Mapping Research, Practice, and Self
Recent developments have brought into closer relation three domains: knowledge production, making and practice, and the positioning of the self within these activities. It is useful to map these domains to understand how they are currently articulated across global contexts, and where they might be heading.
Researchforms of knowledge production legible to academic institutions.
Practicemodes of making that produce actions, artifacts, and effects whose significance exceeds academic validation.
Selfthe situated experience, positionality, and embodiment of the practitioner.
Recognized formations across the nodes
Research ↔ Practice: Practice-Based Research, Research-Creation, Artistic Research, Design, Engineering
Research ↔ Self: Autotheory, Autoethnography
Self ↔ Practice: Practitioner Narratives, Biographies, Artist Statements, Poetics
This mapping does not aim to enclose or strictly define these categories, but more to indicate tendencies and orientations. These formations already overlap extensively. For instance, autotheory and autoethnography often function as artistic artifacts in their own right. Practice-based research frequently incorporates reflexive or biographical elements, even if these are backgrounded. Conversely, artist statements and poetics engage with theory, though their primary emphasis remains on the relationship between the creator and their practice.
At the same time, texts such as Poetics and Creative Writing Research by Kim Lasky suggest that writing poetics itself constitutes a form of knowledge production. This is indeed so, but it might be helpful to think about how this relates to other types of research and how it relates to the self.
The term “practice” here is also necessarily slippery. Academic research itself is also a practice. For the purposes of this mapping, however, I provisionally distinguish “research” in a sense closer to the Wilhelm von Humboldtian model: forms of inquiry that are institutionally recognized, often peer-reviewed, and structured by specific norms of validation according to field.
All of these terms are currently useful insofar as they illuminate different ways of interfacing these nodes. At the same time, even a preliminary mapping reveals gaps, asymmetries, and directions for further development. For example, in creative writing programs, articulations between Self and Practice are often foregrounded through poetics and dedicated coursework, whereas in fine arts and visual arts contexts, these relations may be present but less explicitly theorized despite being necessary for every artist. In music composition, the relation between self and practice is frequently embedded within compositional training, yet rarely isolated as an object of reflection in its own right.
Similarly, autotheory and autoethnography can blur into practice when they engage directly with processes of making, complicating distinctions between reflection and production. Practice-based research often benefits from self-reflexive inquiry, yet in fields such as engineering and design, the role of the self is frequently minimized or excluded. In more conventional research domains, particularly within STEM fields, both the self and the process of inquiry are often bracketed in favor of results, leaving little room for reflexive or practice-oriented accounts.
As these domains continue to intersect, we are likely to see further hybridizations that challenge existing distinctions. Rather than resolving these tensions, it may be more productive to attend to how these nodes are related within different practices, and to consider how we might more deliberately articulate these relations in our own work.