Beginning with Montaigne’s essayistic dictum Que sais je? — ‘What do I know?’ — this PhD thesis examines the literary history, formal qualities, and theoretical underpinnings of the personal essay to both investigate and to practice its relevance as an approach to writing about art. The thesis proposes the essay as intrinsically linked to research, critical writing, and art making; it is a literary method that embodies the real experience of attempting to answer a question. The essay is a processual and reflexive mode of enquiry: a form that conveys not just the essayist’s thought, but the sense and texture of its movement as it attempts to understand its object. It is often invoked, across disciplines, in reference to the possibility of a more liberal sense of creative practice — one that conceptually and stylistically privileges collage, fragmentation, hybridity, chance, open-endedness, and the meander. Within this question of the essay as form, the thesis contains two distinct and parallel strands of analysis — subject matter and essay writing as research. At the core of the study lie two close-readings: Ana Mendieta’s Labyrinth of Venus (1982) and Le Couvent de la Tourette (1959) by Le Corbusier and Iannis Xenakis. In each case, the writing draws, in its tone and texture, on a range of literary influences, weaving together different voices, discussions, and approaches to enquiry. The practice of essay writing is presented alongside, part and party to, research: a method of interrogation that embraces risk and uncertainty, and simultaneously enacts its own findings as a critical-creative mode of study-via-form, and form-via-study. The thesis is presented as a book-length essay, in which the art in question is equal and intimately connected to the writing used to address it. Method and form are designed to respond to the oft-cited challenge of the essay as fundamentally unmethodical, ranging, and diverse. Research, critical study, writerly description, and storytelling are combined to elucidate and expose each other based not on surface continuity, but on a deep interconnection among ideas that, through language, cohere and become related — imbued with an affinity for one another. The consummate product is the argument, as it works across genres, disciplines, descriptive and critical models, to challenge the narrative structure and language used within contemporary writing about art.

This thesis is focused on American gay male comics and queer alternative comics. I argue that the field of gay male comics production is dominated by two key genres: gay porno comics and gay ghetto comics. The conventions and characteristics of these genres help to construct and reinforce a dominant gay male habitus that is both sexual and social. Drawing on interviews as well as close readings of a number of case studies, I discuss the ways in which alternative queer cartoonists respond to the conventions of these genres, and create alternative representations of gay identity, community, and sex. I argue ultimately that the field of gay male comics production is not entirely homogenous, and that the queer male alternative comics that appear from roughly 1990 onwards are distinctive. The gay male comics of the First Wave (from the 1970s to 1990) are concerned with constructing and consolidating a sense of gay identity and community as relatively unified and stable. While sometimes critical of gay culture, as a whole they ultimately affirm the ideal of a unified gay community. In contrast, the queer male alternative comics that emerged as part of the Second Wave (starting around 1990) are far more concerned with questioning the normative, dominant values of mainstream gay culture, and challenging the identities, tastes and practices associated with the dominant gay habitus. Nevertheless because the gay ghetto and gay porno genres have been so dominant, queer alternative cartoonists position themselves in various different relationships to one or other genre. While some do abandon the genre conventions of gay porno and gay ghetto comics, more often queer alternative cartoonists take up some of these genre conventions and adapt, challenge, or subvert them in subtle ways.

This research aims to develop understanding of how teachers’ experience of practising creative writing influences pedagogy in schools. The research is located within a literary studies domain, responding to the context in which creative writing is most commonly taught in schools and in higher education. The central research question explored is: • How is the pedagogy of creative writing in schools influenced by teachers’ creative writing practice? The research explores the premise that creative writing practice has the potential to raise teachers’ ‘confidence as writers’, enabling them to ‘provide better models for pupils’ (Ofsted, 2009: p.6). This thesis examines what ‘creative writing practice’ means in the context of developing pedagogy; considers how creative writing is conceptualised by teachers; and investigates how teachers’ creative writing practice connects to pedagogic methods and approaches. The research sub questions that underpin the research are: • How has creative writing been conceptualised in educational policy, and how do these conceptions influence pedagogy in schools? • Does the practice of creative writing influence teachers’ conceptualisations of creative writing, and, if so, what is the impact on pedagogy? • Does the practice of creative writing influence teachers’ perceptions of themselves as writers, and, if so, what is the impact on pedagogy? • Does the experience of working with writers influence teachers’ pedagogic approaches in the classroom, and if so, how? The research includes a case study involving 14 primary and secondary school teachers, engaged in developing their own creative writing practice under the guidance of professional writers. The case study approach enables exploration of the research questions through analysis of participants’ lived experience of creative writing practice and pedagogy. The analysis of the case study at the heart of this research is situated within an interpretive framework, acknowledging the complexity of multiple meanings at play in socio-cultural learning contexts. The analysis draws on Bruner’s exploration of how pedagogical approaches imply conceptions of the learner’s mind and pedagogy (Bruner, 1996), and considers the interplay between teachers’ experiences of creative writing, and their choice of pedagogical methods and approaches.

