Undisciplining Who We Bring to the Academic Table

Introduction

Between 2020 and 2021, while writing my doctoral thesis, I worked to become more and more undisciplined. I did not pursue academic research to advance the respective field in which my esteemed research lab was situated: design. I was not bought in.^[1] Instead, I saw the position of being a full-time PhD student as a tactic to afford time and space to collaborate with my peers and mentors and ask some burning personal questions I had about material things and everyday sociopolitical life that would otherwise be relegated to a weekend here and there, late nights, and limited by other personal obligations. Academic research is a way to bolster my political and creative direction—not to be mistaken with becoming accepted and promoted by an established academic discipline. As I moved forwards with this attitude, I reached the point in my doctoral candidature that I needed to articulate my research in writing. I developed approaches that felt aligned with why and how I was doing academic research in the first place. In this paper, I revisit three of those approaches: what would traditionally be (a) a literature review, (b) a methodology and (c) contributions to knowledge. As I write what you are reading now and imagine what this article could be, I hope I can understand these three approaches in different ways almost two years later. At the time, I used textual academic writing (a doctoral thesis) as a means of undisciplined intervention. Here, however, I use creative practice as a means of revisiting those approaches to academic writing to make visible how the undisciplining happened.

I close this paper with an offering of practical interventions and open questions for the intersection of the politics of citation and critical creative research. I offer traditional researchers some tactics towards undisciplining their own, their peers’ and their students’ citation practices. To creative practitioners-researchers I put forth supportive propositions that assume the epistemic depths of creative practice itself—that creative practice is a way of knowing and thinking that does not need to be legitimised or disciplined by the “rigour” of traditional textual theory. This paper serves as retroactive documentation and sharing of the thinking, making and undisciplining done in practice.

On Creative Practice

I approach undisciplining citation practice by way of creative practice-led research. I use the term “creative practice” broadly to describe a deliberate, iterative and ongoing endeavour of making a thing—be it a performance, a string of code, a three-dimensional object, a personal relationship or urban infrastructure. An alternative term may be “artistic practice”, which can connote disciplinary value judgements between art, craft and design.^[2] My creative practice is informed by a specific exercise traditional to and preliminary in industrial, architecture and other spatial design education—paper model-making (Fig. 1). However, rather than using model-making with the aims of scaling, functionalism or innovation, I repurpose it towards critical reflexivity.^[3] Drawing on my past research, I use Reflexive Model-Making, a method based on my background as a student of interior design, industrial design and Transdisciplinary Design degree programmes—as a facilitator and consultant, and more recently as an independent scholar. I repurpose the traditional model-making process to negotiate and make visible the splits, masses, gaps, etc. present in any given experience.

When artistic or creative practice is combined with the concept of “academic research”, it can be characterised by an artistic practitioner who reflects on and documents their practice through academic means of production.^[4] In the region in which I write this paper, Scandinavia, “artistic research” is commonly defined as a type of academic research that leads to and implies a degree of Doctor of Arts and is not defined by whether the researcher is an “artist.” Here, however, I do not take interest in making delineations in or out of the academic institution or between theory and practice. This research builds on “creative practice-led research”, dependent on the notion of “thinking through making”^[5] and to the researcher who “iteratively negotiates the understandings that emerge from the practice”.^[6] We are “not just reflecting upon material, technical and physical decisions but also a broad range of social, environmental, cultural and conceptual concerns”^[7]—which is distinct from the notion that creative practice happens some place and is documented and theorised about elsewhere. I do not aim to take two separate things—theoretical disciplines and practical disciplines—and bridge them. I argue that thinking is already involved in making and I take an interest in the “ineffable goings on when visual, material things are made”.^[8]

Reflexive Model-Making is a method that uses creative practice in order to be self-reflexive about what we know and what we make. By revisiting my approaches to academic writing in the past, I make visible my reflections and the potential to make otherwise. Cultural theorist Stuart Hall makes the case that the moment past events or projects are intentionally brought together and considered is “the beginning of a new stage of self-consciousness, of self-reflexivity”.^[9] This revisiting can be taken as a “detour through theory”, where the detour is a remembering, a temporalisation—before, after, first, second, never—and a repeating (again) in relation to an event.^[10] Working with critical, temporal and constantly moving parts all at once is confrontational. Grappling with them offers a new and different reading on the present. Revisiting a past event while sitting with the moving parts works to embody and materialise what we seek.^[11]

