations globally with scholars Kim Powell, Linda Knight, Eve
Mayes, Susan Nordstrom, Affrica Taylor, Mindy Blaise, Astrida Neimanis, Bek
Conroy, Natalie Loveless, Natasha Myers, Aparna Mishra Tarc, Jayne Osgood,
Victoria de Rijke, Sid Mohandas, Vivienne Bozalek, Marek Tesar, Margaret
Somerville, Karen Malone, Hugh Escott, Max Haiven and Sandra Phillips.
Over the past several years I have been fortunate to have received invitations
to present the research in this book and collaborate with scholars at universities
 Acknowledgements xi

internationally. Thank you to Riikka Hohti (University of Helsinki), Katve-

Kaisa Kontturi (New Materialist Network, University of Turku), Jonathan Wyatt
(Centre for Creative-Relational Inquiry, University of Edinburgh), the feminist
research collective The Ediths (Edith Cowan University), and Claudia Matus
and Macarena García González (Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile), for
your engagement and support.
Since graduating from University of Toronto, I’ve had the opportunity to
work alongside fabulous scholars in education and research methods in both the
United Kingdom and Australia. In 2017 I was awarded a SSHRC Postdoctoral
Fellowship by the Canadian government which I undertook at the Education
and Social Research Institute at Manchester Metropolitan University. I want
to thank Harry Torrance and Maggie MacLure for their help in bringing me to
ESRI, and all of the colleagues I worked with there. Particularly, the marvelous
Liz de Freitas who has thought with me about science fiction, theory, and method
the past few years; the generous and thoughtful Kate Pahl and Abigail Hackett
for our ongoing work on affect and literacies; and my dear old friend David Ben
Shannon (Shanny) who I have collaborated with for over a decade on many
projects on many continents. In 2019, I landed at Melbourne Graduate School
of Education. I didn’t know a soul before arriving but happily found myself in
the midst of an excellent community of scholars who have become friends. I
want to thank the ever-inspiring Larissa McLean Davies for her ongoing support
and literary-linking collaborations, and the wry brilliance of Lucy Buzacott and
our other Literary Education Lab members Jess Ganaway, and Troy Potter. A
hearty thanks to ‘Lev7’s’ Licho López López, Sophie Rudolph, Jess Gerrard,
Fazal Rizvi, Dianne Mulcahy, and Julie McLeod; ‘Lev2’s’ Mahtab Janfada, Julie
Choi, Jo Lo Bianco and all my colleagues in LALE; and Sonja Arndt for all
the impromptu chats and laughs at MGSE.
I wrote this book living alone through Melbourne’s long hard lockdown dur-
ing COVID-19. It was an insular time-space. I want to thank my long-time
Melbournian friends Matt Radford, Steph Bohni, Will Bohni Radford, Jordan
Wright and Annalise Drok for checking up on me from near-far. And my col-
league and friend Peter Woelert for our walks and talks around ‘Peter’s Way’
when the lockdown rules permitted. A special shout-out to my pandemic pen pal
Kathryn Yusoff, whose epistolary geo-pulls invariably lift my spirit.
This book contains a series of research-creation projects that I enacted with
more than 50 people: artists, scholars, students, teachers, and friends. I am
indebted to all of them. These include the anonymous students and teachers at
‘Llyn High School’; all of the ‘entanglers’ as part of the Intratextual Entanglements
project; and Shanny for joining me on the long walk along St. Cuthbert’s. I am
grateful for the financial support I received to carry out the projects in this book
which came from The University of Toronto Research Travel Grant, Ontario
Graduate Scholarships, The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council
of Canada, and The University of Melbourne.
xii Acknowledgements

Many colleagues have read, critiqued, and edited drafts of chapters of this
book. Thank you to Ian Buchanan, Nathan Snaza, Eve Mayes, Stephanie
Springgay, Lucy Buzacott, and David Ben Shannon for taking the time. Thank
you to Hannah Shakespeare and Matt Bickerton at Routledge for their work
through production. And thank you to Natalie Loveless, Aparna Mishra Tarc,
and Greg Seigworth for reading the manuscript and writing such thoughtful and
lively endorsements.
Finally, I want to thank my ever-generous and hilarious family ‘The Trumans’
(and their menagerie) for always encouraging creative and critical thought in me,
and always being open to me showing up at the cottage with a troupe of scholars/
artists/friends in tow (a tradition I hope to continue after this pandemic). x
INTERSTICE I
‘And’

“That was how we came to know each other, and we’ve remained friends ever
since, Sister Evonne and me. And,” my grandmother says.
“And what? You can’t finish a story and then say, ‘and,’ or it sounds like you’re
not finished.”
“Perhaps not. That’s a good point. And,” she says.
“You just did it again!”
“Mind your tone, Sarah and…” She pokes my rib. Her pooly old eyes
shimmer.
And. My late maternal grandmother used to end many of her sentences, and
all of her lengthy stories with “and.”
And oozed out the end of every statement. Nothing she said was complete. It
used to infuriate me. Now I wonder whether she was casting a net with “and” to
see what other idea came so she could continue on speaking. And.
Alfred North Whitehead (1968) calls “the little word” and “a nest of ambigu-
ity,” (p. 53). For Whitehead, conjunctions like and are “death traps for accuracy
of reasoning” (p. 53). Ambiguity isn’t typically regarded as a happy occurrence
in educational research, where we are encouraged to describe clear, consistent,
generalizable (even marketable!) outcomes of research studies. But Whitehead
doesn’t shy away from ambiguity and asserts that through “process, the universe
escapes from the limitations of the finite” whereby all “inconsistencies are burst”
(p. 45).
And so how does and work?
• And operates as a conjunction
• And a Boolean operator in library searches
• And implies causation (when someone says ‘and so’)
• And implies progression (she went on and on about and)
xiv Interstice I

• And implies supplementation (this and this equals that)

• And joins varied things together but also makes them appear isolated (the
phrase “Grandma and Whitehead both have a thing about and” both links
and marks a difference between Grandma and Whitehead)
• And
And is a nest of ambiguity, and a link to what could be.
And holds things together-apart and propels them forward.
Many ands emerge in research-creation.
&

References
Whitehead, A. N. (1968). Modes of thought. New York, NY: Free Press.
PREFACE: ‘WHAT DO BOOKS HAVE
TO DO WITH EDUCATION?’

This book is an overview of how I conceptualize research-creation, explicated

through a series of research-creation projects I have conducted with different
communities as an academic (both as a graduate student and as an early career
researcher).1 Research-creation is growing in popularity in the humanities and
social sciences. It has been mobilized in two ways: as a methodology and theoret-
ical framework that informs qualitative research; and as a method or procedure
for enacting empirical research (Chapman & Sawchuk, 2012; Loveless, 2019;
Manning & Massumi, 2014; Springgay, 2020). As a concept, research-creation
has a geographic affiliation with Canada, where it was made popular by pro-
vincial and federal funding agencies such as the Social Sciences and Humanities
Research Council (SSHRC) as a way of acknowledging research projects at the
intersection of arts practices, theory, and research (Truman & Springgay, 2015).
Research-creation is transdisciplinary. The term ‘research-creation’ is used by:
artists and designers who incorporate a hybrid form of artistic practice that draws
from both the arts and science or social science research; scholars attuned to the
role of the arts and creativity in their own areas of expertise; and educators inter-
ested in developing curriculum and pedagogy grounded in cultural productions,
the arts, and attuned to process. SSHRC’s website outlines research-creation as
“an approach to research that combines creative and academic research prac-
tices and supports the development of knowledge and innovation through artistic
expression” (SSHRC 2016).

1 The funding for the research projects that feature in the book came from the Ontario gov-
ernment, the federal Canadian government (SSHRC), the University of Toronto, and the
University of Melbourne.
xvi Preface: ‘what do books have to do with education?’

Research-creation as a term is not aligned with a particular theoretical frame-

work. However, many scholars who use the term research-creation (Springgay,
2019; Truman, Loveless, Manning, Myers, & Springgay, 2020) draw from the
feminist materialisms to think-through how art, theory, and research emerge.
Loveless (2019) points out that research-creation is not only a…
logical extension of post-1968 interdisciplinary and theoretical interven-
tions into the academy, but as specifically indebted to feminist, queer,
decolonial, and other social justice movements, as they have worked to
remake the academy from within (p. 57).
This orientation to research understands the need for ethical, theoretical, and
artistic rigor throughout a research project—from planning to dissemination—
and charges those who take up the concept research-creation to “work in alliance
with antiracist and feminist interventions” (Loveless, 2019, p. 57). How I built
a theory to understand these processes is explored in Chapter 1 and exemplified
through the different projects in the book. Of course, this is/was my way: you
would likely have your own way.