This doctoral portfolio is a collection of papers and pieces of creative writing arising out of therapeutic, supervisory and training conversations and in relation to a wide range of texts. I have wanted to find ways of writing ethically so as to avoid objectifying people and appropriating their words, their life stories. I find ways of writing in which the values and practices of a collaborative, dialogical and reflexive ways of being with people are echoed in the texts. I show how writing and reading are relational practices in that I speak with the participants in the texts as well as with the reader and also with other writers. To do this, I experiment with a variety of written forms and employ literary devices so as to speak from within a range of practice relationships, from within inner dialogue, with real and fictitious characters. Technically and ethically, I try to write in a way which not only captures the sound of talk but which also speaks with the reader who would be reading, and perhaps hearing these accounts of conversation. By sharing a rich level of detail from my polyvocal inner dialogue, I invite the reader into a unique and privileged alongside position as a participant-observer in my work. Inspirational research methodologies include: writing as a method of inquiry, reflexivity, autoethnography, performance ethnography and transgression interpreted by many areas of systemic theory and practice. To support this innovative work, I offer several theoretical and practical papers offering novel developments on systemic practice theory. I situate systemic practice as a research method and demonstrate many family resemblances between systemic inquiry and qualitative inquiry. I offer a reflexive model for systemic practice and practice research which I call Praction Research which regards therapy and research as political acts requiring an activist agenda. Linked to this I politicise ideas of reflexivity by introducing local and global reflexivity and create a political connection with a concept of theorethical choices in theory and ethics in practice research. I propose a new form of ethnography suited to systemic practice, Relational Ethnography in which I draw attention to reflexive relationships between writer and readers, between the voices of inner and outer dialogue in research texts.

Creative Writing as a teachable artistic practice, and reinforcing its identity with an appropriate pedagogical approach, has been a vibrant research area for some years now. Yet, despite a strong increase in writing courses all over the globe, there has been little research into how creative practitioners can actually contribute to facilitate the process of skill development in higher education learners, especially in the public sector universities across Sindh, Pakistan. In an effort to introduce Creative Writing as an academic discipline to government universities in Sindh, the present research sought to observe the impact of a training programme on English fiction on a sample of native learners. A total of thirteen students volunteered for this project. The research sample was selected from a population of second year undergraduates, enrolled in literature courses at the Institute of English Language and Literature (IELL) in the University of Sindh, Jamshoro, Pakistan (USJP); wherein Creative Writing had hitherto been a non-existent area of studies. Students were offered a twenty-nine session modular-workshop, aimed at exploring and expediting their artistic abilities in the short time span of a single semester. To ensure the trustworthiness of findings, the entire procedure was documented under the guidance of the researcher’s supervisory team. A post-workshop evaluation survey was also used for attaining student feedback. The setup of assessment items and analysis constructs of students’ narrative portfolios were adapted from validated sources and aligned with the context of this study. However, neither the feedback nor the assessment of students’ work was counted as the findings of this research. Unlike non-artistic inquiries, the post-training creative output gathered from project participants was interpreted as the final research outcome. Methodologically, this process was conducted following a matrix of three practice-oriented research paradigms; whereas “performative research” was selected as the principle data creation and presentation strategy. The resulting research insight has exhibited an in-depth understanding of approaches that could facilitate fiction composition abilities of learners from different language backgrounds, while writing in English. It also allows practitioners to consider non-typical methods of research to contribute holistically to the existing body of knowledge in the field.

A turn away from language and the human mind as the dominant (or only) determinants of reality can be identified within many disciplines, including anthropology, philosophy and literature, reflecting a growing acceptance of human and non-human, living and non-living entities as real, complex and partially withdrawn agents in the world. In Object Oriented Ontology the definition of object is extended to include humans, who have no special ontological status. Timothy Morton proposes rhetoric as a means of drawing closer to other objects, of contacting the ‘strange stranger’; objects cannot be known directly, or fully, but can be explored through imaginative speculation. Drawing on Object Oriented Ontology, my project explores making - an intimate engagement between body and material - as a means of thinking the body as a (strange) object within a mesh of strange objects. Facture is documented as image and language, prompting a series of shifting, speculative questions: • Can writing be brought to making to generate new new approaches to craft production? • How might writing in response to making, or objects, be reintroduced into a making process as a form of feedback? • Can writing_making methods generate new approaches to writing (about) making and materials? • How might a combination of production, documentation and reflection be displayed as artwork/research? • Can making be seen as a means for contacting the ‘strange stranger’?

This thesis is an example of creative practice that uses contemporary transmedia storytelling techniques to build a fictional environment that content creators can collaborate in and contribute to with their own fictional works. Within this thesis, I refine my methodology and identify new methods and processes that apply to the context of the creative project example – the fictional world of Chaos Reborn. The most notable of these are 1) making use of invented and real mythology to project depth into the work 2) presenting information to other contributors so they can switch roles as creators and consumers of the franchise content and 3) Identifying the ways in which my creative work interacts with other elements of the transmedia narrative of Chaos Reborn. This thesis also identifies issues around continuance of production for this franchise after an initial raft of publications and suggests a consistent way to approach further development of content. The main creative component of this thesis is a novel set in the world of Chaos Reborn. This is Dreams of Chaos (2016), the first of a planned trilogy entitled The Death of Gods, which tells the story of how the world of Chaos Reborn came about from its alternative history root in Earth’s 14th century. This operates as the background to the game world and anchors the fantasy genre context to a version of our own history. This work is only a part of the writing undertaken to build the world of Chaos Reborn. There is additional material in appendices which contain the other associated writing from this work and from my previous science fiction case study on Elite Dangerous to illustrate the progression and development of my methodology across the genres of science fiction and fantasy.