As I work with glue, my knife, pieces of paper and my body, I tuck, fold, score, double, mend, make dense, weigh and make space. Both my past experiences and the ethos of theories are remembered in my mind’s eye or in my body and expressed at once in three-dimensional form. I choose paper as my medium as I already have a practice of using it for model-making and for facilitating reflexive experiences for others. I am fluent in thinking through model-making and this fluency enables my criticality and reflexivity. I have experience in navigating the limitations and affordances of the physical material itself. The material another practitioner may be fluent with can be their body or sound, for instance. What a material like paper allows is a fast, flexible and low-stakes process that is important for this kind of temporal, self-reflexive and embodied practice. Using expensive rare materials that need to be processed in a lab is not ideal, while making gestures with one’s own body or recording or performing acoustic sound may allow for an appropriately low-stakes exploration. I also work with conceptual thinking and material enquiry, making it possible for me to forego written and spoken language. As the final artefact is not legible to others, the process and its output feel quiet and private, offering opportunities to attend to delicate issues, with less at stake in “going there”. Quiet can be synonymous with passivity or complicity, however, illegibility and quiet here are “a stay against the dominance of the social world [that] can shift attention to what is interior It has its own sovereignty”.^[12] I repurpose the material and process with which I am deeply familiar towards an inwards, unauthorised enquiry—turning away from the public gaze and domain. The thinking we do and the critical revisiting through the reflexive process of making a thing afford the possibility of undisciplining. In this paper I ask: How can we repurpose creative practice towards the specific aim of undisciplining? I use creative practice to make visible my relationships with the approaches I developed and consider how these updated understandings might shape the way I move into forthcoming research endeavours.

On Disciplinarity

What I do and the questions that arise from my broader creative practice lead my research.^[13] As a result, what I care about and the framing questions that emerge from making things—regarding social, cultural and political concerns—become more and more untethered from established academic disciplines. One reaction to this might be to attempt to fit the research back into the “orders and borders” of a research domain.^[14] This would make the research possible and intelligible to disciplinary ways of knowing.^[15] However, I take a problem-oriented approach to research in academic institutions, understanding it as disciplinary imperialism and cognitive capitalism.^[16] It brings attention to “the multiplicity of authorized (traditional, scholarly, institutional) and unauthorized (cultural, experiential, precarious) knowledges deployed in the production of social life.”^[17]

I use the term undisciplining to mean “a liberating act of temporarily suspending disciplinary regimes and practices in order to develop creative research (questions, ideas, and approaches)”.^[18] I amend Wendelin Küpers’s framing of un- or non-disciplinarity as “temporary” by replacing the descriptor with the already constant quality of Black fugitivity—“always at war, always in hiding”.^[19] Which is particularly the case as I speak as a researcher moving in the world in a Black, femme body. Disciplinarity does not visit institutionalised creative research every once in a while or in passing; the disciplining is always present. In undisciplined work, research does not serve as institutional bridges, “using all ‘faculties’ creatively”.^[20] Instead, I centre the unauthorised and experiential knowing of creative practitioners.^[21] For practitioners who not only engage critically with contemporary sociopolitical conditions topically, but attend to the conditions through their own bodies, their practices may scrape up against disciplined and authorised structures, policies, conversations, insinuations. While creative practice is not fundamentally undisciplined, when it does lean into this scraping, scrapes back, or refuses to be scraped, we can begin to investigate its undisciplinarity. The undisciplined creative practice I will feature in this article and its overall approach to research itself are ruptures in the institutional borders that are maintained through knowledge-production.^[22]

Where might this unauthorised work be done? And what kind of place might it be? To speak to these questions, I bring forward a call to action from Fred Moten and Stefano Harney in The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (2013). They posit that:

