RESEARCH-CREATION

Research-creation can be described as the complex intersection of art practice, theoretical concepts, and research. It is an experimental practice that cannot be predicted or determined in advance. It is trans-disciplinary and is used by artists and designers who incorporate a hybrid form of artistic practice between 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 interested in developing curriculum and pedagogy grounded in cultural production. Research-creation is attuned to processes rather than the communication of outputs or products.

Propositions for Research-Creation (By Stephanie Springgay and Sarah E. Truman, 2016).

Speculate: Research-creation is future event oriented. As a speculative practice, it invents techniques of relation.

Propose enabling constraints: Enabling constraints are expansive and suggestive. They operate by delimiting process and possibility, although they always include more possibilities than any given event realizes.

Create problems: Research-creation is a practice that does not seek to describe, explain, or solve problems. Rather, it is an ‘event’ that creates concepts that problematize. Concepts are not pre-given or known in advance. As an event of problems research-creation brings something new into the world.

Think-in-movement: The aim of research-creation is not to reflect on something that has passed. Thinking-in-movement is to think in the act; it is a thinking saturated with rhythm and affect.

Note emergences – rework emergences: Concepts proliferate in research-creation, and with them ethico-political concerns emerge. Once an ethico-political concern emerges, re-work it to see what it can do.

More-than-represent: Rather than attempting to ‘represent’ or report on research-creations, use them to propel further thought, and create something new: new concepts, new ethico-political concerns, new problems.

 

Research-Creation Publications by Educational Researchers:

Rotas, N. & Springgay, S. (2014). How do you make a classroom operate like a work of art? Deleuzeguattarian methodologies of research-creation. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 28(5), 552-572.

Springgay, S. (2014). Approximate-rigorous-abstractions: Propositions of activation for posthumanist research. In N. Snaza & J. Weaver (Eds). Posthumanism and educational research, (pp. 76-90). NY: Routledge.

Springgay, S. (2016). Meditating with bees: Weather bodies and a pedagogy of movement. In N. Snaza, D. Sonu, S. E. Truman, & Z. Zaliwska (Eds.). Pedagogical matters: New materialism and curriculum studies (pp. 59-74). New York, NY: Peter Lang.

Springgay, S., & Truman, S. E. (2017a). On the need for methods beyond proceduralism: Speculative middles, (in)tensions, and response-ability in research. Qualitative Inquiry. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800417704464

Springgay, S. & Truman, S. E. (2017b). A transmaterial approach to walking methodologies: Embodiment, affect, and a sonic art performance. Body & Society. DOI: DOI: 10.1177/1357034X17732626. Online first.

Springgay, S. and Truman, S. E. (2017c). Stone walks: Inhuman animacies and queer archives of feeling. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 36(6), 851-863.

Springgay, S. & Truman, S. E. (2018). Walking methodologies in a more-than-human world. London, UK: Routledge.

Springgay, S., & Zaliwska, Z. (2015). Diagrams and cuts: A materialist approach to research-creation. Cultural Studies Critical Methodologies, 15(2), 136–144.

Springgay, S. & Zaliwska, Z. (2016): Learning to be affected: Matters of pedagogy in the artists’ soup kitchen. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 49(3), 273-283.

Truman, S. E. (2016a). Intratextual entanglements: Emergent pedagogies and the productive potential of texts. In N. Snaza, D. Sonu, S. E. Truman & Z. Zaliwska (Eds.), Pedagogical Matters: New Materialisms and Curriculum Studies (pp. 91-108). New York, NY: Peter Lang.

Truman, S. E. (2016b). Becoming more than it never (actually) was: Expressive writing as research-creation. Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy, 13(2), 136-143.

Truman, S. E. (2017). Speculative methodologies & emergent literacies: Walking & writing as research-creation (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). University of Toronto, Canada.

Truman, S. E. & Shannon, D. B. (2018). Queer sonic cultures: An affective walking-composing project. Capacious: Journal for Emerging Affect Inquiry. 1(3). 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. 151-164). New York, NY: Springer.

Truman, S. E., & Springgay, S. (2016). Propositions for walking research. In K. Powell, P. Bernard, & L. Mackinley (Eds.),International handbook for intercultural arts (pp. 259-267). New York, NY: Routledge.