New Materialist Affirmations: Creative Research Interventions in Methods and Practice

Positions processes of making and doing, in creative and critical practice, within a feminist new materialist framework

This international collection brings together arts-based researchers to explore how new materialisms have changed creative research practice. Grounded in a framework of affective and conceptual creativity, it makes existing and emerging pathways in research visible to challenge dualistic modes of thought-in-practice.

With a focus on the methods employed by individual researchers, the coverage is interdisciplinary, including screen and sound production, dance, literary theory, social media, creative writing and community arts. The collection explores transformations in scholarly practice through methods of ‘crimping’ which reflect the 4 thematic sections: bending, joining, making waves and holding.

• Bending – ways of creating new deformities in thought or fields of practice;
• Joining – methods for bringing diverse areas of scholarship together in new ways and the labour of holding such spaces together;
• Making waves – methodological and theoretical strategies for making waves and enabling change;
• Holding – practices of restricting access to knowledge as ways of retaining power, and challenges to these practices.

Key features:

• Brings together established and emerging scholars from a range of disciplinary areas including creative writing, screen production, gender studies, radio production and cultural studies
• Reflects the important role of RMIT University, internationally recognized center of excellence, in this debate
• Brings together key thinkers in new materialism and creative practice research, including Iris van der Tuin and Nanna Verhoeff. Draws from specific practitioner knowledge gained through the materiality of research
• Discusses examples and case studies from Australia, China, Spain and the United Kingdom

Anna Hickey-Moody is the inaugural Professor of Intersectional Humanities in the Arts and Humanities Research Institute at Maynooth University. Her work explores intersecting angles of disadvantage through philosophical and creative approaches. She came to Maynooth to develop interdisciplinary research culture exploring intersectionality across the humanities. Prior to joining Maynooth, Anna was Professor of Media and Communication at RMIT University, Melbourne where she held an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship called Interfaith Childhoods. For this large research project, Anna created a unique, responsive research design that allowed her to collaborate with hard-to-reach communities through building strong relationships with children through artmaking. She worked with schools, communities and religious organisations across Australia and the UK to collect and share stories of faith told by diverse religious and secular people. This method offered a way of developing public understandings of what belonging feels like in superdiverse, multicultural cities. You can read what the research participants had to say in the book Faith stories: sustaining meaning and community in troubling times (MUP, 2023). Anna also led the Creative Research in Methods and Practice (CRiMP) Lab and you can read the lab’s work in a collection coming out with Edinburgh University Press in 2024. This feminist research laboratory supported a community of queer and gender-diverse researchers working at the intersection of creative practice as a research method, visual sociology and creative anthropology at RMIT. Before joining RMIT University, Anna was Associate Professor of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney. She has also held positions at Goldsmiths, London and Monash University, Melbourne. Anna is a very experienced PhD supervisor and is available to supervise projects exploring religion, disability, sexuality, gender, race, youth. She has published widely on gender, sexuality, disability, religion and race and racism as they shape young lives.

Suvi Pihkala is a postdoctoral researcher in Gender Studies in the University of Oulu, Finland and a member of the creative and activist FIRE research collective. Her research is inspired by feminist posthuman, new materialist and post-qualitative approaches and the re-thinking of ethics and responsibility they have prompted in and for social research theory and praxis. She has worked as Co-Editor-in-Chief for Sukupuolentutkimus-Genusforskning [Finnish Journal of Gender Studies] and has published actively in key journals of her field of expertise, including International Journal of Social Research Methodology, Reconceptualizing Educational Research Methodologies and Journal of Gender Studies.

Gretchen Coombs is a lecturer in the School of Design, Master of Design Futures at RMIT University in Naarm (Melbourne). She has a PhD in anthropology and a MA in visual criticism. She is the author of The Lure of the Social: Encounters with Contemporary Artists (2021), co author of Creative Practice Ethnographies (2019), and most recently, co-edited Care Ethics and Art (2022). In addition to academic journals, her art writing has appeared in Hyperallergic, The Brooklyn Rail, and Eyeline. Gretchen runs writing workshops for artists and designers who want to learn more about ethnographic and creative methods for their social practice.

Marissa Willcox is a digital ethnographer and feminist theorist. She is a Lecturer in New Media and Digital Culture at the University of Amsterdam, and is a Researcher on the EU HORIZON funded vera.ai project. She has co-authored a book on arts-based research methods (2021) and has co-authored 6 peer-reviewed scholarly publications based on ethnographic research from the Interfaith Childhoods project lead by Prof Anna Hickey-Moody.