After all, the subversive intellectual came under false pretenses, with bad documents, out of love. Her labor is as necessary as it is unwelcome. The university needs what she bears but cannot bear what she brings. And on top of all that, she disappears. She disappears… into the undercommons of enlightenment, where the work gets done, where the work gets subverted, where the revolution is still black, still strong.^[23]

In the excerpt above, Moten and Harney write about a place to disappear to, “paved with refusal”, invested in the project of world-ending.^[24] The place Moten and Harney point to clarifies the distinctions between multidisciplinarity (one or multiple individuals from various fields working together), cross-disciplinarity (an individual or group from one domain venturing into another distinct one), transdisciplinarity (an individual or group with mixed professional backgrounds using methods and approaches to traverse in and through multiple disciplines) and a refusal of disciplinarity. Ten years ago, I began my explorations in transdisciplinarity through a Master’s degree and by co-founding and running a creative consultancy. In the past two years I have arrived at undisciplinarity. Transdisciplinarity tends to point towards an optimistic, holistic vision. It overflows from disciplines, blends and blurs them, is historically rooted in the sciences and in effect requires disciplinarity as a point of departure. The point of departure for becoming undisciplined is a fundamentally interior, critical, dark, disorderly place that makes it possible to imagine movements otherwise. In Blackness and the Pitfalls of Anthropocene Ethics (2019), philosopher of Black critical theory Axelle Karera puts forth the point of departure of being undisciplined is immateriality, death, and Blackness—distinct from blending or traversing disciplines:

Despite knowing otherwise, we are often disciplined into thinking through and along the lines that reinscribe our own annihilation”.^[25] This is why, as it is for black philosophers like Moten, Hartman, Jackson, Sexton, Warren, and many others, to be black and critical is necessarily to engage in disorderly conduct, to become “undisciplined”.^[26]

If we don’t rely on academic, institutionalised ways of knowing, we can rely on unauthorised, experiential knowing. The generous advisors in my research community—including Lisa Grocott, Gene Bawden, Stacy Holman-Jones, Yoko Akama, and Shana Agid—once offered me a frame of thinking that continues to influence how I approach citation practices: Theory is something to think with. The lineage of authors of the literature we spend time reading and the friends, family, and greater communities that form our worldviews should keep us company as we do research. We can imagine sitting down with them over a meal. Who would you invite to sit next to whom? What role do they play over the evening? What dissonant and complementary conversations might come about? How might this shape other gatherings? What might future gatherings look like? Now, rather than approach citations and references as things that belong within disciplinary borders, with these questions and analogy in mind, I take on the project of undisciplining citation practice in the company of scholars like Karera and Moten. I keep present the ethos of their theories as I make and think in my creative practice. However, resisting conventional rules and policing of how researchers cite and reference is a risky task, potentially putting (perceived) job security and reputation on the line. I choose to do research as an independent scholar, which gives me access to the institution, to university libraries, proximity to relevant research centres and people, an ability to read and navigate the academic institution. At the time, I am able to remain peripheral to institutionalised academic research and in some ways able to maintain ample space to be undisciplined. I see it as meaningful to note here that it is because of this precarious yet relatively autonomous status that I can develop—and personally establish—a practice dedicated to citation in parallel to and intra-active with my critical creative practice. As researchers seeking to undiscipline ourselves, we may take on different tactics to varying degrees: for instance, we may blanket disciplinarity with unauthorised ways of being, seeping in from beneath, or nurture it elsewhere, protecting it from being disciplined.

Undisciplining by Critical Creative Enquiry

We arrive at this section of this essay with two notions; that undisciplining can be practised in a space that is subversive and Black, and that critical creative practice has the potential to facilitate our way into that place. In this section, I investigate fundamental aspects of academic research to make visible my relationships with textual theory, the ethos of theory I use to keep me company, and the disciplinary institutional context in which academic research is done. I do so to get closer to what it is, precisely, that is happening in (my) critical creative practice, distinct from the chronological process of what I do or its output.

