NiTRO + Creative Matters

Perspectives on creative arts in higher education

BECOMING THROUGH COMPLEXITY 

  • PAULINA LAROCCA
DEVELOPING THE TRANSDISCIPLINARY INQUIRY MODEL IN CREATIVE PRACTICE RESEARCH — This article reflects on the development of the Transdisciplinary Inquiry Model (TIM) as both a methodological framework and a record of my becoming as a creative researcher. Developed during my doctoral research through practice-led inquiry, TIM integrates imagination, embodiment, and relationality to navigate the tensions of knowledge production across disciplines.

It emerged not from detached theorising but from lived negotiation between creative experimentation, academic expectation, and institutional constraint. Drawing on the Fractals of Nature project – a multisensory, participatory creative work – I trace how creative practice research became a way of thinking-with complexity, not merely representing it. Through reflexive narrative, I explore how TIM itself became a site of epistemic shift: from disciplinary loyalty to transdisciplinary opening, from output to process, and from methodological certainty to embodied attunement. In doing so, I argue that creative practice research reveals the transformation of the researcher through iterative acts of making and unmaking.

Keywords Transdisciplinary Inquiry Model (TIM), Creative Practice Research, Embodied Knowledge, Relational Complexity, Becoming

DOI 10.65289/creativematters.2025.10.8

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Paulina Larocca is an artist–researcher whose Metabolising Through Making methodology uses embodied, collective making to cultivate ethical attention, defer judgement and build relational care. Her work spans creative health, applied performance and more-than-human inquiry, with participatory projects that integrate scent, touch and taste to scaffold accessible, communal research environments.

Main image: Larocca, Touch Room. Photo credit: Jason Kirk

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REVOLUTIONARY DYNAMICS IN CREATIVE PRACTICE RESEARCH AT THE CONVERGENCE OF CRITICAL, CREATIVE, THEORETICAL, AND ACADEMIC SPACES
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METHODOLOGIES IN FLUX
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RECALIBRATION OF THE PĀLI JĀTAKAS THROUGH SPECTER AND SAMSARĀ
  • MESH TENNAKOON
This paper reflects on a methodology within a Creative Writing PhD that recalibrates selected Buddhist Pāli Jātakas through a parallel reading of Derrida’s Specters of Marx and Buddhist texts on samsarā (rebirth). This cross-cultural dialogue provides a nuanced context for rearticulating the Jātakas. The project’s ‘middle-way methodology’ avoids privileging either Western or Buddhist frameworks and adapts Smith and Dean’s (2009) ‘iterative cyclic web’ through oscillations across creative writing, cross-cultural reading, and critical inquiry.
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PROLIFERATING VOIDS
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REHEARSING THE INSTITUTION: ARTISTIC LABOUR AND PEDAGOGICAL TRACE
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WHEN AI MEETS CYBERPUNK
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COMMERCIALLY VIABLE, ACADEMICALLY FOCUSED, OR BOTH? — Nicola Boyd (2009) declared there is a strong chance of publishing a creative work developed from the creative writing doctorate. But how does this work when the creative output is deeply entwined with academic methodology, especially when the output is popular genre fiction with its own rules and industry expectations for commercial publication?
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