Cambridge Creative Research Conference 2025

Introduced at the beginning of the session, the Cutting Shop Floor Collage will tell the story of the affect of the supervisor on doctoral study. As the story is told, attendees are invited to craft their own narrative from what has been cut out of their work based upon their experience of higher education. Attendees can draw on supervisory relationships or experience of critical feedback to trouble perceived binaries within academia. This is based on a context of doctoral study where the supervisor is positioned as the ‘all seeing and knower’ (Haraway, 1988) and representative of the HEI thus creating a superficial divide between the student and the academic. The perceived divide is reinforced when the Postgraduate Researchers (PGR) submit their work for scrutiny and feedback, often finding it difficult to extricate themselves from the comments on the work. In hierarchical positionalities it is assumed the student and their work are separate, one alienated from the other and the emotional work remains invisible (Fineman, 2005), this session troubles this assumption through storytelling, collage, and creative play. From the very beginning of the session attendees will be invited to use story (digital or otherwise) to challenge what is meant by ‘belonging’ in academic writing through playing, manipulating, responding to what is left over from submitted work that has received feedback. No single creative methods is privileged over others, from building with Lego or putty to writing poems or cartoon strips, all are intra-active (Barad, 2007) and welcome. Attendees are invited to share their craft in the main presentation space chat space or whiteboard within the Zoom platform. This is optional due to the personal nature of creative work. At the end of the session, it is hope attendees will be able to recognise the value of work that has been cut away and empowered in their future feedback relationships.

References:

Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Duke university Press.

Haraway, Donna. (1988). “”Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.”” Feminist Studies 14, 3: 575-599.

Fineman, S. (2005), “Appreciating emotion at work: paradigm tensions”, International Journal of Work Organisation and Emotion, Vol. 1 No. 1, pp. 4-19

Waiting is typically understood as a familiar, everyday experience. We might wait for a bus, a message, or a result. However, its pedagogical potential has often been overlooked. Inspired by Braidotti’s (2019) concept of becoming-with, waiting is not merely a human experience, but one that is deeply entangled with the non-human and more-than-human worlds. I argue that within waiting, the seemingly silent stillness unfolds as an ongoing, noisy, complex, and multi-directional distribution of matters.

This workshop is situated at the intersection of posthumanism, creative writing, and waiting as pedagogy. It reimagines waiting as both a mode of writing and a way of knowing, proposing it as an embodied, affective, and radical practice. Rather than waiting for, it invites a process of waiting with. By attuning ourselves to the temporalities of waiting, new pedagogical possibilities for writing may begin to emerge.

Participants may come away with:
a) a new mode of noticing grounded in both writing and everyday experience;
b) a critical lens through which to reconsider our entanglement with technology;
c) a potential pedagogical approach to creative writing, arts-based practices, and interdisciplinary inquiry.

Three parts are designed for the workshop: 1) situated waiting; 2) digital waiting and; 3) performative waiting. The specific design is as follows:

Part 1: Situated Waiting (Approx. 12 minutes)
We begin by thinking about and listening to the sounds of waiting. What are the sounds of waiting? What kind of personal, political, or patriotic waiting are you experiencing? Found poetry will be created based on fragmented sentences and words. Part 1 aims to make waiting embodied and situated within personal histories and imagined futures.

Part 2: Digital Waiting (Approx. 10 minutes)
Making use of the online format of this conference, participants will be invited to sit in front of their screens and wait silently for 3 minutes. During this time, unexpected “prosthetic” events may occur: a screen dims, a message appears, a dog stirs nearby, or perhaps nothing happens at all. As Donna Haraway (1991) observes:
“We are not in charge of the world. We just live here and try to strike up non-innocent conversations by means of our prosthetic devices, including our visualisation technologies” (p. 199).

In the digital age, people have been conditioned not to wait (e.g., short videos and bite-sized information), yet new forms of digital waiting have also emerged, waiting for an email, a comment or like on an Instagram post, or for a response from a friend. Part 2 invites participants into an unpredictable, shared experience of digital waiting, one that attunes them to how we intra-act with technology and the materialised digital spaces of the 21st century.

Part 3: Performative Waiting (Approx. 5 minutes)
We return to the found poetry created in Part 1 (Situated Waiting) and revisit the sensory experiences from Part 2 (Digital Waiting). Each has generated words, feelings, and symbols, scattered across the paper in different locations.

Now, take a coloured pen and begin to connect these words. As you draw, a shape of waiting may begin to emerge, fluid, shifting, and dynamic. Through this act, the shapes of waiting become visible.

In this way, the entire workshop itself becomes a waiting, waiting with the shape of waiting to emerge.

This inclusive, practical, and engaging online workshop invites participants to explore identity through accessible creative autoethnography. We will utilize a shared digital Padlet board as our ‘Thirdspace’ (Soja, 1996)—a dynamic, co-constructed site for making meaning and resisting research binaries. Participants will respond to the prompt “”Who are you?”” using readily available materials, which could involve:

• Drawing on paper (then photographed/scanned).
• Simple textile work (e.g., fabric pens, basic stitching, appliqué – then photographed).
• Digital image creation.

No advanced artistic or textile skill is necessary; the emphasis is on personal expression.

Participants will upload images of their creations directly to our collaborative Padlet during the workshop. This live sharing transforms the Padlet into a vibrant, visual archive of individual narratives and a collective artwork in progress. The workshop demonstrates an innovative, art-based method for creative data gathering, where each post becomes an object-based articulation of identity.

The Padlet itself will serve as a temporary, dynamic Thirdspace, fostering reflection, interaction (optional commenting), and a shared experience of creative exploration. With explicit consent, images from the Padlet will be invited to inform a larger PhD research quilt exploring neurodivergent experiences of identity and craft. Participants will gain hands-on experience with an adaptable creative research technique, explore their own narratives through making, and contribute to a tangible (via the Padlet) and conceptual collective piece, showcasing creative research dissemination.

This workshop aims to encourage researchers to deepen their analyses of rich qualitative data through creative interpretation and re-storying of participants’ accounts. Skills covered will include mapping imagery to develop motifs, emplotment (sequencing events and the representation of time), tense and perspective, ethical collaboration and co-authorship, and the role of art responses alongside the written word.

I intend to use a combination of demonstration, storyboarding and application of example data sets (or attendees’ own data if they have it). I hope to encourage the use of methods from narrative inquiry, collaborative inquiry and a heuristic process in bringing to life participants’ experiences and views.

My proposed workshop is based on my practice-based research into psychotherapeutic counsellors’ development of tacit wisdom in their early years of practice. I am a psychotherapeutic counsellor, literary editor and English tutor.