Below, I revisit three approaches I took in my doctoral research and consequent thesis: what would traditionally be (a) a literature review, (b) a methodology, and (c) contributions to knowledge. You will find three sections, each dedicated to one of the traditional approaches. Each section includes a photograph of a paper model produced using the Reflexive Model-Making method, a marker of time (month and year), and a written vignette describing how I undisciplined the respective traditional approach to academic writing. The marker of time is a note of the approximate month and year I wrote my undisciplined literature review, for instance. I include the month and year to encourage you as reader to consider the reflexive remembering I have done, and that I hope you are encouraged to do—again, before, after, first, second, never. As intended, the paper model is illegible, refusing to offer you the intimate, dark, unauthorised details of the past experience and what I understood about how the undisciplining happened. The form does not attempt to be visual “interpretations” of or “represent” a concept from a piece of scholarly literature I read. The forms cannot be read; care did not go into whether or not the bends or corners would “suggest” something or “remind” the viewer of something. The photographs of the paper models are documentation of the final products resulting from an embodied process of critical reflexivity. I materialised the aches in my body or the heat felt from, for instance, undisciplining contributions to academia so that I could feel it, see it and write with it. As a viewer, I invite you to ingest the images of the paper models, the markers of time, and the written vignettes in lateral fashion, allowing yourself to imagine their possible interrelations and allow yourself to move through the illegible messy dark place required to imagine otherwise.

Approach 1
Undisciplining the literature review: “Extended Acknowledgements”

July 2021

In the long-term process of coming to understand my own research and what it offers I came across adjacent creative practices, described below, that challenged the concentrations of my doctoral research and encouraged me to distinguish what my work brings to the table. These other artists’ practices reminded me of who and what knowledge my research centres. The works I studied affirmed the transformative and poetic potential of making the visual, material things I had been investing in in practice.

Traditionally, the effort to establish familiarity with existing work is approached through a systematic review of ideas published in academic papers, theses and books. A gap and a respective contribution are identified. In my research, I do not attempt to demonstrate my expertise, identify problematised gaps in knowledge, exercise rigour by asserting my mastery over others’ work, enhance the replicability of the outcomes, or imagine carrying out an objective, unbiased review of an established research field. In refusal of a literature review, I aim to be unsystematic and approach others’ work by way of acknowledgement. On paper, I titled the section of my thesis that introduces the ideas and practices in which my work is in conversation, “Extended Acknowledgements”.^[27] It is an extension of the acknowledgements, typically noting collaborators, partners and other supporters of a project.

While I was still trying to figure out my position on literature reviews and how I could manage to not do one, it was difficult to imagine what shape and feeling it could take. What am I doing? What might this be called? As soon as I was able to give Extended Acknowledgements its name, I was able to own that I was refusing to be disciplined by a systematic review of literature. I gave myself permission to instead write and demonstrate something closer to my actual relationship with the scholarly texts that affirmed my ways of knowing. In the Extended Acknowledgements, I summarised the personally heavy-hitting, influential practices of three individuals: Daria Garina’s abolitionist Qi Gong and embodied self-accountability practice; Robin Boylorn’s Blackgirl autoethnography; and Torkwase Dyson’s interdisciplinary explorations of environmental liberation. I saw these practices as the ones most clearly adjacent to my practice and research. I explained how I understand each practitioner’s work and the aspects to which I connect. The Extended Acknowledgements conclude with a simple diagram highlighting the threads that connect the three practices, including the methods they use, their approach, the politicised direction of their creative practices and an illustration of where I situate my research and the respective practitioners’ works in the larger landscape. I argued that there are characteristics of Garina, Boylorn and Dyson’s approaches that, together, worked to situate my research and offer it a relevant home and critical conversation to join.

Approach 2
Undisciplining methodology: “Tracing a Lineage”

May 2021

The methodology I developed for my doctoral research works to support what was done in practice. As a practice-led research endeavour, the practice shapes the relevant frame of theory. It may have been more straightforward to pick an existing theoretical framework that fitted neatly into a creative discipline or social science model, but the methodology I drew together offers theoretical grounds tailored and specific to my research. The contents of my theoretical framework spanned across archiving, cultural studies, ethnography and performance. However, I did not look to bridge and advance these disciplines. It began with identifying for myself where what I know and do are being disciplined. What was at stake was epistemological and methodological. To echo Karera’s phrasing, to do the work I came to do is necessarily engaging in disorderly and undisciplined conduct. To do so, I sought out (theoretical) company to fortify my ways of knowing and doing. I pulled a thread across them, defined overlapping attributes and reframed them to support what I observed in practice, i.e. what was happening in-context and while making the models and pieces of writing.