Transdisciplining: situating myself

I was introduced to research-creation as a concept at University of Toronto
(Uof T) where I completed my PhD in a collaborative program in Critical
Studies in Curriculum and Pedagogy (Ontario Institute for Studies in Education:
OISE) and Book History and Print Culture (Massey College). As the distinction
between the two programs suggests, I am both a social scientist and arts and
humanities scholar. My undergraduate degree was in English and philosophy.
I’m a qualified secondary English literature teacher. I worked as a secondary
English literature teacher, and in the publishing industry as an editor and writer
ten years before returning to graduate school. I’ve been awarded two Ontario
Arts Council Grants for creative writing, a National Magazine Award for travel
writing, and an Utne Independent Press Award for editorial excellence, as well
as publishing numerous articles, editorials, and a creative non-fiction book. I
mention these credentials to demonstrate that I have a background in creative
modes of inquiry both through my own writing and through my editorial work
with artists, authors, scholars, and students. Moving from publishing and creative
work back into the academy shocked me: particularly the institutional proce-
duralism, silos between fields, and strictures regarding what counts as research.
Research-creation as a concept helped me navigate my way through graduate
school when I felt split between the social sciences and humanities, as I attempted
to link disciplines that didn’t always (want to) understand or relate to each other.
For example, I remember having to get some paperwork signed regarding my
enrollment in the collaborative program of Book History and Print Culture.
Because I was the first student from OISE who had been admitted into the col-
laborative program, OISE would have to become a collaborating department in
 Preface: ‘what do books have to do with education?’ xvii

order for me participate in the program. There was a meeting. And there was a
discussion about what OISE—a faculty of education—would gain from being
involved in an interdisciplinary program with other faculties centered on Book
History & Print Culture (e.g. English, Comparative Lit, Information, Religion
etc.). During the meeting, an academic from OISE asked: ‘What do books have
to do with education?’
I often reflect back on that question. Sometimes, I think of it rhetorically:
of course books have something to do with education, at every level of school-
ing but particularly in higher education, so surely they were being rhetorical;
or in terms of the material version or codex format of the book (PhD students
are reading more digitally now, or they might read journal articles rather than
books per se, so perhaps that’s what they meant). But over the years I’ve begun
to see the question as a comment about two trends in the field of higher edu-
cation: Firstly, ‘books’ and what they might stand for (the labour of reading
and thinking and scholarship) are not valued in a field increasingly governed
by business models that spin on the promises of multinational owned EdTech,
micro-certifications, and quick-fix upskilling. Secondly, there’s a palpable dis-
trust of the value of engaging in transdisciplinary research within the academy
unless it can be commodified.
Where does this leave me as a scholar? To be pedantic, I’d like to point out
that even within the supposedly ‘social science’ oriented field of education, my
subject specialization is English literary education. English literature is a human-
ities subject that pivots, for better or worse, on the concept of the novel and
other forms of literary text such as the short story.2 Also, when studying a spe-
cific novel, teachers and students need to contextualize it, often using other
books, often from other subject areas. To refuse the primacy of books and the
interdisciplinarity required to engage with them is to refuse literary education
itself (Truman, McLean Davies, Buzacott, 2021). Further, in case you’re not
familiar with it, the term Curriculum Studies refers to a loose group of practices
that critically examine the cultural and social effects of educative phenomena:
it’s entirely interdisciplinary and rooted in cultural studies, philosophy, and the
various subject specializations (like English literature) a scholar might bring to it.
Curriculum scholars apply theoretical concepts to curricular documents, events,
or practices as a form of empirical research: interdisciplinary reading is integral
to this practice. Lastly, as a research-creation scholar, I understand that arts prac-
tices can instantiate theory; however, in order to further investigate an issue,

2 I’d like to be extra pedantic about the idea of studying the history (and future!) of books and
print culture as an English literary educator. For scholars interested in English literary educa-
tion, it’s important to be aware of how specific socio-material publishing conditions allowed
certain literary genres (the short story—and science fiction in the late 19th century for example)
to proliferate. Yet concomitant with new formats and genres in the 19th century and interven-
ing century came arguments about ‘literariness’ and the kinds of texts that should be allowed in
schools. These debates continue to this day.
xviii Preface: ‘what do books have to do with education?’

I will be required to read across other fields. Transdisciplinary reading and col-
laboration are foundational to how I conduct research as a critical curriculum
scholar, but also more importantly for the purposes of this book, to the practice
of research-creation.
During graduate school, I was fortunate to have collaborated with schol-
ars who mobilized research-creation in their own research, many of whom
were awarded funding by various granting bodies in the category of ‘Research-
Creation’ in Canada.3 Firstly, I worked as a research assistant on The Pedagogical
Impulse, which is a research-creation project run by Stephanie Springgay that
enacts socially engaged-art as research in K-12 schools in Toronto. The Pedagogical
Impulse curated contemporary artists inside of schools: not to teach the exist-
ing curriculum or extract data to be analyzed, but as collaborative art pro-
jects unfolding in situ with the students and teachers and researchers. We also
ran a theory reading group as an important part of the research-creation pro-
ject to think through concepts while conducting the research and through-
out the writing up of the research (see Springgay & Zaliwska, 2015; Truman
& Springgay, 2015). Throughout graduate school, I also engaged with other
research-creation collectives such as Concordia University’s SenseLab: these
collaborations included symposia and retreats built around art and theory, in
both Quebec, Canada and New South Wales, Australia. Similarly, WalkingLab,
the research project I co-direct with Stephanie Springgay, has prioritized read-
ing theory with scholars in the arts and humanities in Canada, the US, and
Australia, as well as running ongoing research-creation projects with differ-
ent publics internationally. The Hamilton Perambulatory Unit, a socially engaged
research-creation project I co-founded with artists Donna Akrey and Taien
Ng-Chan runs itinerate reading walks as part of our public engagement. And
my music-making and sound research-creation project Oblique Curiosities with
David Ben Shannon is also embedded in theory (Shannon & Truman, 2020;
Truman & Shannon, 2018).
While an artistic practice is integral to research-creation, the need to read and
engage with theory as part of conducting research-creation projects also cannot
be overstated, particularly in our current climate of higher education. Our work
as scholars is to read, think, and experiment (and of course to write and teach and
do service). I will follow this with another statement: every student in graduate
school should have funding and support that allows them time to read and think
and experiment, and professors who value reading and thinking with theory in
connection to research events. The practices of reading and thinking with theory
are not inherently elitist, they are made elitist through not giving students the
time and resources and support to read and think, and through creating a culture

3 The ‘What do books have to do with education?’ question was an anomaly (or so I thought at
the time).
 Preface: ‘what do books have to do with education?’ xix

that disavows the time it takes to read and think together (hooks, 1991).4 In their
article ‘Ground Provisions,’ Thompson and Harney (2018) discuss the practice
of reading together: to ameliorate how reading is ‘outsourced’ in universities
(where students are expected to read and do ‘work’ outside of class), they organ-
ized a camp for students to read and study (Harney & Moten, 2013) together. This
politics-of-reading aligns with many research-creation events I’ve been involved
with over the years, where reading together, and thinking together, alongside
conducting arts practices has been central to the success of the project.
Me chiming in on the need to read theory and collaboratively engage with
theoretical concepts throughout artistic projects will perhaps sound bizarre to
colleagues in the arts and humanities (well, collaboration around reading might
sound bizarre to some solitary readers). However, it’s a genuine concern in the
field of education, where a culture of anti-intellectualism is growing. The global
pandemic, increasing precarity, and overworked academics will, of course, exac-
erbate this trend. In light of this, I want to acknowledge my colleagues spe-
cifically in curriculum studies who are critical interdisciplinary scholars, who
recognize the importance of reading theory, and who work hard to include grad-
uate students in research projects, reading groups, and writing projects. I also
want to acknowledge how, although it’s of course important for courses to teach
theory and build a research community in graduate school, perhaps more impor-
tant is that junior scholars gain experience running research projects, hopefully
with scholars who are already enacting them.

