Working with Higher Degree Research and Early Career Research creative practitioners at the converging sites of critical, creative, theoretical, and academic spaces expanded our own horizons as editors and creatives. Each submission in this issue exhibits a unique perspective on knowledge production, experimentation and research – often speaking directly to the academic space that both encourages and constrains creative practice research.
Peer review is the academic world’s attempt at objective appraisal of new, unique, and advantageous knowledge. The convention evolved alongside scientific exploration and has since become the de facto protocol of scholarly journals, including those centring the arts and humanities. Given this convention of peer-review was developed as ‘quality’ assurance for disciplines that are based on expectations and conventions not necessarily shared with creative practices, is peer-review an appropriate way to appraise creative practice research, and, if so, what are the appropriate criteria? Or, is peer review more relevant and necessary for creative work, requiring more specialised and nuanced reviewers due to the diversity within creative practice? Can creative practice still push boundaries while remaining within an institution, evaluated alongside institutional values?
As guest editors and emerging academic creative practitioners, we believe the answer is a complex ‘yes’. The process of peer review, for us, involved learning new methodologies and exploring new imaginaries through a constructive revision process. We collaborated with fellow creative practitioners, supporting the reflexive articulation of their knowledge production and experimentation at the converging sites of theory and practice. While we integrate the pillars of the academy into our framework as editors and peer reviewers, our approach centers collaboration between the editorial group and a collaborative mode with the authors. This orientation prioritises community-building toward new artistic and scholarly understandings. The responses to our call out show how academic work evolves within creative practice, and it is our hope that this issue supports peer review’s relevance in creative practice as research within the institution.
Many submissions considered how new modes of inquiry might challenge the status quo (of their own creative practice disciplines; of the subject matter and themes they were exploring; of the theoretical landscapes they were working within) and how creative practice research could be leveraged in change-making. New ways of seeing creative practice as research in the world, including the institution, developed as discoveries, tensions, and challenges. We asked of the authors: what new theoretical and/or creative directions have you discovered? Has working within an institution changed your practice or your view of your practice or research? What are the tensions experienced during the creative process in these settings? What conditions have given rise to change through the processes of experimentation and knowledge production? The contributors of this edition rose to the challenge of answering these questions through their own research and creative practices, sharing the ways they have experimented with new ways of ‘knowing’ and ‘doing’, challenged institutional frameworks, operated within and outside of these sites of tension, and advanced the field of creative practice research.
Patricia Amorim finds institutional constraints productive for new discoveries, such as participant collaboration and combining divergent techniques, and helped hone a reflexive, adaptive methodological framework in her feminist, cross-cultural research. Mesh Tennakoon experiments with modes of knowledge, mixing Derridian techniques with Buddhist samsarā teachings to push the bounds of cross-cultural teaching in creative writing methodologies. To avoid reinforcing dominant modes of thought and practice, Oscar Davis invites creative practice researchers to reflect on, and even resist, cultural and linguistic limitations, for example avoiding gendered language. Ben Waters turns transactional education tools into art, demonstrating the unnoticed labour that scaffolds creativity within institutions and repositioning ‘making’ as a mode of critical pedagogy. Neo Xia interrogates the affective benefits of using generative artificial intelligence as part of world-building, whilst at the same time the way these tools can undermine critical practices, specifically cyberpunk, in this example. Sarah Gory challenges the traditional format of research outputs to discover new techniques in creative-critical scholarly writing.
Through sketching and prose poetry, Julie Smythe shares a sidewise ethics of practice that explores accountability in the storied layers of the environmental crisis and ongoing intersectional colonising injustices. Alongside layers of story, Paulina Larocca’s development of the Transdisciplinary Inquiry Model (TIM) required event participants to layer sensory experiences as they formed their own story. For Sarai Mannolini-Winwood popular genre fiction highlights another institutional tension, this time between the expectations of the publishing industry and academia via a case study of urban fantasy.
Many submissions used the creative practitioner’s self as model, instrument, or artefact. Ana Louisa Davis demonstrates how affect, resulting from research, can be a constructive tool for trauma life writing scholars engaging in practice-led research and research-led practice. Bree Glasbergen uses Oracle Cards to plumb her subconscious from which she develops an unexpected theatrical monologue, combining artistic impulse with academic self-reflection. Sarah Mould explores the ‘inherent tension of scope’ between writing a science fiction creative work and speaking to scholarly frameworks. Simon-Peter Telford’s lyrical-poetic-prose hybrid creative writing is both method and artefact, extending Strange Loop methodology into the Anthropocene context, demonstrating how the recursive form itself generates knowledge about ecological entanglement and researcher identity.
These creative practice researchers-in-the-making compel us to take a lateral look at what we expect knowledge to be – in our environment, setting, the tools and methods, institutional constraints, writing, creative practice, and what we expect knowledge to look like vs how it emerges. We editors are the ‘first’ readers of these works and thus become the first students, exposed to new ways of knowing and challenging the status quo that have the potential to affect our own practices, critically and creatively. We hope this issue has a similar effect upon you, too, in this act of community-building.
L. Nicol Cabe is a digital dramaturg, award-winning sci-fi solo performer, writer, dramaturg, and director, focusing on speculative fiction and new plays. Her doctoral research centred on the incorporation of digital tools into live performance, conducted through practice-based inquiry.
Chloe Cannell teaches creative arts at Flinders University. She is a writer and early career researcher interested in diversity in young adult literature, queer writing, and collaborative creative practice research. Her short stories can be found in the Green: A Blue Feet Anthology (Buon-Cattivi Press, 2022). She completed her Doctor of Philosophy in 2024 at the University of South Australia.
Kendrea Rhodes is currently undertaking doctoral research at Flinders University into the history and narratives of the former Ballarat Asylum. Kendrea uses Mad studies as a theoretical framework with an interdisciplinary approach that includes creative practice as research through creative writing, poetry, history, life writing and visual art. With sights set on social impact regarding perceptions of Madness, Kendrea’s research aims to focus on Mad voices, disrupt sanism, engage beyond the academy into the community, and to share Mad histories, knowledge and stories.
Juliette Sauvage is currently undertaking her PhD at the University of the Sunshine Coast, specialising in fiction’s representation of mythological women, and revising patriarchal narratives. Her creative writing research is practice-led, with a focus on women’s writing, to develop her debut novel, titled Sigrún. She teaches English Literature, Creative Writing, and Academic Writing as a sessional academic.
Main image: Kendrea Rhodes, Asemic Writing, mixed media, 2022.