To build an undisciplined theoretical framework, I first visited what I know (theory) and what I do (practice). I articulated whether or not creative practice and scholarly theory needed each other in my work. In the case of my doctoral research, an appropriate methodological frame was one principally concerned with “messing with” the false binary separation of theory and social life. It should fundamentally encourage the bringing together of theory—traditionally thought about—and practice —traditionally done. Conceptually, it should bring them closer and closer together, allowing them to overlap and align. And practically, a fitting methodology for my research needed to enable investigations into past moments in practice and suggest ways in which theoretical texts and practice can be engaged with/in at once.

As I sifted through text after text that spoke to the relationships of theory and practice, I was drawn to ideas rooted in various fields. Cultural theory,^[28] performance studies,^[29] and autoethnography^[30] provide examples in theory and practice with understandings about what can happen in the space between a past moment and the present. While I was reading one text, I found the author was heavily influenced by a concept another put forth. And in digging up this other author’s concept, I landed on the ideas of a third author. By taking three essays, I traced a lineage from 2003 to 2016 centred around the notion of not thinking theory and doing practice as we normatively understand it, but that of “doing theory”. Below is an excerpt from my thesis that hints at the lineage I traced across years and multiple fields of research.

I extend Pollock’s phrasing, doing theory and thinking performance, which is in reference to Hall’s essay (2003), and I take Jones’ adaptation, doing theory, thinking story, in reference to Pollock, to loop back and name the kind of archival practice Hall calls for: doing theory, thinking archive. The purpose of discussing the scholars in this chapter is not to propose incorporating or combining their approaches; it is to illustrate how they propose analogous elements or variables in one methodological, theoretical frame.^[31]

Based on my reading across Hall, Pollock and Jones, I highlighted their respective emphases on the interanimated relationships of theory and practice—an appropriate theoretical framework for my research. I underlined the thread across what they put forth as “doing theory, thinking practice.” Practice, in the case of the three authors referenced, being archiving, performance and story. I called my methodology “doing theory, thinking form” as I investigated the relationships of theory and practice in my doctoral research using visual, material enquiry.

Approach 3
Undisciplining contributions to institutionalized knowledge production:
“Contributing to practice and practitioners”

September 2021

While my doctoral research was not a direct investigation of non-disciplinarity, the practice and the activities of my research itself were ruptures in the institutional borders that are maintained through knowledge-production. ^[32] Therefore, the contributions of the research are not to disciplines. Rather, the research contributes to practices like Torkwase Dyson’s Black Compositional Thought, Robin M. Boylorn’s blackgirl autoethnography, and Daria Garina’s Accountability Mapping—the practitioners I named in the Extended Acknowledgements. I appreciate how refusals of disciplinary borders allowed for their bodies of work to be in conversation with each other and work as the home base for the efforts and convictions of my doctoral research. A practice-led approach to research encourages the research to speak back to both practice and theory, consistent with these non-disciplinary understandings.

Below is an excerpt from the conclusion of my thesis, framing my contribution:

Throughout the hardest days and the most rewarding days during my PhD, when I thought about what I hope to bring to the table, I imagined the lectures, online courses, and practices of the artists and practitioner-researchers I invited to my metaphorical table. When I think about community members, artists, and scholars whose work and ways of showing up I look up to, I spend a lot of time thinking about how they got there. I wonder what kinds of things they pay attention to on an average day, how they spend their time, who is in their mind’s eye as they do their work, who they look up to and how that affects what they do. It is the work they do behind the thinking, methodology, projects, or words they outwardly present that I look for. I dig around the haze, looking for answers as I read their work or listen to talks, interviews, and conversations of which they are a part. There have been rare moments in which they have revealed a piece of it in their work or I have gotten a glimpse of it when I have had an opportunity to ask them in person. There are, also, the kinds of community members, artists, and scholars who are confident, open, and generous in the sense of explicitly sharing these things they do behind the work: they not only share how they do what they do, but also carefully craft the deeply inner, messy, vulnerable parts of their work. They expose much of what it takes for them to show up in the way they do. I see their offerings as invitations for more of us to interrogate how we do what we do—breaking down the separation put up between the expertise of one person and that of those of us working to make our own ways through the haze. The methods of the research, my explorations of what happened in each context, and the methodology of the research have all aimed to make things visible. It makes visible what I pay attention to, who is in my mind’s eye, who I look up to, and how that affects what I do. This PhD has been an attempt to carefully craft the deeply inner, messy parts of the much larger project of unmaking the worlds we live in. Through this research I hope to gain a seat at that confident, open, and generous table.^[33]

Tactics to Keep Us Company

I intend this paper to offer a demonstration of undisciplined approaches to traditional academic writing and a meta-approach for critical reflexivity and becoming undisciplined. Below, I situate a (slightly more) legible visual form to locate where the practical intervention proposed in this paper lies, and to propose considerations for you, as creative, as researcher.

If we imagine the black space or plane in Fig. 5 as undisciplining—the intimate, quiet, dark, unauthorised place discussed above—we can imagine the black space including the instances we’ve practised or observed critical and unauthorised acts. I drew the red dotted form to suggest a person’s creative practice. And I draw the grey dotted shape to suggest academia, including enquiries into how knowledge works and the institutional apparatus in which academic research is done. I placed the blue points to indicate meta-tactics or meta-enquiries exploring knowledge in critical creative research. I consider what comes forth if I place the meta-enquiry I’ve made in this paper—using paper model-making to revisit my own approach to academic knowledge production—on the cusp or threshold of undisciplining. The blue points are at once in and off the black plane, capable of drawing creative practice and academia towards, away from, into, through, against undisciplining.

As I made the drawing above, I very much hesitated putting pen to paper or fix static delineations and borders to depict the fragmented, fluid, interanimating, material, immaterial, constant conditions this paper describes—especially when it can be read as a scientific diagram in the context of the formal format of an academic paper. Instead, I hope you read this drawing as a cursory attempt to make visible what it is that is going on and that you use it to think with it, again, in lateral fashion, allowing yourself to imagine its possible interrelations and move through the illegible messy dark place required to imagine otherwise. I used the drafting of this diagram to help me write this section of this paper and I intend for it to be an invitation to you to think with me and for me to put forth some considerations below regarding the blue points illustrated in Fig. 5.

As researchers seeking to undiscipline ourselves, we might take on different tactics to varying degrees: for instance, we may blanket disciplinarity with unauthorized ways of being, seep it in from beneath, or nurture it elsewhere protecting it from being disciplined. I pull this statement from the “On Disciplinarity” section above to pose the following questions for further exploration:

• What should happen once we have managed to dedicate time and space for meta-enquiries into our practice and research?
• Towards what aims, precisely?

Undisciplining citation practice is a way into the larger project of undisciplining academic work. In my citation practice, I position interventions we make to the academic page—its formatting rules, references, expected audience, writing and editing process, hierarchies, theoretical frameworks, contributions, etc.—as a rehearsal space for this larger project. If we can manage to deepen our understandings of precisely how and where we are disciplined when we take on the task of writing articles or theses, then we might be able to extrapolate the tactics and self-assuredness we learn from this towards undisciplining meetings we have with academic peers, funding applications, job applications, the classroom, proposals for special issues, publications, public panel discussions, supervising a junior researcher, meetings with a senior researcher, and where we do our inquiries about how we know and be in the world.

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For a more comprehensive exploration of this approach—including a second method, further fidings, a full methodology, and eight more cases of using reflexive methods—see “Thinking: A Creative Practice for Bringing Together the Everyday and Black Onto-Epistemologies”, a thesis that can be found at http://myriamdiatta.com.