Research-creation in conversation with other

qualitative research
Because this book is part of Routledge’s Research Methods series, I want to note
that how I formulate my approach to research-creation and method for conduct-
ing qualitative research is theoretically in conversation with many colleagues in
the social sciences who draw on theories that align with the more-than-human
turn.5 One component of these disparate new empiricisms in qualitative research
is to acknowledge how thinking with theory is a form of empirical research
(de Freitas & Truman, 2020; St. Pierre, Jackson, & Mazzei, 2016). Of course,
reading one theory through another—call it diffraction, call it friction, call it

4 I write this from Australia where the budget for 2021 will increase the cost of humanities
courses at universities up to 100% of their previous costs in order to fund ‘ job ready’ courses.
This will ensure that theory becomes more elitist and university becomes less accessible to
poorer families and students. University students may undertake their studies part-time due to
family obligations or work obligations or other reasons. As such they may only be taking one
course at a time and read more slowly; that is fine. But reading theory and thinking must be
valued and encouraged in graduate school and continue through a scholar’s career.
5 There are dozens of scholars who draw on these theories and other theories such as anti-colonial
thought and feminism that seek to unsettle positivism in the social sciences, some of which are
taken up in subsequent chapters where they relate to specific projects I’m conducting, particu-
larly in educational settings.
xx Preface: ‘what do books have to do with education?’

speculation, call it literary analysis—is pretty much what humanities scholars

always do. As such, it is not a new approach to conducting qualitative research
but essential to how I conceptualize research-creation.
I understand research-creation as similar to the practice of cultural studies
where a scholar might ‘empirically’ engage with a work of art or cultural pro-
duction such as a film, art event, poem, or song and think about it theoretically.
However, in the case of research-creation, I as the scholar am involved in the
creation of the work of art or cultural production. I’m making or curating art as part
of the research event rather than interrogating something that’s already been
created. I then think further about the event and artistic production through
scholarly writing.
Further, research-creation as I theorize it in this book is not the creative
presentation of, nor artistic experimentation with, pre-existing ‘data’ har-
vested through traditional qualitative research methods. As in, I’m not talking
about conducting interviews and then composing a poem or drawing a picture
‘representing’ them, which is sometimes how Arts Based Education Research
(ABER) functions: where the creative presentation of data arguably makes it
available for different audiences on different registers. That said, the theorization
of research-creation is aligned with qualitative researchers in the arts who have
troubled positivism and method for decades (Irwin, 2003). And of course, artists
themselves have troubled positivism for much longer through the radical arts
practices which research-creation draws from (Loveless, 2019; Springgay, 2020;
Springgay & Truman, 2018a).
As the various exemplification chapters will illustrate, my approach to
research-creation as (1) a methodology, and (2) the methods brought to bear on a
project is interdisciplinary throughout the entire research process. This requires the
theories, the arts practices, and the research to be attuned across disciplines. This
requires a lot of reading and thinking about theories embedded in arts practices or
cultural productions across different fields. That is the point of research-creation as
a concept within the siloed academy: an interdisciplinarity orientation to research
into theory and the arts (with a queer-feminist-anti-racist bent!).
For me, this begins with the angle of approach I set out in Chapter 1, Theoretical
Precursors: Tracing My Methodology for Research-Creation.6 This chapter introduces
the theoretical framing for how I conceptualize my orientation to conducting
research at the intersection of arts practices and interdisciplinary scholarship. I
talk through what I call situated speculation, rigorous agitation, emergence, affirmation
(refusal), and more-than-representation and a host of other attendant theories that
inform these concepts. Writing that chapter was a significant part of thinking
through how I approach research-creation and qualitative research in general,

6 Much of this thinking occurred during my PhD at University of Toronto as I developed own
orientation to research-creation and was encouraged to run experimental arts projects by both
my committee at OISE and practicum at Massey College (thanks to Stephanie Springgay, Peter
Trifonas, Rob Simon, and Thomas Keymer).
 Preface: ‘what do books have to do with education?’ xxi

and it’s always a work in progress: theory is also needed to make sense of the
event of research afterwards, and this always means more reading and thinking
in relation to what emerges.
The chapters following Chapter 1 are all exemplifications of research-creation
projects I have conducted. They are all theoretically and methodologically aligned
in that they adhere to my orientation to research as described in Chapter 1. Some of
the projects were completed with diverse groups of participants ranging from chil-
dren to adults, and in different geographies including Canada, the United States,
and the United Kingdom, while others were solo projects. While the majority of
research-creation scholars come out of the visual and performing arts, the contri-
butions I make to the field in this book focus broadly on ‘text-based’ research-cre-
ation projects including: narratives, intertextual marginalia art, postcards, songs,
and computer-generated scripts. The projects in this book are in conversation
with my other research-creation projects focused on literature and literacy edu-
cation (Truman, 2016, 2019), walking studies (Springgay & Truman, 2018b), and
sonic arts (Shannon & Truman, 2020; Truman & Shannon, 2018). The theories
and scholars I think with to write about the research events and what emerged
vary widely across the chapters and are embedded in different disciplines including
literary studies, curriculum studies, public pedagogy, and cultural studies.

Text-based research-creation event chapters

Chapter 2, Minor Interferences: Marginalia as research-creation, centers on a 34-par-
ticipant intertextual marginalia project with adult members of the arts and scho-
lastic community. I begin the chapter with an overview of some of the history
of marginalia, theoretical approaches to texts, textuality, and intertextuality,
and the pedagogical importance of annotation. I then think with some of the
intertexts produced by participants in the project to consider the pedagogical
outcomes of radical ‘reading-writing’ practices and annotation on meaning and
the genealogy of a text.
Chapter 3, Affective Public Pedagogies: Youth writing the intersections of race-gender-
power, and Chapter 4, More-than-Linguistic Rhetorics: Writing (speculative) mappings
of place, focus on a series of research-creation projects completed with secondary
school English literature students. Chapter 3 is embedded in discussions of public
pedagogy and curriculum studies. It exemplifies how I approached the overall
project propositionally and let ‘ethico-political emergences’ guide the ongoing
research and prompt further questions. The chapter goes on to focus on a social
justice inspired creative writing and ‘publishing’ project in public space that con-
siders the intersections of race-gender-power on student experience. Chapter 4
continues work with the same students and is theoretically informed by scholar-
ship on transmateriality, place, and situated learning. The chapter then focuses
on two writing and mapping projects: literary maps of the students’ secondary
school, and speculative maps of the future.
xxii Preface: ‘what do books have to do with education?’

Chapter 5, Postcards from Strangers: Queer-non-arrivals on a long-distance walk

along St. Cuthbert’s Way, focuses on a long-distance walk and postcard project
I conducted in the UK, inspired by the 19th-century practice of ‘letterbox-
ing’. Letterboxing was a precursor to geocaching and originally took the form
of people leaving writings addressed to themselves in hidden places on specific
walks in Dartmoor for strangers to discover and post back to their own letter box
(hence the name letterboxing). The project is theoretically informed by Derrida’s
writings in The Post Card about non-arrival and hospitality, in conversation with
queer theory.
Chapter 6, Tweets & Critiques from the @postqual Diffractor Bot focuses on
tweets generated by a Twitter bot I created with the handle @postqual. The
bot’s ongoing tweets are a satirical intervention into the contemporary academic
milieu. The chapter begins with a gloss of some of the theoretical orientations
that inform what has been called postqualitative research. I then describe the
mechanics of how the bot operates. The latter half of the chapter thinks with
some of the PostQual Diffractor Bot’s generated tweets—or micro blogs—as
critiques and provocations for the future of the field.
Chapter 7, the final chapter, Undisciplined: reaffirming transdisciplinarity in social
science and humanities research, is me thinking about where I am now. This includes
my current research in English literary education and science fiction during a
pandemic and climate crisis, and what might come next for interdisciplinary
research-creation.
In addition to these chapters, the book is punctuated by a number of Interstices.
These occupy spaces between chapters and discuss different concepts or collab-
orations and their relationship to my understanding of research-creation and
the writing of this book. The Interstices include: ‘And,’ ‘Citations,’ and ‘Oblique
Curiosities.’ The final interstice, ‘Hyphens,’ is part of the concluding chapter.
Finally, in addition to writing in 1st person (both I and inclusionary ‘we’s)
I write in 2nd person at points in this book, directly apostrophizing a ‘you’ that
I try to bring along with me in my thought processes. I had different ‘yous’ and
‘wes’ in mind as I wrote. As part of a research methodology series, I thought of
graduate students a lot as I was writing, but also academics who might be inter-
ested in how research-creation connects different fields through transdisciplinary
collaboration. I hope you find the book helpful to your own thinking.

