Queer Practice as Research: A Fabulously Messy Business

Abstract

This short piece highlights a current spurt in queer researcher-practitioners doing practice as research (PaR) in higher education and explores potential reasons why PaR is so vital, appealing, useful and strategic for queer research. As a starting point, we offer the idea of messiness and messing things up as a way of describing the methods of PaR. Queer mess is to do with asserting the value and pleasure of formations of knowledge that sit outside long-standing institutional hierarchies of research. The latter places what Robin Nelson calls 'hard knowledge' above tacit, quotidian, haptic and embodied knowledge. The methodological and philosophical impulses of PaR make space for a range of ..