Research Modules // Blueprint
These research modules were produced under intense pressure. I hadn’t written an essay since 2018, and throughout that year I received only two supervisions, one of which was my yearly review. I felt groundless, so I read extensively Practice as Research books starting with Robin Nelson. Working within those conditions meant what I submitted functioned less as sophisticated academic work and more as the early seedlings/blueprints of my PhD.
Aware of both the time constraints and the demands dyslexia places on reading and processing, I approached the modules with a kind of survival‑driven rigour. Alongside this, departmental research methods teaching introduced a range of other research models, creating a dense methodological environment in which I began to recognise, almost before I had the vocabulary for it, that unrehearsed live art has a particular capacity to unsettle positivist knowledge systems and teleological time and Eurocentric models of progress. What I understood intuitively through practice and lived experience gradually conversed with theoretical conversations I had not yet encountered.
In retrospect, these two modules became the impetus for the entire PhD. They provided a rough but generative framework: an early articulation of how live art might operate as a method for disrupting dominant epistemologies and pedagogical structures. Although the writing was not yet refined, the methodological orientation was already present. It would become the foundation upon which the rest of the research came to light.
Early on I was told that documentation was key. But I knew that any teleological or capturing technologies, such as a camera, betray the work’s potential and abide by colonialistic aesthetics and hierarchical knowledge logics, including Rankean ideas that treat only fixed knowledge as legitimate knowledge — something to ‘fix’, to ‘pin down’. This is precisely the logic I attempt to dismantle, and it can only be dismantled within a temporal state.
Due to late introduction into the arts MR402 was completed prior to MR401Submitted: May 2023
Submitted: December 2023
I became less fearful of adhering to my supervisor's preferences for text and image as I started to see its potential to become a fluid knowledge pathway in and of itself.
I instinctively felt that ephemerality could be an epistemic decolonial force and a site of inquiry in of itself. And I wanted to explore, move through this instinct.
No matter whether I tried photography, both digital and analogue, a mixture, the medium always betrayed the promise of fugitivity. The power to dismantle white and to leave it rather than reinstate. I knew I required a supervisory change, because of this constant friction of non-understanding, it was hindering progress and the ability to make an alternative to positivist notions of knowledge that are impeded by colonial logics.
MR402 paragraphs that were stricken through by a former supervisor...
Can research be free-flowing, unbound by documentation? Can it be an entity that lives and transforms within the viewer? Is a person not already a bundle of knowledge?
...What it might offer is a poetic, nuanced expression of theory, a non-captive yet intentional research method, a contribution to knowledge and research. Pg 2 (Starkey, 2023)
I situated these questions in my first research paper regarding my PhD, they were in the MR402 introduction; they were struck out by the then supervisor. My position on not documenting was discouraged. Instead of exploring my positionality, I was shamed into following the supervisor's preference, even though it was counterintuitive for this specific project. I was persuaded to include imagery even though, deep down, I knew it was counterintuitive. I have gone back to that essay and published my original draft as part of my personal evolution.
I returned to these questions once; I chose myself, my instinct, over the supervisor's preference for text and image. I knew that his preference/template was costing me the potential of my research. I attempted 'interbeings' (photographs) but they only served to reproduce violence. This process also taught me that people-pleasing at the cost of decolonialism is in itself a complicity to systems that require interrogation if epistemic equality became a thing. I too must be uncomfortable in making others uncomfortable. I knew going along with it I could not stand by the research at viva or in general.
Good sections of MR402
...' what may seem a threat to knowledge reproduction encapsulates a radical alternative to positivist thinking about knowledge and knowledge sharing as fixed and absolute. Live art, with its inherent ephemerality, generates a particular intensity that resists capture or replication. Its strength lies in the demand that the spectator be fully engaged in the present moment, where spectators become active participants, rather than passive observers. In this way, the audience is not positioned as detached observers but as co-creators of meaning, implicated in the unfolding of the work itself.'(Starkey, pg, ...., 2023)