References
Chapman, O., & Sawchuk, K. (2012). Research-creation: Intervention, analysis and
‘Family resemblances.’ Canadian Journal of Communication, 37, 5–26.
de Freitas, E., & Truman, S. E. (2020). New empiricisms in the anthropocene: Thinking
with speculative fiction about science and social inquiry. Qualitative Inquiry. doi:
https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800420943643.
Harney, S., & Moten, F. (2013). The undercommons: Fugitive planning & black study.
Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia.
 Preface: ‘what do books have to do with education?’ xxiii

hooks, b. (1991). Theory as liberatory practice. Yale Journal of Law & Feminism, 4(1), 1–12.
Retrieved from https://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/yjlf/vol4/iss1/2.
Irwin, R. L. (2003). Toward an aesthetic of unfolding In/Sights through curriculum.
Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies, 1(2), 63–78.
Loveless, N. (2019). How to make art at the end of the world: A manifesto for research-creation.
Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Manning, E., & Massumi, B. (2014). Thought in the act: Passages in the ecology of experience.
Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Shannon, D. B., & Truman, S. E. (2020). Problematizing sound methods through music
research-creation: Oblique curiosities. International Journal of Qualitative Methods. doi:
https://doi.org/10.1177/1609406920903224.
Springgay, S. (2019). Research-creation in practice. Public lecture. School of art, design and archi-
tecture. Melbourne, Australia: Monash University.
Springgay, S. (2020). Feltness: On how to practice intimacy. Qualitative Inquiry, Online
Fir, 1077800420932610. doi: https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800420932610.
Springgay, S., & Truman, S. E. (2018a). On the need for methods beyond proceduralism:
Speculative middles, (in)tensions, and response-ability in research. Qualitative Inquiry,
24(3), 203–214. doi: https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800417704464.
Springgay, S., & Truman, S. E. (2018b). Walking methodologies in a more-than-human world:
WalkingLab. London, UK: Routledge.
Springgay, S., & Truman, S. E. (2019). Walking in/as publics: Editors introduction.
Journal of Public Pedagogies, 4, 1–12.
Springgay, S., & Zaliwska, Z. (2015). Diagrams and cuts: A materialist approach to
research-creation. Cultural Studies – Critical Methodologies, 15(2), 136–144. doi: https://
doi.org/10.1177/1532708614562881.
St. Pierre, E. A., Jackson, A. Y., & Mazzei, L. A. (2016). New empiricisms and new
materialisms: Conditions for new inquiry. Cultural Studies – Critical Methodologies. doi:
https://doi.org/10.1177/1532708616638694.
Thompson, T. S., & Harney, S. (2018). Ground provisions. After All, 120–125.
Truman, S. E. (2016). Becoming more than it never (actually) was: Expressive writing as
research-creation. Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy, 13(2). doi: https://doi.org/10.108
0/15505170.2016.1150226.
Truman, S. E. (2019). Inhuman literacies and affective refusals: Thinking with Sylvia
Wynter and secondary school English. Curriculum Inquiry, 49(1), 110–128. doi: https://
doi.org/10.1080/03626784.2018.1549465.
Truman, S. E., McLean Davies, L., & Buzacott, L. (2021). Disrupting intertextual power
networks: challenging literature in schools. Discourse, Online first: doi.org/10.1080/0
1596306.2021.1910929.
Truman, S. E., Loveless, N., Manning, E., Myers, N., & Springgay, S. (2020). The inti-
macies of doing research-creation: Sarah E. Truman interviews Natalie Loveless, Erin
Manning, Natasha Myers, and Stephanie Springgay. In N. Loveless (Ed.), Knowings and
knots (pp. 221–250). Edmonton, AB: University of Alberta Press.
Truman, S. E., & Shannon, D. B. (2018). Queer sonic cultures: An affective walk-
ing-composing project. Capacious: Journal for Emerging Affect Inquiry, 1(3), 58–77. doi:
https://doi.org/10.22387/CAP2018.19.
Truman, S. E., & Springgay, S. (2015). The primacy of movement in research-creation:
New materialist approaches to art research and pedagogy. In M. Laverty, & T. Lewis
(Eds.), Art’s teachings, teaching’s art: Philosophical, critical, and educational musings (pp. 151–
162). New York, NY: Springer.
1
THEORETICAL PRECURSORS
Tracing my methodology
for research-creation

As a transdisciplinary scholar, the concept ‘research-creation’ gave me the per-

mission to draw on my background in English literature, cultural studies, and
philosophy to inform how I conceptualize research in the social sciences. This
chapter outlines my personal theoretical framework for how this process works
methodologically, whereas the following several stand-alone chapters specifically
focus on the enactment of research-creation projects using various methods. In
this chapter, I set out how I think about research-creation methodologically.1
While there are likely as many ways of approaching research-creation as there
are artist-researcher-scholars who might carry out a project, my own approach is
aligned with many of my Canadian research-creation colleagues who think with
the feminist materialisms (Truman, Loveless, Manning, Myers, & Springgay,
2020).2 The feminist materialisms is an umbrella term that describes feminist schol-
arship that activates thought from diverse fields, including process philosophy,

1 By ‘methodology’ I mean the logic, ethics, theories, and angle of approach that guide how I
approach research and inform the various methods that I might use. This is me talking through
the theories that inform how I think research-creation operates. Also, amor fati: some of these
theories might not seem like they go together to you, but they definitely influence me. I invoke
Nietzsche’s (1960) amor fati to acknowledge that this is a situated historical and contemporary
overview of scholars that have influenced how I think of research-creation. My background is
English literature and philosophy, and some of these scholars, for better or worse, have been
a part of my thinking since my undergraduate degree. In the following Interstice, I consider
citational politics and whether it’s possible to omit scholars as a method of attuning to different
modes of thought. Surely that is possible, with appropriate study, and this methodology will
likely change in the future. But this is a snapshot of it right now.
2 This could also be written as feminist new materialisms, although I and plenty of people have
pointed out that much of what is called ‘new’ materialisms is not new. That said, I believe the
initial use of the word was to distinguish it from a Marxist mode and that has been forgotten
in the critiques of the word ‘new.’ Also, the critique of the word ‘new’ in ‘new materialisms’ is
itself not new (Ahmed, 2008; Snaza et al., 2016).

DOI: 10.4324/9781003104889-1
2 Theoretical precursors

speculative pragmatism, the environmental humanities, queer and trans studies,

vitalism, and affect theory. When activated in research practices, these theo-
ries disrupt common orientations to research methodology in a variety of ways,
including: directly implicating researchers, artists, and theories in the event of
research; prioritizing affect and relationality; re-thinking representationalism;
and recognizing that thinking with theoretical concepts and making-doing art
are also ‘empirical’ research.
When I’m asked to articulate a common thread across all these disparate the-
ories and how they play out in research, I say: they unsettle humanism. This
is usually followed by the question: what do you mean by ‘humanism’? In the
next section, I’m going to unpack what I mean by humanism, and my method
for complicating humanism through invoking the inhuman and the narrative
human. Once that’s established, I will discuss situated speculation, rigorous activa-
tion, emergence, affirmation (refusal), and more-than-representation as five movements
for how I think about the process of research-creation.

What do I mean by ‘humanism?’

Literary theorist Sylvia Wynter has written extensively about how there are dif-
ferent genres of being human that are myriad and unfinished (Wynter, 1989;
Wynter & McKittrick, 2015). For this section, I am focusing on how Wynter
has also theorized the production of a particular kind of human as a signifier
for Eurowestern humanism. Wynter contends that who counts as this version
of the human is tethered to white Eurowestern ideals: ideals that align with a
particular set of aesthetics that are deemed desirable, and which operate through
practices of exclusion or assimilation in a universalizing global order. Wynter
calls this Eurowestern ideal of the human Man. Wynter’s theory of Man expands
on the work of early anti-colonial thinker Frantz Fanon (1963) who explicates a
similar Eurowestern ideal of the human as produced through a ‘bourgeois ideol-
ogy’ that “manages to appear logical in its own eyes by inviting the sub-men to
become human, and to take as their prototype Western humanity as incarnated
in the Western bourgeoisie” (Fanon, 1963, p. 163). Wynter’s (Wynter, 2001,
2003; Wynter & McKittrick, 2015) writings track the production of this ver-
sion of the human—Man—through colonial capitalism, inextricably linked with
transatlantic slavery, and back to the origins of the discipline of the humanities
itself. This version of the human and humanism is implicated in the structure of
the university, schooling, research methods, and aesthetic and literary traditions.3

3 Wynter tracks the production of Man through history: homo politicus (Man1) coincided with
the ‘Enlightenment’ of the 18th century as a break away from medieval theocracy. Homo
oeconomicus (Man2) coincided with the Darwinian influence of natural selection and rise
of capitalism in the 19th century. Both of these versions are tethered to what might be called
Man—and are reinforced through stories and institutions that uphold their worldview. But
Wynter’s genres of the human explain that there are myriad ways of being ‘human.’
 Theoretical precursors 3

