Doing Creative Work from Your Political Body

Bridging the dichotomy of inner and outer, the approach laid out in this book is for your living practice.

In the context of our socio-political realities, the approach in this book fosters what is interior—what is private, inward, fragmented, and illegible. How do we check ourselves, make tangible what we value in theory, and become sharper as socio-political agents?

The book functions in three interlocking ways: The framework equips you with language to talk about and assert your footing with practice and theory. The demonstration reveals a repeatable four-step process and models ways of working with theory. The guide provides a sequence of hands-on prompts to attend to the inner workings of your own practice.

In practice, the book is subversive to conventional disciplinary research and institutional pedagogy while simultaneously modeling and contributing to practice-led research. Building on design​ research, Black critical thought, and autoethnography, the approach in this book was developed over a decade in design studios, classrooms, and a research lab.

This book is a grounded, generous, and clear-eyed companion built for the studio, the classroom, and the long work of becoming. It is for artists, designers, writers, performers, educators, and cultural workers who’ve been asked (too often) to leave their politics outside the studio. To “be neutral.” To tidy their truths into something more digestible. This book says: no. Bring your body. Bring your entire history. Bring the future you desire.
—Stephanie Dinkins
Artist; Kusama Chair in Art, Stony Brook University; Founder, Future Histories Studio

Creative practice researchers have been taught that theory is forever separate from practice. This false binary makes practice-led research writing a struggle: we lose ourselves in theory's abstractions and silence what we know through making. This book gives us a guide for learning to love writing as an embodied, politicised practice.
—Stacy Holman Jones
Co-Editor of the Handbook of Autoethnography, Professor of Theatre and Performance at Monash University

Experimental, poetic, and autoethnographic, this deeply felt and dazzling work plumbs the means by which systemic trauma lives in the body, takes shape in creative practices, and yet can be channeled to reimagine a material politics of the everyday.
—Jamer Hunt
Professor of Transdisciplinary Design, Parsons School of Design | The New School, Co-Curator of Design and Violence, Museum of Modern Art