NiTRO + Creative Matters

Perspectives on creative arts in higher education

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.

Writing is both method and artefact, a movement through iterative spirals of reading, writing, thinking, breaking. Boyd’s methodology, rooted in Hofstadter’s self-reflexive loops, offers a structure for writing that resists linearity and embraces recursive motion and conceptual reintegration. The Anthropocene, as both geological reality and philosophical provocation, demands forms that are unstable, situated, and reflexive. Smelting responds to this demand through form and voice, rendering the paradoxes of human/nature binaries, and the institutional/self-boundaries porous. This article contributes to creative writing research by extending Boyd’s methodology into an Anthropocene context, demonstrating how recursive form itself generates knowledge about ecological entanglement and researcher identity. In doing so, it situates the writer as a researcher-in-the-making, whose methodological loops resist institutional linearity while opening new pathways for creative research.

Keywords Strange loops, anthropocene, creative writing, methodology, artefact and exegesis, creative practice research

DOI 10.65289/creativematters.2025.10.13

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Simon-Peter Telford is a writer and researcher exploring creative writing’s role in health, existentialist fiction, and Anthropocene literature. Based at Flinders Medical Centre and Flinders University, his work examines narrative as healing, meaning-making, and ecological engagement. He is a published author and received his PhD from University of South Australia.

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IN THE PRACTICE OF MAKING CHANGE
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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
  • 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
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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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BECOMING THROUGH COMPLEXITY 
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POPULAR GENRE FICTION IN THE CREATIVE WRITING DOCTORATE
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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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GIVING IT A NAME
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IS THERE ENOUGH SCIENCE IN THIS FICTION?
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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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