We are currently accepting submissions for our inaugural issue (deadline 6th March). We invite academics and creative practitioners to respond to the call below.

For information about how to submit, please click here.

Call for contributions

In his lecture series Theory and Practice Jacques Derrida asserts the call “(It) must be done” (2019, 1) to emphasise the importance of pursuing thinking into action and deconstructing our tendency to conceive practical and theoretical activities as opposed. Debates, practices and pedagogies within the developing field of creative practice research address this call by asserting practices as ways of producing types of knowledge. For example, Rebecca Fortnum claims art practice is investigative because it engages the unknown (2013), Estelle Barrett and Barbara Bolt emphasise art’s unique capacity to unfold the psycho-social within the material (2014), and Carolina Rito and Bill Balaskas see potential for new modes of knowledge to develop within research-driven curatorial projects (2020). Further, practiceled/practice-based PhDs and practice portfolio REF submissions have provided contexts for practitioners to recalibrate the dynamics of thinking and doing within research projects, producing methodological innovations within areas such as auto-theory (Fournier 2022) auto-ethnography (Adams, Holman Jones, and Ellis 2013) and action research (Mcniff 2017). Yet theory and practice have long been instituted in opposition, so that creative practice still tends to have a precarious academic status. The Journal of Creative Practice Research seeks to challenge this history and advocate for new apparatuses of doing/knowing within this field.

In this first issue we take Derrida’s call into action and invite contributors to use forms of practice and/or critical writing to explore the kinds of thinking specific to creative practice. We also want this issue to develop out of discussion and collaboration, and so we will invite contributors to share and discuss their work through a series of online workshops prior to double-blind peer review.

Possible areas of inquiry

• To what extent are there kinds of thinking specific to the differing technical structures of creative practices?

• How have practice and theory been historically conceived and what impact can their deconstruction have upon our understanding of creative practice research?

• In what ways can trans-disciplinary/cross-institutional practices generate new ways of knowing?

• What knowledges of embodiments/subjectivities are specific to creative practice?

• How do practices relate to or articulate the concealed and unknown?

• What knowledges are generated through the intra-action of human/nonhuman/more-than-human actors in creative practice research?

• How can creative practices work as forms of speculative enquiry?

References

Adams, Tony E., Holman Jones, Stacy, and Ellis, Carolyn. 2013. Handbook of Autoethnography. New York: Routledge.

Barrett, Estelle, and Bolt, Barbara. 2013. Carnal Knowledge Towards and ‘New Materialism’ through the Arts. London: I.B. Tauris & Co.

Derrida, Jacques. 2019. Theory and Practice. Edited by Geoffrey Bennington and Peggy Kamuf. Translated by David Wills. Chicago and London: Chicago University Press.

Fortnum, Rebecca. 2013. Creative Accounting: Not Knowing in Talking and Making. In On Not Knowing: How artists think. Edited by Elizabeth Fisher, and Rebecca Fortnum. London: Black Dog Publishing, pp. 70-86.

Fournier, Lauren. 2022. Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing, and Criticism. Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press.

Mcniff, Jean. 2017. Action Research: All You Need to Know. London: Sage Publications.

Rito, Carolina, and Balaskas, Bill (eds.). 2020. Institution as Praxis: New Curatorial Directions for Collaborative Research. Edited by Carolina Rito, and Bill Balaskas. London: Sternberg Press.