My practice-led research in Creative Writing consists of composing a novel closely focalised through three members of a dual-heritage family in Suffolk in 2004 after the teenage daughter is diagnosed with leukaemia. ‘Seventeen: Ethics and Aesthetics’ explores the question: what are the tensions between truth, kindness and the form and poetics of the novel? My critical reflection considers techniques used to convince the reader, and my attempts to represent unconscious psychic processes of the novel’s protagonists in relation to trauma fiction. The aim of the research programme has been to discover the appropriate form for a novel in which characters are paramount. My research methodology has consisted of revising repeated drafts in order to imagine and articulate the points of view of the novel’s protagonists: Rosie, a mixed-race teenager who has a vivid sense of the ridiculous, who wants to separate herself from her family and mix with her friends; Jay, her White mother, who works in anti-racist education and has ambitions as a photographer, together with a tendency to embrace New Age ideas; and Mel, Rosie’s stepfather, who runs an independent cinema, who never intended to be anyone’s father but finds himself caught up in loving Rosie. The novel is about the language and voices used, and about how the relationships between the characters change as a result of Rosie’s illness and impending death. Writing a commentary has informed the discipline of editing and revision. My completed critical reflection recounts decisions made on ethical or aesthetic grounds, while attempting to relate the research to cultural preoccupations in the study and composition of novels. The originality of this contribution to knowledge consists of fiction that focalises three original characters. A claim to originality may also be made in relation to my work on metaphor, metonymy and the unconscious.

This thesis, set within an Action Research framework, details the development and validation of a writer-centred model of the writing process. The model was synthesised within the boundaries of a writers’ group for MA students. The initial data collected, and analysed using the principles of grounded theory, were retrospective descriptions of group members’ writing processes. After initial analysis, additional data, from group members’ writing, and from audio recordings, were used for further analysis, and to form a model of the writing process. To ascertain whether the model had value outside the specific context in which it was made, it was validated from three different perspectives. Firstly, the retrospective descriptions of other writers were collected and analysed, using the model as a framework. Secondly, the model was presented at academic conferences; comments about the model, made by members of the audience, were collected and analysed. Finally, the model was used in writing courses for PhD students. Comments from these students, along with questionnaire responses, were collected and the content analysed. Upon examination of all data sources, the model was updated to reflect additional insights arising from the analysis. Analysis of the data also indicated that the model is useable outside its original context. Potential uses for the model are 1) raising awareness of the process of writing, 2) putting writers at ease, 3) serving as a starting point for individuals or groups to design their own models of the writing process, and 4) as a tool to help writers take control of their writing processes.

This thesis explores the scope artists’ writing has to perform the ‘sensation of knowledge’ – a term I am using to indicate my central proposition that knowledge can be felt. Through descriptions of place, the use of allusion and first person narration the thesis paves the way for a series of encounters between the reader and the matter, content and commonplace bodily processes of contemporary lived experience. By being grounded in this way, the ‘sensation of knowledge’ challenges presuppositions about the immateriality of knowledge; it makes readers alert to their own idiosyncratic perceptions of its meanings. Further, the thesis asks them to consider how such experience gains the authority and status of knowledge when the significance is felt rather than comprehended. The writing has come out of research into meaning-making that is located in the experience of specific sites and situations and has taken place across moving image, installation, writing and performance. The thesis is presented as a self-contained art object with the writing that comprises it performing its argument through its form and methods rather than by explaining, cataloguing or defining it. The writing as art practice contributes to a broad art discourse but also, critically, to academia. It specifically makes its proposition within, and in response to the current culture and format of knowledge production within the academy. It meets the defining expectation of a PhD to produce new knowledge and provides the means for this knowledge to be accessible through existing academic and institutional conventions. Its knowledge is contingent on the sensation of its encounter, an approach that is counter to that which the academy expects. With these propositions in mind, the writing produced for this thesis situates ideas and language alongside descriptions of physical substances. It questions assumptions about the default function of language to expedite the delivery of information, by slowing down the feelings experienced. The material and abstract references accumulate to reveal the sense of weight that occurs in response to the act of reading. Formal conventions of academic writing and reading, such as footnotes, are used as meta-critical devices that illuminate the apparatus of institutionalised knowledge production. The thesis places such devices alongside forms of storytelling including historiographic fiction and autobiographical narratives to reveals the multiplicity of modes through which knowledge can be produced and absorbed. This multiplicity is a critical device that challenges institutionalized conventions through which knowledge is legitimized. Through these methods the thesis locates the production of knowledge between the body, ideas and the lived world and, as such, challenges the superiority of one form over another.

