NiTRO + Creative Matters

Perspectives on creative arts in higher education

GIVING IT A NAME

  • ANA LOUISA DAVIS
INTEGRATING FAMILY ADDICTION TRAUMA THROUGH EMBODIED CREATIVE RESEARCH — This article explores how the phenomenon of ‘affective ambush’(Maguire & Deller 2024), influenced the creative practice as research involved in the production of my creative artefact 'The Lighthouse: Personal Essays on the Transgenerational Haunting of Addiction'. Affective ambush occurs when a scholar experiences an unexpected emotional reaction to their academic research.

My affective encounter occurred during my Master of Arts research in creative writing, and while confronting for me, recognising ‘affective ambush’ (Maguire & Deller 2024) meant that I could finally name the feelings I was experiencing while researching and writing about the long-held trauma of my father’s substance addiction. Affective ambush contributed embodied knowledge to my intellectual research. In this article, I demonstrate how the phenomenon can be a constructive tool for trauma life writing scholars engaging in practice-led research (PLR) and research-led practice, especially when combined with ‘the poetics of trauma’ (Atkinson 2017) within an autotheoretical form. 

Keywords practice-led research; creative practice research; trauma testimony; affective ambush; trauma life writing

DOI 10.65289/creativematters.2025.10.10

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Ana Louisa Davis recently submitted her Master of Arts in creative writing at Griffith University. Next stop: PhD. Her work has been published in anthologies and literary journals including The Grieve 2021 Anthology, Openbook, SWAMP and The Saltbush Review. She has also been shortlisted and highly commended in a number of literary prizes, including the 2025 Whitlam Essay Fellowship. Ana lives on unceded Bundjalung country. 

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METHODOLOGIES IN FLUX

NAVIGATING CULTURAL TRANSLATION IN PHOTOGRAPHIC PRACTICE RESEARCH — This paper examines the methodological tensions and transformations in my practice-led research

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PROLIFERATING VOIDS

GENDER’S PRESENCE IN GENDERLESS NARRATIVES — In an experimental attempt to avoid all gendered markers while writing my unpublished novel,

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WHEN AI MEETS CYBERPUNK

CREATIVE EMPOWERMENT OR CRITICAL DISSOLUTION? — This paper investigates the pronounced tension between ‘creative empowerment’ and ‘critical dissolution’ at the

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WALKING WOLLONGONG

As a creative researcher-in-the-making, I am exploring how to practice accountability in the unresolved cultural context of the environmental crisis

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IN THE PRACTICE OF MAKING CHANGE
  • CHLOE CANNELL, JULIETTE SAUVAGE, KENDREA RHODES, L. NICOL CABE
REVOLUTIONARY DYNAMICS IN CREATIVE PRACTICE RESEARCH AT THE CONVERGENCE OF CRITICAL, CREATIVE, THEORETICAL, AND ACADEMIC SPACES
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METHODOLOGIES IN FLUX
  • PATRICIA AMORIM
NAVIGATING CULTURAL TRANSLATION IN PHOTOGRAPHIC PRACTICE RESEARCH — This paper examines the methodological tensions and transformations in my practice-led research exploring photographic representation of gendered bodies across Brazilian and Australian cultural contexts. Through analysing my evolving methodology, I demonstrate how convergence of feminist epistemology, decolonial theory, and photographic practice generates new knowledge at the intersection of theory and creative production.
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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
  • OSCAR DAVIS
GENDER’S PRESENCE IN GENDERLESS NARRATIVES — In an experimental attempt to avoid all gendered markers while writing my unpublished novel, Static Sun, Phantom Breath, traces of gender seemed to still appear and, in turn, complicate the presence/absence binary. Inspired by Anne Garréta’s novel Sphinx and her exploration of how genderless characters expand understands of love and writing form, this paper reflects on the logocentric restrictions and aporetic opportunities that come from textually avoiding gender.
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REHEARSING THE INSTITUTION: ARTISTIC LABOUR AND PEDAGOGICAL TRACE
  • BENJAMIN WATERS
'The past inside the present' (2023) begins with surfaces: inscribed, weathered, and imbued with pedagogical significance. The research involves reconsidering reclaimed art school studio tabletops as artefacts of accumulated gestures. It focuses on investigating how artistic labour and the relational custodianship of educational practices become systematically blurred within contemporary institutional frameworks of higher education.
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WHEN AI MEETS CYBERPUNK
  • NEO XIA
CREATIVE EMPOWERMENT OR CRITICAL DISSOLUTION? — This paper investigates the pronounced tension between 'creative empowerment' and 'critical dissolution' at the intersection of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and cyberpunk, a genre defined by its critical engagement with technology. Grounded in my reflexive practice of generating cyberpunk transmedia (images) using AI, this study analyses how these tools – despite affording creative efficiencies and expanded visual capabilities – may undermine cyberpunk's intrinsic critical spirit, DIY ethos, and narrative depth.
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BODY OF RESEARCH, BODY OF WORK
  • SARAH GORY
GENERATIVE TENSION IN THE CREATIVE WRITING PHD — Scholars such as Professor Nigel Krauth (2011, 2018) argue that there is an inherent tension between the ‘radical experimentation’ required to innovate in the discipline of creative writing, and the standard exegetical models, orthodoxies and conventional positions of the PhD thesis. In response, this essay looks to the role of structure in the creative writing PhD thesis, asking how experimenting with standard exegetical models can be generative for practice and research.
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WALKING WOLLONGONG
  • JULIE SMYTHE
As a creative researcher-in-the-making, I am exploring how to practice accountability in the unresolved cultural context of the environmental crisis and ongoing intersectional colonising injustice. To address this, I have developed a sidewise ethics of practice that begins with my own unresolved settler cultural understanding of the foreshores of the city of Wollongong on the New South Wales South Coast.
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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.
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POPULAR GENRE FICTION IN THE CREATIVE WRITING DOCTORATE
  • SARAI MANNOLINI-WINWOOD
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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PRACTICE-BASED TOOLS FOR SELF-EXPRESSION
  • BREE GLASBERGEN
SUPPORTING WOMEN TO CLAIM THEIR VOICES POST-VIOLENCE — Can creative self-expression support women to gain or claim their voices? This research explores the dialogic nature of self-reflective questions in oracle cards as provocations for theatre and investigates if and how these provocations can assist women with self-expression. A sample deck of oracle cards – including self-reflective questions – were crafted and then tested as provocations for playwriting.
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IS THERE ENOUGH SCIENCE IN THIS FICTION?
  • SARAH MOULD
REFLECTIONS ON GENRE WRITING AND CREATIVE PRACTICE RESEARCH — Nearly three years into my creative practice PhD in which I wrote multiple fat and queer science fiction short stories, my supervisor asked: Is there enough science in them? This question has since underpinned my understanding of the ‘perennially revised’ (Latham 2017, p.8) genre borders of literary science fiction, and the ‘validity and rigour of practice-led research’ (Gandolfo 2012, p. 64) in academic institutions.
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WRITING THE ANTHROPOCENE
  • SIMON-PETER TELFORD
STRANGE LOOP METHODOLOGY AND THE WRITER AS RESEARCHER — This article presents Smelting, a lyrical-poetic-prose hybrid that performs creative writing as recursive inquiry through Boyd’s Strange Loop methodology. The work loops through narrative, reflection, and fragmentation to explore writing in the Anthropocene where meaning, identity, and climate collapse entangle. The writer is positioned not as commentator but as participant and epistemic agent, embodying the writer-as-researcher ethos within a practice-based research PhD.
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