The production of this particular kind of human and order of knowledge—who

stands in for and represents all humanity or what counts as a ‘civilized’ or ‘cul-
tivated’ subject—is not merely biological but rather is a combination of what
Wynter calls bios and mythoi (Wynter & McKittrick, 2015). However, Wynter
emphasizes that this over-represented version of the human is only one genre, or
way of being human: although, as the white, abled, cis-hetero, and male ideal,
it’s the version of humanity that is most frequently centered in art, history, music,
literature etc. in the west. As a result, our institutions, our research practices in
the social sciences, and our dominant theoretical frameworks tend to calibrate
everything to Man.4
In my scholarship, I think with theorists and pedagogues who challenge
the humanism derived from European Humanist traditions that model Man as
endowed with the sovereign rights to act on or against other people and inanimate
matter. Mel Chen (2012) outlines how the concept of animacy in Eurowestern
traditions has been constructed using the logic of the human. Linguistically,
animacy refers to the “quality of liveness, sentience, or humanness of a noun or
a noun phrase” (p. 24, italics mine). The less agency a body possesses, the less
animate it is considered to be, and the further from being ‘human.’ As such,
this taxonomy, Chen (2012) argues, is a contributing factor in dehumanization,
where qualities valued as ‘human’ are removed when discussing particular popu-
lations. The senses are similarly connected to this animacy taxonomy: perceived
base senses like touch, taste, and smell have been historically understood as
attached to certain bodies, particularly those which are deemed less-than-human
(Springgay, 2008). The taxonomy of affect, or what Sara Ahmed (2004b) calls
the “economies of affect,” also work to regulate and ‘dehumanize’ particular
people. Dehumanization activates a logic where certain powers are granted the
ability to assess and value life and include or exclude others from the realm of the
human. This dehumanizing logic often follows racial hierarchies. For instance,
Kalpana Seshadri (2012) argues that the line that divides those who are subject to
the law from those who are protected by the law is a racializing line.5
Humanism in its ongoing proliferations functions through both erasing dif-
ference and enforcing difference. In order to be deemed ‘human,’ non-humans
must be assimilated into the category of the human, a practice that Luciano and
Chen (2015) argue operates through logics of inclusion and rehabilitation: to be
included is to be rehabilitated enough to become legible within the very sys-
tem that then continues to exclude others. Julietta Singh (2018) raises similar
concerns through her analysis of Eurowestern notions of mastery, where to be

4 The proponents of whiteness may not question cis-white-able-Man’s certainty as the representa-
tion of humanity because they perhaps don’t want to know that it’s only a genre of being human.
Those who have the most to gain from dominant ways of knowing, being, and storying within
an inherited context are the least likely to question it.
5 Black scholars and activists have asserted this for a long time. In recent years, the Black Lives
Matter movement has brought this to the attention to even mainstream media.
4 Theoretical precursors

masterful is to wield power within the system that may have excluded that same
person or group in the past. This ‘becoming masterful’ could take the form of
understanding a language or a theory or some other kind of mastery. However,
Singh highlights that through becoming masterful, those previously deemed
in-human or un-human might inadvertently begin to reinforce the very logics
they might wish to overthrow. This understanding of how humanism operates
has direct implications for what is valued, what is considered legible, and what
counts as ways of knowing in research projects. Similarly, these systems of clas-
sification operate in educational settings and practices like literacy and literary
education: where what counts as knowledge and who can possess knowledge is
also governed by hegemonic values associated with a humanist logic and institu-
tional legibility (Snaza & Weaver, 2014; Snaza, 2019; Truman, 2019a) and where
many of the world’s students continually “find themselves subjected to various
tactics of dehumanization, objectification” (Snaza, Sonu, Truman, & Zaliwska,
2016, p. xix).
As an educational researcher in English literature and the arts, I constantly
struggle with this: being aware that concepts like literariness, literacy, art, and
aesthetics all hail from this Eurowestern-humanist tradition, desiring for my
students and colleagues (and myself ) to refuse it, while recognizing that doing so
may still mean being subject to the system through being excluded from it (and
also believing that there is such a thing as ‘literariness’). Working to unsettle the
humanist inheritance that haunts Western thought while not sidestepping very
human concerns is an ongoing endeavor in both my social science and humanities
research.6

Storying the inhuman

We are all stories in the end, just make it a good one, eh?
(The Doctor, Doctor Who)

In this section, I will first discuss the notion of the inhuman, and then discuss the
idea of storying the (in)human. In both my research-creation projects and my lit-
erary education research, I have thought with the notion of the inhuman as a way
of troubling humanism from both within and without (Springgay & Truman,
2017; Truman, 2017, 2019b). This thinking has been informed by various queer
scholars who challenge Eurowestern humanism but recognize the dangers of
declaring a post-human position in a world that is very much still governed by

6 While post-humanism has been applauded for its attempts at de-centering the human, and
acknowledging an emergent, relational subject, it has also been critiqued for dissolving race,
gender, and sexual orientation markers among humans; erasing difference between humans and
non-humans; and inadvertently re-inscribing anthropomorphism (King, 2017; Livingstone &
Puar, 2011). See my SAGE encyclopedia entry on feminist new materialisms (Truman, 2019a);
also, similar critiques have been made toward affect theory (Palmer, 2017).
 Theoretical precursors 5

white-humanist power structures and ideals ( Jackson, 2015; Muñoz et al., 2015;
Stryker, 2015; Yusoff, 2018, 2020).
Jeffrey Cohen (2015) outlines how the inhuman as a concept describes an
“estranged interiority” (p. 10). As a Janus word or auto-antonym, “in” in the
inhuman can operate both as negative prefix (presuming difference from the
human) while simultaneously also describe being within or of the human (as
an intimacy). The paradoxical function of the term creates a frictional thinking
space that keeps me and my methodology in tension. This aligns with Kathryn
Yusoff’s (2021) assertion of why she continues to think with the concept of the
inhuman in her research: because it is “counter intuitive, unsettles the norma-
tive paths of thought – queers your trails ” (personal communication).
Similarly, José Esteban Muñoz (2015) proposes thinking with the inhuman as a
“necessary queer labor of the incommensurate” (p. 209). This labor is queer in
that it subverts the silos and stratification of kinds of being, and incommensurate
because as humans we cannot know the inhuman (or human) due to the limits
of our knowledge production. Thinking the inhuman does not mean flattening
the boundaries between human and nonhuman, nor is it a practice that demands
the inhuman’s inclusion into the category of the human. Instead, Luciano and
Chen (2015) argue, the “inhuman points to the violence that the category of the
human contains within itself ” (p. 196) and propose inhumanisms (note the plural,
similar to Wynter’s genres of human) as a generative concept: an unfolding, rather
than a spatial designator of a particular kind of entity.
The queer imperative to think with the polysemous concept of the inhu-
man helps me continue to trouble humanism in research-creation projects and
literary education precisely because the concept is unsettling and does not rest.
Acknowledging that this is an ongoing practice where the friction between the
inhuman, the inhuman, and human allows other mutual inclusions to occur,
such as Jin Haritaworn’s (2015) necessity of injecting a “good dose of human-
ism” (p. 211) into thinking practices that seek to disrupt humanism. This is an
important consideration for those of us who are drawn to the more-than-human
turn which can theoretically slide into abstractions and elide the fact that there’s
‘humans involved’ in research (King, 2017). If the inhuman functions through
both difference and intimacy, it’s a paradox that’s always in tension. This tension
is helpful to my thinking as I attempt to unsettle humanism without ignoring the
very real human concerns of research participants in my projects.
Now that I’ve explained the paradox of the inhuman as a method for unset-
tling humanism, here comes the idea of storying the (in)human. As someone
who conducts research based on texts, and literature, I’ve been influenced by
what Sylvia Wynter (Wynter & McKittrick, 2015) calls homo narrans: the nar-
rated human who is a combination of both mythology and biology as a way of
explaining how there are myriad genres of the human (even though Man might
be the genre of the human who is vaunted in texts, theories, and literature).
Wynter’s storying version of the human highlights how, as individuals, we are not
merely produced through biology and social practices but also through creative
6 Theoretical precursors

practices: the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and what we are becom-
ing. For me, this emphasizes the materiality and power of language and story-
telling in shaping—figuratively, speculatively, and literally—what’s possible. In
that regard, what we foreground and center in narratives, texts, speculation, and
art is both affirmed and reproduced through the telling: we’re materially shaping
the world and ourselves through stories.7 The idea of re-configuring the human
through story and language is significant to my research in that much of it,
particularly the research projects highlighted in this book, focuses on ‘text’ based
artistic projects, including literature and literary education, creative writing,
marginalia, and hypertexts.
In this section, I sought to articulate how I conceptualize humanism and
seek to unsettle it through thinking with the paradox of the inhuman and sto-
rying potential of proliferating humanisms. The next section of this chapter
will engage further with theories I use to think through my approach to the
research-creation process.8 This methodological orientation is assembled from a
variety of sources that I draw together under the terms situated speculation, rigorous
activation, emergence, affirmation, and more-than-representation. I think with many
philosophers and scholars in the next sections, some of whom write about how
thought works, or how the physical world works. I appropriate some of these
theories to explain how research-creation as a process works for me. It’s impor-
tant to recognize a distinction between theories that seek to explain the world
in an abstract or physical sense, and how I as a researcher might appropriate
them to explain my own engagement with research in the arts and education: a
process that Ian Buchanan (2020) calls a “subjectification of theory” (personal
communication).

