First things first: The image above is not the actual cover of a book. The book is not yet written. But before writing a book I like to be able to picture it as a book, so I make an imaginary cover. (Even among these blogposts, we can see that this has happened before for my Creativity book, which was indeed published with a different cover two years later, and before before, for a book called An Experimental Culture of All Kinds of Things Made by Everybody, which I, um, changed my mind about soon afterwards).
So, although this will not be the cover, I have started writing a book called Practice-based Research and Research-Creation: An introductory guide.
The blurb says this:
Practice-based research is a process of exploration through doing, making and thinking, bridging personal and cultural experiences. This book offers a practical guide to doing practice-based research, and an engaging conversation about why we do it.
Human beings have long recognized that creative practice is central tohow we understand our lives – which is why there have been stories, art and music in all cultures and since the earliest times. As researchers seek to build and communicate knowledge about the world, it makes complete sense that creative practice should be one of our most vital methods.
David Gauntlett argues that practice-based research – also known as research-creation – is a meaningful, systematic way of developing understandings of cultural worlds and human experience. It is not ‘just another method’ on a menu of available procedures: it is an ethical choice, and represents a commitment to empathy, dialogue, and a journey on which we gather a basket of processes, experiments and experiences.
Unlike those methods which take a more strident and extractive approach to achieve simplified explanations of the world, practice-based research means we can foreground complex realities, gentleness, and compassion. This book is your guide on that journey.
David Gauntlett is Canada Research Chair at The Creative School, Toronto Metropolitan University, Canada, and the author of 10 previous books including Making is Connecting (2011, 2018) and Creativity (2022).
There’s a fun story to tell you about how all the publisher’s reviewers of my proposal absolutely hated me talking about practice-based research being a gentle process. They were fine with anything else that I promised for this book, but suggesting that the process could be gentle, and that this would be a good thing in the world, made them absolutely lose their minds with fury. Although I was baffled about why my call for gentleness met such an un-gentle reaction, I am very grateful to them because it’s a very funny way of getting into the topic. So I’m not telling you about that now.
There’s also the thing about how the reviewers of my book proposal worried that it might be a bit ‘woo’. As someone who worries that I am probably too blandly practical about everything, it was quite exciting to be called ‘woo’, although fans of the ‘woo’ will be disappointed to hear that the book will be a clear and sensitive guide to the doing of practice-based research, but with very little genuinely ‘woo’ content. I can only apologize.
I love practice-based research – also known as research-creation – and am thrilled to be writing a whole book about it. I am inspired every day by my friends and students such as Ashley Jane Lewis, Deanna Armenti, and Francisco-Fernando Granados, and having the opportunity to highlight and talk about their work, and that of others, in this volume, makes me very happy. And inevitably, being able to talk about my own creative experiences. And about how we can turn all these things into documented bundles of stuff which are self-evidently research, as well as being creative delights, is all super-interesting.
If all goes according to plan it will be finished in August 2025 and published in spring 2026! Which, of course, seems upsettingly far off, but it’s less than two years away. So far, I’m really enjoying it.
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