Socio-Legal Studies 2022 Speaker Series: F**king with Form: Research-Creation as Socio-legal Inquiry

In the past decade, research creation has evolved well beyond the limited conceptualization by SSHRC as “an approach to research that combines creative and academic research practices” (SSHRC, 2022). When mobilized as an epistemological intervention within the university – and situating the university firmly within a larger apparatus of law-like institutions designed in service to colonization, assimilation, order, discipline, and nation building – research-creation works to reveal, unsettle, and transgress the boundaries of established forms of scholarly practice. In doing so, research-creation, and arts-based inquiry more generally, helps to forge critical creative space for multimodal, polyvocal ways of knowing otherwise. In this reflexive presentation, I will bring to the surface some of the inherent tensions, paradoxes, challenges, and possibilities that emerge in the (always unfolding) process of working through the general principles of research-creation.