Techniques for thinking about the process

of research-creation
Situated speculation
The structure of conventional qualitative research projects often requires research-
ers to presume to know in advance: this is demonstrated through an approach to
research design that states what we’re looking for, what it might mean, what
its outcomes might be, and who will benefit from it, all before embarking on a
study. This process is normally built on some kind of knowledge of the field and,
hopefully, a situated and ethical approach to speculating on what might occur or
develop during the research. While I think all of these aspects of conventional

7 This also includes the constant re-affirmation of ‘Man’ as dominant through critiquing (and
narrating) his dominance, so I don’t want to give him too much airtime.
8 I’ve belonged to several reading groups throughout the years and I am indebted to colleagues
I’ve read and thought alongside for helping me frame my understanding of research-creation.
I particularly want to thank Stephanie Springgay and David Ben Shannon who have conducted
numerous research-creation projects with me.
 Theoretical precursors 7

qualitative research can and should be speculated on before embarking on a study,

students are rarely taught to think about this process as speculative. Following
queer-feminist theorists, and informed by feminist materialist and process phi-
losophers, in this section I think through situated-speculative thought as an inte-
gral part of research-creation. To do so, I unpack some theoretical influences that
inform my understanding of speculation.
Research-creation, like all research and creative practice, is in part a specu-
lative process. As an artist and researcher embarks on a project, and throughout
that project, they speculate about different times/spaces from a particular time/
space, and in so doing shape and co-compose what could be. Scholars in the fields
of critical race, Black and Indigenous studies, queer and trans studies, critical
disability studies, and feminist studies often mobilize this differential in their art
and scholarship (Muñoz, 2009; Nyong’o, 2019; Wong, 2020) both to warn of
futures that we might not want to eventuate and to take “seriously the generative
proposition another world is possible …” (Keeling, 2019, p. ix). The differential link
between a situated curiosity and speculative possibilities or potentialities9 fuels
much feminist materialist thought. ‘Situatedness,’ as conceptualized by Haraway
(1991), might mean the actual physical situation from where speculation occurs,
but also refers to shifting, inherited, self-identified, and externally forced subject
positionalities, including race, gender, class, sexuality, ability, as well as the the-
oretical positionality (concepts) a researcher speculates with. Åsberg, Thiele, and
Van der Tuin (2015) outline how feminist thought has always been speculative,
while remaining critically contextualized. Through speculative alter-worlding,
materialist feminisms “envision a different difference from within” an inherited
context (Åsberg et al., 2015, p. 160). A researcher’s positionality and intentional-
ity have material effects on what the research-creation might produce. In order
to keep being critical, a ‘critical positionality’10 cannot proceed from a fixed
position: it is constantly being modified by what we read and encounter through
the arts, or scientific research practices, or through discussions with participants,
and in the event of research-creation. In this regard, the researchers themselves
are also in process. The speculative process proposes what could be. It might
usher in a different world while simultaneously changing us: this is the power
and potential of speculative thought and storying practices.
In continuing my discussion of situated speculation, I will now discuss some
philosophers who have informed my thinking on how I’ve come to understand

9 Possibilities can be thought of as just that (logically possible). Whereas potentialities (Agamben &
Heller-Roazen, 1999) have the capacity to both be and not be.
10 There’s also an important link between situated positionality and ‘objectivity’ in feminist sci-
ence studies where a friction between subjectivity and objectivity has been debated by feminist
scholars for decades. Haraway (1991) who complicates this at length in Situated Knowledges: The
Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective. For Haraway, ‘feminist objec-
tivity’ relies on the understanding that knowledge is partial and that ‘critical positioning’ is
integral for any hope of ‘objectivity’ in science (1991, p. 193).
8 Theoretical precursors

the differential link between what is (in actuality) and what might be, and who
have subsequently informed how I’ve conducted research-creation projects. I
collect their ideas through discussions of: the actual and the virtual, propositions, sit-
uatedness, theories of affect, and queer time/spaces. Many of the theories I think with
are aligned with what has been called the ontological turn (where ‘ontology’
studies what is) and process philosophy (which is a theory of how thought in
general works). As you’ll see, many of the concepts I take up explain the world
in an abstract sense yet have influenced how I think practically (albeit perhaps
metaphorically) about running research-creation projects. This is an important
distinction to understand. As these theories are appropriated or subjectivized
(by me!) and engaged with in relation to queer positionality, antiracist praxis,
and situated feminisms, they (perhaps aporetically) have much in common with
phenomenological approaches to research.

Actual ⇔ virtual
Gilles Deleuze’s (1994) writings on the virtual, actual, and difference inform this
theoretical orientation and run as a current through much of the new materialist
or ontological turn that influences research-creation scholarship in Canada, as
well as other forms of qualitative research. To explain the relationship between
actuality and virtuality, Deleuze (1994) engages the notion of difference as the
force behind the creative becoming of the world through two processes: dif-
ferenciation (with a ‘c’) and differentiation. Differenciation refers to the actualized
expression of virtual intensities. What is actualized simultaneously affects virtual
potentials through a process he calls differentiation. The differential movement
between differenciation and differentiation operates in all events. Deleuze’s ontology
is not only concerned with what is (with discrete forms of identity as being)
but as an approach to experimentation—a way of probing what might be. This
might be exists virtually in all actual instances but as a virtuality cannot be known
until it actualizes. Simultaneously, what does actualize has the potential to affect
the virtual.
Deleuze (1994) fleetingly refers to the intensive movement that courses
between actual and virtual potentialities and allows them to communicate as
the ‘dark precursor’ (p. 119). To explain the dark precursor, he uses an atmos-
pheric example of thunderbolts exploding in different intensities as being guided
by an invisible and imperceptible precursor that determines a “path in advance
but in reverse …” (p. 119). The idea of a dark precursor occupies an affective,
queer time-and-space and has been utilized by many artists and scholars to think
through speculative world-makings (Nyong’o, 2019). Similarly, feminist theo-
retical physicist Karen Barad (2015) describes lightning as having a queer tempo-
ral communication system that operates through non-local relating where there’s
no ‘sender’ or ‘recipient’ until after the transmission has already occurred. Barad
(2015) discusses all matter as operating agentially in “an ongoing reconfiguring
of spacetimemattering” (p. 411) include ongoing ‘reconfigurations’ of the virtual
 Theoretical precursors 9

as well as the actual. In the next section, I consider how this differential is acti-
vated in a research encounter through the ‘proposition.’

Propositions
Alfred North Whitehead’s (1978) explication of propositions has inspired many
scholars who theorize research-creation (Manning, 2016; Shannon, 2021;
Truman & Springgay, 2016). For Whitehead (1978) a proposition—whether
uttered by a human in words or made through a material gesture—is a “… new
kind of entity. Such entities are the tales that perhaps might be told about par-
ticular actualities” (Whitehead, 1978, p. 256). A proposition then functions as a
differential lure for feeling that links virtuality and actuality (p. 25). I think of this
kind of feeling as similar to Deleuze’s dark precursor, in that it is an invisible and
imperceptible communication between potentialities; it is through ‘feeling’ that
new potentialities actualize and make new propositions (and worlds) possible.11
As Whitehead (1978) states, “[e]vidently new propositions come into being with
the creative advance of the world” (p. 259). Manning (2008) uses the idea of
propositions to discuss newness or novelty not as “… something never before
invented, but a set of conditions that tweak experience in the making” (p. 6). In
this regard, propositions are activated throughout the research-creation event.
Once these potentials are actualized (in an event), new propositions immedi-
ately emerge creating a new hybrid between actual and virtual. In Whitehead’s
thought, this is not just happening in the human sphere, but obviously for the
purposes of my research in education and the arts, humans are very much part
of the mix and will ‘tweak’ the research in process as part of a situated response to
what is unfolding.
How a proposition might actualize will be radically different across different
bodies, times/spaces, and circumstances. In that way, a proposition can function
as an affective force in the Nietzschean sense—which would vary depending on
circumstance and through its engagement with other forces. As such, Bennett
(2010) after Latour explains that a proposition “has no decisionistic power but
is a lending of weight, an incentive toward, a pressure toward the direction of
one trajectory rather than another” (p. 103). Latour (1999) does not use the term
proposition in an epistemological sense (as in deciding whether a statement is

11 I know all this might sound like a really complicated way of saying that things affect other
things on every level. I do find Whitehead particularly interesting when he argues that even
a non-conformal (untrue!) proposition’s “primary role” is to “pave the way along which the
world advances into novelty” (1978, p. 187). In an era of post-truth politics, science denialism,
and AI-driven media, I wonder what kind of ‘novelty’ world we’re going to find ourselves in
next. As I say in the Affirmation section, sometimes the ‘affirmation’ that is required is ‘refusal’.
In case you think I’m propositionally cheering for an anything-goes false world: I’m not. But
sometimes what might be deemed ‘false’ in an existing order is that which is illegible or threat-
ens it. We maybe need non-conformal propositions more than the conformal ones.
10 Theoretical precursors

true or false) but rather in an ontological sense that considers “what an actor
offers other actors” during their interaction or event-making (p. 309).12
In all these relational exchanges among forces, feelings, and speculations as
part of a research-creation event, there will be various humans. These humans
will be replete with all kinds of human inheritances. As I mentioned at the
beginning of this section, a feminist approach to speculation is situated, and
considers the world-making that might occur through the act of speculation.
As scholars (Nyong’o, 2019; Shaviro, 2015) have argued elsewhere, speculative
thought is not neutral. In many instances (including in speculative fiction), the
worlds created through speculation re-inscribe the logics of white supremacy,
misogyny, and ableism, rather than creating a more just world.