My Creative Writing thesis comprises a collection of uncanny short stories that explores social, psychological and physical impacts of advances in science and technology, and a critical-reflective exegesis. Using a research methodology that critically examines insights emerging from creative and reflective practice, the thesis as a whole addresses the question of how the short story can be used as a particularly appropriate mode to illuminate contemporary experiences of science and technology through the creation of uncanny affect. The exegesis offers a definition of contemporary uncanny fiction; the stories test a range of thematic, stylistic and formal strategies for achieving uncanny affect. The resulting creative work suggests a contemporary technological uncanny is one that develops and extends Freud’s conceptualisation of das Unheimliche. Chapter 1 establishes the theoretical background to my practice research, providing a historical overview of the uncanny as a phenomenon and literary mode. Chapter 2 draws on Gothic and posthuman studies and psychoanalysis, and short stories by China Miéville, Nicholas Royle and Ali Smith, to explore the implications of insights emerging from my short stories: notions of an ‘uncanny of the virtual gaze’ and the body as site of impact for science and technology characterise a technological uncanny particular to our age, and comprise an original contribution to dialogues and debates theorizing a contemporary uncanny. Chapter 3 applies these notions to the practice of creative writing, to investigate the impact of its location in the academy. Finally, Chapter 4 extends existing narratological theory to suggest how second person is a particularly uncanny narrative mode, and examines issues of form, voice, structure and sequence to contend that short fiction is an especially effective form for the creation of uncanny affect – at the level of the individual story, and the collection as a whole.

This thesis reframes, or reforms, ‘nature writing’ (‘Nature Writing Reformed’) through the practical and theoretical recombination of human, tree, and page. Understandings of ‘writing’, ‘nature’, and their phrasal relation in ‘nature writing’, are explored through a sustained enquiry into the reading and writing practices principally undertaken by the author (Camilla Nelson) in relation to one specific apple tree in the walled garden of University College Falmouth’s Tremough Campus, Cornwall. The central claim of this thesis is that composition is always environmentally constructive and constructed: how (the method with which) you read and write, and where (the environment in which) you read and write, i.e. the situation and materials you read and write with, affect not only the composition of the written text but the composition of the human, as well as the other-than-human, entities involved in this practice. This thesis is explicitly structured as an interweave of variously material (word; page; room; box; walled garden; library; studio; tree) and conceptual (word; page; theory; footnote; hyperlink; field of research) framing devices (and / or environments). The structure of this thesis and that of the orchard and studio installations, which together constitute the final PhD research submission, play on the variety of framing and reframing that occurs in relation to the spatio-temporal specifics of material and conceptual composition (as evidenced in the Media Log). This ‘reform’ of nature writing, as an interweave of human and other-than-human environments (or frames), is developed in relation to Mark Johnson’s expanded theory of ‘mind’ by way of the conceptual and material practice of metaphor (Johnson, 2007). This thesis combines the theories and practices derived from the (prinicipal) field of ‘Nature Writing’ (as defined in the correspondingly titled chapter), with those suggested by contemporary developments in cognitive philosophy, neuroscience, microbiology, systems theory, and translation studies.

