[Conference Symposium] Among the dashes and the slashes: Creative research for the ‘new new’

[Creative Inquiry Symposium with Richard Fay as Symposium Discussant]

In their discussion of post-qualitative research, Patti Lather and Elizabeth St Pierre (2013), citing Gayatri Spivak (1999), refer to a distinction between the ‘old new’ of reorientating familiar perspectives on research, and the bringing into being of the ‘new new’. Over several years, we have sought to bring the ‘new new’ into being through establishing and participating in various innovative projects at the intersection of language and creative practice, including a special issue of Language and Intercultural Communication (Harvey, Tordzro and Bradley 2022). In this panel we present research at this intersection which seeks to engage with otherness in moments of transition, opening up possibilities for the new new to emerge by allowing space for the unexpected, and for radical solidarity with the very difference of others.
Drawing on a range of theoretical lenses, we present research across, through and beyond the boundaries of activities, people, places and things in ways which acknowledge the role and necessity of those boundaries, and which recognise contingency, partialness, smallness, hesitation, the fluid and the fleeting. We demonstrate that it is in this contradiction – of being always on and beyond the boundary – that the new-new emerges, in the tensions among and the spaces between: the trans-, the multi-, the and/but, the both/and, the dashes and the slashes. Our presentations demonstrate our creative explorations of these in-betweens, our strangeness to each other and the strangeness within ourselves, in order to account for our ‘relationships of incommensurable interdependency’ (Gaztambide-Fernández 2012: 46) with all our different others, and for the role of creativity and communication in moments of transition and (the possibility of) more just futures.