Still situated
I want to invoke one final process philosopher before I move on: William James,
the speculative pragmatist. Dieter Debaise and Isabelle Stengers (2017) think
with James and Whitehead to pose a pragmatic question concerning the process
of speculative thought and the practice of feeling potentialities. They ask us to
consider: “does the possible whose insistence I sense add or detract from the
situation?” They then acknowledge that how we “answer is part of the situation,”
and that we should then make ourselves “response-able, answerable for its conse-
quences”(Debaise & Stengers, 2017, p. 13). I will return to this point later in the
section on affirmation below, but just in case you think these speculative prag-
matist/process philosophies are a-political: they are not. They’re radically polit-
ical. But it’s up to those of us who mobilize these theories in research-creation
practices to consider the forces, feelings, lures, and contexts that affect what
actualizes, how it might be felt, and how what takes place in actuality might then
affect what could be: this is where situated feminism is a necessary component
in speculative thought.
Feminism is the advocacy of equity and social justice across diverse sexes,
genders, sexualities, classes, races, and abilities. While historical approaches to
feminism were frequently based in practices that sought for equality between
white (straight and abled) cis-women and white (straight and abled) cis-men,
present-day feminism recognizes intersectional forms of oppression and efforts
(speculation, writing, actions) to create a more just world. As I said in the
Preface, many scholars who use the concept research-creation (Loveless, 2019;
Truman et al., 2020) align it with a queer feminist, anti-colonial orientation
to art and research. From the planning of a research-creation project, through

12 Composer and research-creation scholar, David Ben Shannon (2021) adds a good dose of
Wittgenstein to his Whitehead to argue that there is a danger in completely abandoning the
proposition’s True/False distinction. Rather, he suggests that in a post-truth era of white
nationalist nostalgia, we should describe the proposition as speculating on a modality of Truth
(on what is ‘possibly True’) in order to keep a firm grasp on what is distinctly False: “wrong
notes, bad politics and crap art” (n.p.)
 Theoretical precursors 11

the research-creation event, and through dissemination practices, the tension

between what is being speculated, actualized, felt, and how we might respond,
has material effects. In the next section, I think about this materiality through
theories of affect.

Affect
“Feeling” × 7 ~ Joy Division, Disorder

This section still hovers in the realm of situated speculation but turns to theories
of affect.13 In my understanding, affect functions in a similar way to the virtual
and actual discussed above and is both situated and speculative.14 However, across
academic disciplines, affect is understood in different ways. Affect is frequently
theorized as the capacities of bodies to act or be acted upon by other bodies in an
ever-shifting milieu. Seigworth and Gregg (2010) describe affects as the forces at
work in an encounter.15 Such forces might capacitate or debilitate as part of rela-
tional exchanges circulating through (and transversal to) individual events and
bodies. Affects can be intimate (Springgay, 2020) and sticky (Ahmed, 2004a) and
cling to bodies (or events); affects can also be deflective and slip past particular
bodies or situations (Truman & Shannon, 2018).
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” (p. 9). In this regard, affect is a capacity that sounds like it
is tethered to an individual who has become committed (or has the intention) to
being affected. This capacity might vary wildly in different circumstances and
situations. As a scholar, I might propose the question: how can I prime myself to
become affected? But I also must consider how different affective intensities might
circulate through, and land differently on, diverse research participants in my
research-creation projects (Ahmed, 2004b), and consider how different affects
make us feel differently (Probyn, 2010). Black affect scholars have argued that
when an individuated subject is invoked in affect theory, they are frequently pre-
sented as transparent and “endowed with the capacity to affect and be affected”
(Palmer, 2017, p. 37). Tyrone Palmer (2017) follows da Silva (2007) to argue that,
while the transparent subject is endowed with a capacity to affect and be affected,
Black subjects are often configured as “endlessly affectable but unable to ‘affect
or have agentive power within an affective economy’” (p. 37). The removal
of agency from already oppressed groups—through scholastic description, or

13 I would argue that affect functions in the differential of the actual and virtual. It’s speculative,
pre-personal, and very personal. That’s why it’s still part of this section on situated speculation
(and will be part of other sections below and throughout this book). Most of these different sec-
tions that I’ve made infiltrate each other. I’m just breaking them up because that’s how I thought
through them to understand how research-creation functions.
14 And as you’ll see in the Emergence and Affirmation sections below, it fits there as well. Alas,
linearity.
15 See above how I link propositions to forces/affect as well.
12 Theoretical precursors

framing, or through capitalism—is a problem of white supremacy that suffuses

many of the theoretical frameworks and practices that circulate in the academy.
Significantly, many critical race and Black studies scholars mobilize affect
theory in nuanced and anti-colonial ways that don’t re-victimize Black people
or people of color (Ahmed, 2004a; Chen, 2012; Harney & Moten, 2013; Puar,
2017). In The Undercommons, Stephano Harney and Fred Moten (2013) discuss
this literally and speculatively through their description of the hold, below decks
during the Middle Passage. They frame the hold as an undercommons and artic-
ulate how affect can circulate and land in different ways through the relations
and forces at work in the hold. I include their discussion here because their
thinking on affect does not reduce Black lives to being only ‘affectable’ yet never
‘affecting.’ In The Undercommons, what Harney and Moten refer to as the ‘com-
mon’ is developed through feeling. This feeling is more-than-individual (and felt
throughout the common, not just by a single person). They call this “touch of
the undercommons” hapticality (p. 98). Their description of hapticality is spec-
ulative in that it is to “feel that what is to come is here;” personal, in that it is
the “capacity to feel though others, for others to feel through you;” and more-
than-personal, in that people in the hold were “[t]hrown together touching each
other [they] were denied all sentiment, denied all the things that were supposed
to produce sentiment, family, nation, language, religion, place, home” yet still
“feel (for) each other” (p. 98). This understanding of hapticality and the feeling
in the common shows the complexity of affect circulating in both the horror
of—and through the Black resistance and resilience to—the transatlantic slave
trade’s Middle Passage. Harney and Moten articulate how affective forces do
not end in the hold but extend beyond it into different time/spaces including
contemporary Black music, Black speculative thought, and study, demonstrating
how hapticality can pull toward different potentials for the future.16 I now go
on to think about how normative conceptualizations of time and space might be
unsettled, or ‘queered.’

Queer time/spaces
The situated-speculative differential and discussions of affect I’ve been unpack-
ing throughout this section all occupy a queer time/space. And queer temporali-
ties and topia are a part of how I understand the differential between situatedness
and speculation. Queer is an umbrella term that is commonly used as a noun or
adjective to describe LGBTQIA+ subject positions; and a mode of thought that
scholars, activists, and researchers mobilize when attempting to unsettle norma-
tive approaches to method and methodology and the power structures that are

16 Further, Harney and Moten’s discussion of the undercommons is based in the literal under-
commons of the hold but has also been taken up as a metaphor for affective spaces within and
beyond the university inspired by Black fugitive thought. McKittrick’s (2021) Dear Science is
full of examples of these arts in practice and is brilliant. Also, hapticality has been theorized by
other scholars as a trans-sensory intimacy, including Laura Marks.
 Theoretical precursors 13

reproduced through them. Similar to my caveats regarding affect, speculation,

and the ‘human’ above, queer theory has been critiqued for centering a white,
cis- and abled version of queerness at the erasure of Black, brown, Indigenous,
disabled, and trans people. In mobilizing queerness, it’s important to work
against it as merely a form scholarly or social transgression performed by people
who often already inhabit a privileged position. If we consider how many people
(racialized, disabled, trans) are already unsettling humanism’s ‘norms,’ then the
notion of queering begins to reek of a kind of white enabled (often masculine)
exceptionalism that ironically performs an exclusionary logic through asserting
queerness as a drive to ‘do things differently,’ or ‘transgress’ these norms (and
never more so than when ‘queering’ is enacted by white, cis-hetero, abled peo-
ple: what exactly is being queered in that instance?). That said, and even though
queerness has been co-opted (literally by banks and the police in Pride parades
etc.), I think queerness still exceeds this kind of capture: particularly given how
many radical thinkers still use and complicate the term (Keeling, 2019).
Queer theorists help me think through my approach to research-creation
projects and method as situated/speculation, imbued with affects that unsettle
linearity and occupy queer times/spaces.17 Normative approaches to qualitative
research tend to follow linear constructions of time. By way of a contrast, Muñoz
(2009) contends that queerness might be understood as “structuring an educated
mode of desiring that allows us to see and feel beyond the quagmire of the pres-
ent” (Muñoz, 2009, p. 1). In Muñoz’s work, queerness itself is a horizon that has
not yet arrived, and both the future and the past hold (virtual) potentials, or what
he calls ‘affective surplus’ (p. 14), that may be accessed to feel toward different
worlds. Thinking alongside Muñoz, the speculative planning that goes into a
research-creation project is open to what could be, recognizing that what might
actualize will create an affective surplus. Keeling (2019) outlines how queer is
“palpable, felt as affect” (p. 18) and how queer temporalities outline a “dimension
of time that produces risk” (p. 19). Queer temporally refers to the “dimension
of the unpredictable and the unknowable in time that governs errant, eccentric,
promiscuous, and unexpected organizations of social life” and, I would argue,
methods (Keeling, 2019, p. 19).
Research-creation is risky.18 And situated speculation, including propositions,
affect, and queerness, are risky concepts: a researcher is never certain exactly