This thesis comprises an original work of Weird fiction, entitled The Adventures of Kunstlicht in the Netherworld, and a commentary which explores its relationship to the fiction and writing practices of the American Weird fantasy author, H. P. Lovecraft. The novel is the first person narrative account of Christian Blackwood’s experiences with his goth band, Kunstlicht, their pursuit by politically motivated occultists, and encounters with serial killers, avant-garde artists, revenant Nazis and supernatural folkloric monsters. The majority of the story unfolds retrospectively in conversations with the former police officer Wade. The final section shows the band’s own attempt to perform practical magic and their meeting with a resurrected pagan god. The commentary opens with an introductory examination of the extent of Lovecraft’s influence on fantasy (and especially horror) fiction since his death, the general rationale for using him as model, and the specific thematic issues relevant to this novel. There follow three chapters. The first chapter discusses the realist tendencies in Lovecraft’s work, his world-building strategies and those in recent Weird fiction. It then shows how Lovecraft’s prescriptions were applied in this novel, and how this affected the novel’s narrative and tone. The second chapter examines the connection between his work – and that of his predecessors – and the cultural, scientific and occult thought of his time, showing how these elements were combined to give depth to his corpus. I then explain how this approach was applied and updated in my own novel. In the third chapter I explore Lovecraft’s extensive synthetic mythology, its relationship to existing folklore and myth, and to a folkloric interpretation of the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. I then explain how I combined occult and Nietzschean elements with the Lovecraftian to produce a more complex Weird novel. In the concluding section, I briefly examine how the novel fits with other recent Lovecraft-inspired work, and assess to what extent it succeeds as Weird fiction.

This practice-based research questions the potential defining characteristics and status of contemporary alt-folksong and its role(s) in the articulation of place through a collection of twelve original songs with accompanying written research. The thesis relates the term ‘place’ to the notion of subjectivity, autobiography and the performance of identity as they relate to geographic experience (Tuan 1997; Agnew 2005). Place is addressed from the perspective of a subject both re- and dis-located, and as such, diasporic neurosis concerning home and authenticity leads to a focus on aspects of place related to my past (Shetland), heritage (Ireland), present (Cornwall), and ‘in between’ (Augé 1995). Methodologically, songs respond to, and inform, written/ read/ listened research, with a ‘diarist’ mode of writing linking audio and text. Songs are generated through engagement with these research methods, and through field trips and recordings, influencing the directions of page-based enquiry. Early chapters draw on theories of Popular Music (Moore 1993; Eisenberg 2005) and Postmodernism (Jameson 1998), but also look to ethnomusicology of Folksong (Gammon 2008; Boyes 1993), and interviews with practitioners (Hayman 2011; Collyer 2010), characterising the relationship between traditional music and contemporary Alt-folk. Chapter 2 introduces psychoanalytic theory (Lacan 1977; Minsky 1998) in locating the three places within development of the subject. Each place is subsequently addressed respectively through appropriation of Lacan’s Imaginary, Symbolic and Real as a means of investigating the subject’s relationship to each. Chapter 3 discusses autobiographic theory (Marcus 1994; Anderson 2001), assessing the value of such a songwriting method, and aspects of musical ‘meaning’ (Small 1998; Moore 1993). Chapter 4 investigates the use of production/recording technologies as themselves sources of meaning (Doyle 2005; Barthes 2000). Conclusions, in songs and text, work towards articulation of the ‘outside’ nature of the itinerant in these aspects of (non)place, and the capacity of Alt-folksong to voice this state.

Academic writing can be difficult to accomplish and disengaging to read (Monchamp 2007), the result is that often when we carry out research, our final readership can be miniscule. While reading and writing for the purposes of research should be informative, insightful, rigorous and challenging, is it also possible to make these processes entertaining or even pleasurable? Can the researcher give some personal insight into their world view and also from that of their interviewees instead of pretending that they play an entirely passive and objective role in the research process? Many qualitative researchers (Grumet 1981; Cortazzi 1993; Charmaz 1995; Ely, Vinz et al. 1997; Erben 1998; Usher 1998; Denzin and Lincoln 1998, 2003; Ellis and Bochner 1998, 2003; Richardson 1998, 2003; Bruner 2004; Perselli 2004; Antoniou and Moriarty 2006; Short, Grant et al. 2007; Sparkes 2007; Caulley 2008; Trahar 2008) have started to push the academic writing borders and explore new ways to write up research. This assignment seeks to provide a rationale for using narrative as a research method to tell the story of my research and to trial these methods on a small-scale project. A professor with an extensive writing portfolio has been interviewed in order to access some of her experiences with academic writing. The author seeks to use a emotionalist approach to the interview process by obtaining the participant’s view on their authentic experiences through open ended and unstructured interviews (Silverman 1993) with the aim of encouraging the interviewee to share their thoughts while discussing the author’s own observations and attitudes towards academic writing. This is in order to provide ideas and insight that might help other academics with their own approaches to the writing process.