I have written a novel as a prequel and parallel narrative to Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The accompanying critical commentary draws on psychoanalytic and feminist perspectives, interpreted for “the complexities of fin‐de‐siècle British society” (Kucich, 2007, p.35), and examines my novel alongside other adaptations of Jekyll and Hyde. Although my work may invite comparisons with Neo‐Victorian novels such as works by Sarah Waters, Michael Cox’s The Meaning of Night (2006) or Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White (2002), I would argue that it has more in common with Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) and Sophie Gee’s The Scandal of the Season (2008), both of which are prequels respectively to Jane Eyre and The Rape of the Lock. My research explores the potential origins of Jekyll’s decision to divide himself – the psychological roots of “his desire to reveal himself and his desire to conceal himself” (Laing, 1960, p.37). I have used this premise for both a psychoanalytic and a feminist perspective, drawing on the key works of Freud, specifically his writings on the unconscious and in relation to dreams, and Gilbert and Gubar’s seminal text The Madwoman in the Attic. The decision to use these texts as a framework was made using the rationale of two primary perspectives: Stevenson’s novel was inspired by a dream he had, which led me to Freud, whose theories fit so well with the manifestations of the Jekyll/Hyde personae, and whose analytic attention to sex and gender, with the argument that psychological and social forms of gender oppression cause a manufactured and oppressive role for women, is correlative with a feminist approach. Gilbert and Gubar’s critique analyses nineteenth century female writers, and it is my argument that Stevenson’s novel suggests that Jekyll’s rigid beliefs about his ‘other’ can be seen as both a resistance to the feminine within himself, and as an unconscious identification with women who felt suppressed in a patriarchal society and constrained by that society’s rigid gender expectations. This feature of late Victorian culture which Stevenson’s novel appears – on the surface ‐ to actively resist, is symbolised by the anonymous and one‐dimensional female characters within his novel, therefore this narrative motif is the starting point for my novel.

Personal space is a human’s imaginary system of precaution and an important concept for exploring territoriality, but between humans and technology because machinic agencies transfer, relocate, enact and reenact territorially. Literatures of territoriality, violence and affect are uniquely brought together, with chatbots as the research object to argue that their ongoing development as artificial agents, and the ambiguity of violence they can engender, have broader ramifications for a socio-technical research programme. These literatures help to understand the interrelation of virtual and actual spatiality relevant to research involving chatrooms and internet forums, automated systems and processes, as well as human and machine agencies; because all of these spaces, methods and agencies involve the personal sphere. The thesis is an ethical tale of cruel techno-science that is performed through conceptualisations from the creative arts, constituting a PhD by practice. This thesis chronicles four chatbots, taking into account interventions made in fine art, design, fiction and film that are omitted from a history of agent technology. The thesis re-interprets Edward Hall’s work on proxemics, personal space and territoriality, using techniques of the bricoleur and rudiments (an undeveloped and speculative method of practice), to understand chatbot techniques such as the pick-up, their entrapment logics, their repetitions of hateful speech, their nonsense talk (including how they disorientate spatial metaphors), as well as how developers switch on and off their learning functionality. Semi-structured interviews and online forum postings with chatbot developers were used to expand and reflect on the rudimentary method. To urge that this project is timely is itself a statement of anxiety. Chatbots can manipulate, exceed, and exhaust a human understanding of both space and time. Violence between humans and machines in online and offline spaces is explored as an interweaving of agency and spatiality. A series of rudiments were used to probe empirical experiments such as the Prisoner’s Dilemma (Tucker, 1950). The spatial metaphors of confinement as a parable of entrapment, are revealed within that logic and that of chatbots. The ‘Obedience to Authority’ experiments (Milgram, 1961) were used to reflect on the roles played by machines which are then reflected into a discussion of chatbots and the experiments done in and around them. The agency of the experimenter was revealed in the machine as evidenced with chatbots which has ethical ramifications. The argument of personal space is widened to include the ways machinic territoriality and its violence impacts on our ways of living together both in the private spheres of our computers and homes, as well as in state-regulated conditions (Directive-3, 2003). The misanthropic aspects of chatbot design are reflected through the methodology of designing out of fear. I argue that personal spaces create misanthropic design imperatives, methods and ways of living. Furthermore, the technological agencies of personal spaces have a confining impact on the transient spaces of the non-places in a wider discussion of the lift, chatroom and car. The violent origins of the chatbot are linked to various imaginings of impending disaster through visualisations, supported by case studies in fiction to look at the resonance of how anxiety transformed into terror when considering the affects of violence.