17 Colleagues who I have organized and written about research-creation projects with often
think with queer theory (Springgay & Truman, 2019; Truman & Shannon, 2018; Truman &
Springgay, 2019).
18 Risk is a high alert word in the academy, particularly when working with students, as I do in
some research. When researchers write ethics protocols, we’re supposed to account for risk to
participants which makes sense. However, the structure of capitalism also always seeks to min-
imize risk for some at the expense of others. Surely this happens with experimental methods and
art as well. Perhaps Latour’s risky diplomacy is a way of thinking through this with regards to
research projects.
14 Theoretical precursors

what is going to emerge in the event. But, in case this sounds like I’m beginning
to say, ‘anything goes, weee!’ be assured that I am absolutely, most definitely, and
forever not saying that. Yes, I wanted to hash out some of my favorite theoretical
underpinnings for how I think about research both before and during the event
of research. However (I reiterate), I don’t think research-creation should ever be
conceived as an ‘anything goes’ process, just like the theories are not ‘anything
goes’ theories. Like all research, there’s a planning stage. This is speculative, but
it also requires me as a researcher-artist to set some limitations, or conditions, or
constraints in advance and have some kind of ethico-political tendings that help
frame and suffuse the project. As I mentioned in the introduction and will con-
tinue to affirm: my orientation to research is embedded in feminist, antiracist,
queer politics. In my work with Stephanie Springgay at WalkingLab, we call this
political orientation our (in)tensions to method (2018): meaning the politics that
we aspire to keep us and our methods in tension throughout the research process,
as we enact situated speculation. In the next section, I think about how these (in)
tensions bring rigour to the research-creation practice.

Rigorous activation
How do I get from speculating about what could be to enacting a project? If I’m
talking about research-creation, which I am in this book, then I am proposing
a way to artistically create an event (text, song, cultural production) of what it is
that I am curious about. In other words, I figure out how to make an artistic
event of what I want to research: that’s the creation part. I’m not talking about
investigating something that’s already happened. It is fine to research something
that has already happened, but that’s not what I’m talking about here: I’m talking
about creating the thing/event that I want to investigate. Sometimes this occurs
with other participants, such as in the example of my research in schools or with
other publics. Sometimes this is a solo artistic project.
Creating the thing that I want to investigate is not an ‘anything goes’ pro-
cess. Creation requires curation: specifically, curation of how I will approach
the research encounter, and how I will activate artistic practices and theoretical
resources. It takes planning, including ethics protocols, co-ordination with par-
ticipants, and curation of materials. In other words, I have to turn up with a plan
of what I am going to do and with protocols in place, even though the event
of what might emerge is speculative and unknown. In terms of working with
students in schools, this process can take months of pre-planning and getting to
know the students, parental consent, and giving students background knowledge
on a topic or arts practice. When organizing public events with WalkingLab, it
requires pre-walking routes, considering issues of access, and how the police
(who could show up) might react to different bodies and groups in public spaces.
Curating the artistic practices that will be activated requires artistic rigor,
which usually comes from years of training or practice from myself or my col-
laborators. I don’t turn up to a research site and spontaneously decide I’m going
 Theoretical precursors 15

to do a research-creation project using Ikebana or the Charleston with a group of

students (when I’ve never done either before in my life). Just like I wouldn’t show
up in a science laboratory one day, declare myself a scientist, and “do parameci-
ums” (Shannon & Truman, 2020, p. 2). The arts are undermined considerably
when they are leveraged in ‘anything goes’ ways in qualitative research.
Curating the theory that is activated in a project is also embedded in the
project from the beginning. For example, the project I discuss in Chapter 2
centered on a desire to understand how marginalia might pedagogically affect
text reception. And the text I chose to investigate through artists’ marginalia was
Nietzsche’s writings about the eternal return, which is a concept that has haunted
me since I first encountered it during my undergraduate studies, and which first
came to Nietzsche during a walk. The theory circulates through the base text,
the artists’ engagement with it, and my discussions of it in the chapter. Similarly,
theories of marginalia are foregrounded in the chapter and the project design.
I take a similar approach but with different artistic practices and different theories
in subsequent chapters. The arts practice, the theory, and the research methods
are co-imbricated throughout the duration of the project (planning, background
reading, arts practice, and theorization).
As you’ll see in the various exemplification chapters that follow, I use a variety
of different theoretical agitations, artistic activations, and methods to organize a
research-creation project, depending on what it is I’m trying to think-through
and who I’m working with. Once an event, or thought, or art piece, or cultural
production actualizes, then new potentials emerge from that and may invite the
necessity to read new theories. In this regard, situated speculation and its attendant
concepts as well as rigorous activation prime an event, but also happen throughout
the event (queer time/space). So, although the next section talks more specifically
about the event of emergence, the attributes of situated speculation and rigor I
addressed above are also part of emergence as well as precursors to emergence.

Emergence and events

The term research-creation suggests a form of practice whose analytical
framework does not simply study what already exists, but acts by bringing
something new into the world.
(Couillard, 2020, p. 55)

In this book, the word emerge functions as a verb (these findings emerged), as
an adverb (research-creation projects operate emergently), and as an adjective
(an emergent concept). I like how flexible the term ‘emerge’ is, and how slip-
pery. Events emerge. An emergence glides over a cusp between potentiality and
an actuality. An emergent cannot be known in advance and so in that way is
aligned with what has been called the ontological turn. Perhaps emergences are
ontogenetic because whatever actualizes through emergence is ‘becoming’ as
much as ‘being.’ Perhaps ontogenetic is the wrong word: perhaps I should say
16 Theoretical precursors

viral! Mostly, I like the term emerge because it reminds me of the word emer-
gency and causes me to consider before, during, and after the event of research:
‘What is emerging—and what is the emergency?’ ‘How do I respond to what’s
unfolding?’ ‘What do I affirm?’ In the coming sections, I think about emer-
gence and the event of research-creation, and how bodies (or bodyminds), and
ethico-political concerns emerge through those events.

!Emergence ⇔ emergency!
Emergence as a term has cycled through much contemporary thought including
the sciences, social sciences, and even new age writing. In many ways, I use the
term as a metaphor because I like how it links up with the word emergency when
I’m thinking about the event of research and I can’t think of another term that’s
as good. In empirical science, emergence is often discussed as simple objects pro-
ducing novel collective effects, where emergent properties are formed through
a particular process or interaction and then acquire new characteristics that
are substantively different from pre-existing conditions that gave rise to them
(Chang, 2004). Cultural theorists have different uptakes of the term emergence,
which include Raymond Williams’ (1977) description of an emergent culture
as one where “new meanings and values, new practices, new relationships and
kinds of relationship are continually being created” (p. 122) and interventions
in a cultural realm arise from a dominant framework but operate autonomously
from it. In this regard, the emergent only makes sense in relation to a dominant
framework that it can be distinguished from. Bryan Reynolds (2009) hybridizes
the scientific notion of emergent properties and Williams’ notion of emergent
culture with what he calls ‘emergent activity.’ For Reynolds (2009) emergent
activity draws from both fields to “… propose critical enterprises simultane-
ously stemming from a subject of inquiry and distinctly redefining it” (p. 276).
Drawing from Haraway (2008), research-creation scholar Natalie Loveless
(2019) writes that emergence “describes an aggregate property of elements,
none of which demonstrate that property inherently within them” (p. 25): in so
doing, she builds a case for the unknowability of what might emerge through
research, as well as for the emergent trans-disciplinarity of research-creation as
a growing field.
The theoretical framework I attempt to build for myself to explain emer-
gence happens on a whole host of levels including: relations between bodies;
thoughts; social inheritances; genealogies of thought as part of materiality;
and what emerges in the event of research (in the time/space that Stephanie
Springgay and I call the speculative middle) (Springgay & Truman, 2018). I call my
research-creation projects ‘events’ as a way of highlighting how research unfolds
in practice. I conceptualize an event as a multitude of forces interacting and
emerging as event—including the people involved.
Following Whitehead, Steven Shaviro (2009) explains, “events do not
‘happen to’ things: rather, events themselves are the only things. An event is
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