“I opened my mouth to say both Yes and No. A fly had time to go in and out of it.”1 One way of imagining the concerns of this thesis would draw reference to the preposition. Prepositions are words that denote relative positions. Gertrude Stein favoured them over all other types of word. This writing, itself positioned in a wider body of work, employs and reflects on gestures of appropriation and positioning familiar from the practice of collage, and common to curation, writing and magic as well as art-making practices. In, for example, magical practices such as Temurah and Notarikon in the Kabbalah, or the narrative Pathworking rituals of contemporary Witchcraft, items of text and/or imagery are appropriated and reiterated in varying combination. This PhD project mimics these practices, here appropriating its constituent materials to the space of writing (and thereby to what magicians term the Astral Plane), there to move them around in order to become sensitive to their communications. This results in the ravelling of a complex and somewhat nebulous body. What the nature of this body – that is, the body of the artwork – might be, becomes the fugal question around which this writing attempts to orient itself.2 Confusion and intoxication inevitably result, and their Brownian dynamic is found more representative of the encounter with artworks that this writing seeks to address than linear approaches seeking resolution, conclusion or definition. Constructions of division are necessarily tested throughout this undertaking. As an element of a ‘two-part submission’, this writing acknowledges the necessity to operate across an arbitrarily imposed writing/practice fissure, and finds it urgent to address the encounter with artworks not as an external commentary but as a work among, within, around, by, against, through and with works.

The thesis investigates the methods used in the contemporary crowdsourcing of creative crowdwork and in particular the succession of conflicting ideas and concepts that led to the development of dedi- cated, profit-oriented, online platforms after 2005 for the outsourcing of cognitive tasks and creative labour to a large and unspecified group of people via open calls on the internet. It traces the historic trajectory of the notion of the crowd as well as the development of tech- nologies for online collaboration, with a focus on the accompanying narratives in the form of a dis- course analysis. One focus of the thesis is the clash between the narrative of the empowerment of the individual user through digital tools and the reinvention of the concept of the crowd as a way to refer to users of online platforms in their aggregate form. The thesis argues that the revivification of the notion of the crowd is indicative of a power shift that has diminished the agency of the individual user and empowered the commercial platform providers who, in turn, take unfair advantage of the crowdworker. The thesis examines the workings and the rhetoric of these platforms by comparing the way they address the masses today with historic notions of the crowd, formed by authors like Gustave Le Bon, Sigmund Freud and Elias Canetti. Today’s practice of crowdwork is also juxtaposed with older, arguably more humanist, visions of distributed online collaboration, collective intelligence, free soft- ware and commons-based peer production. The study is a history of ideas, taking some of the utopian concepts of early online history as a vantage point from which to view current and, at times, dystopian applications of crowdsourced creative labour online. The goal is to better understand the social mech- anisms employed by the platforms to motivate and control the crowds they gather, and to uncover the parameters that define their structure as well as the scope for their potential redesign. At its core, the thesis offers a comparison of Amazon Mechanical Turk (2005), the most prominent and infamous example for so-called microtasking or cognitive piecework, with the design of platforms for contest-based creative crowdwork, in particular with Jovoto (2007) and 99designs (2008). The crowdsourcing of design work is organised in decidedly differently ways to other forms of digital labour and the question is why should that be so? What does this tell us about changes in the practice and commissioning of design and what are its effects on design as a profession? However, the thesis is not just about the crowdsourcing of design work: it is also about the design of crowdsourcing as a system. It is about the ethics of these human-made, contingent social systems that are promoted as the future of work. The question underlying the entire thesis is: can crowdsourcing be designed in a way that is fair and sustainable to all stakeholders? The analysis is based on an extensive study of literature from Design Studies, Media and Cul- ture Studies, Business Studies and Human-Computer Interaction, combined with participant observa- tion within several crowdsourcing platforms for design and a series of interviews with different stake- holders.