Magical Research Creation: Exploring the Felt-verse

• In Event: Feminist Technoscience by Other Means: Reconfiguring Research Practices for World-Making Beyond the Academy - III

Abstract

Riding the conceptual currents of the anarchive (Manning, 2018) and non-representational methodologies (MacLure, 2013; Vannini, 2015), I seek lively text in writing about nature, sustainability and the environment, and novel, playful ways of writing “research” of the same. I start with an expedition into text of The Lost Words, by Robert Macfarlane.Macfarlane’s work has awakened the public with its beauty and magic (MacLellan, 2018).  This movement seems to resonate with Manning’s call for work/art that moves the occasion toward the more-than, the felt, the shimmering of experience that exceeds and defies the conscious and the stability/structuration of the concrete event (Manning, 2016).  How might our academic work reach these levels of activation and potentiation?

Driven by a search for potentiated experiences for readers and writers in academic work, I extend my trek through Macfarlane’s book; I reach towards the magical realism of Gabriel Garcia Márquez to experiment with infusing research writing practices with radioactive elements that exceed static, informational text.  I propose to play with writing of research through infusion of magical realism, engaging myself and readers in a tapestry of text that hopes to create “the real—the limit events that resist representation—as an immediate, felt reality” (Arva, 2008, p. 60).

This project aims to experiment with writing as inquiry, particularly writing that moves past the epistemological and towards the axiological. I hope to contribute by developing research-creation methodologies that push at the barrier separating the academy from the lived-in world around us.

Author

• Nicole Bowers, Arizona State University