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Richard Wainwright, PhDEuropean Graduate School, SwitzerlandWhen Language Dances: Micromovement in Experimental ChoreographyBook review:Experimental dance and the somatics of language: thinking in micromovement by Megan V. Nicely, Palgrave Macmillan When Language Dances: Micromovement in Experimental ChoreographyMegan Nicely opens her monograph with an arresting claim: words are not explanatory veneers applied after choreography has taken shape; they are a material substrate that co-animates every flick of the wrist or shift of weight. From the first chapter onward she threads affect theory, somatic education, and the unruly genealogies of post-1960s experimental dance into a single proposition: language circulates through muscle, sensation, and studio politics, shaping the micromovements that harden into recognisable style. The prose can be demanding, yet flashes of  humour and vivid rehearsal vignettes keep the argument agile.Nicely organises her study into seven chapters, the last functioning as a reflective coda; there is no separate conclusion tagged as such. Chapter 2, “The Micropolitics of Micromovement,” provides the conceptual spine. Drawing equally on Deleuze’s writing on affect, and Brian Massumi’s accounts of intensity, Nicely insists that naming is never neutral; every whispered cue or teacher’s correction translates the political into the kinaesthetic. Her critique thereby departs from the largely phenomenological lineage that has dominated dance studies since the 1990s, proposing instead that a more-than-human optic is required if scholars hope to understand how anatomical hierarchies and social categories sediment in the smallest muscular contractions.Chapter 3, “Interval,” moves the discussion to New York’s Judson Church. An extended reading of Trisha Brown’s Locus shows how Brown converts alphabetic coordinates into spatial tasks, turning everyday verbs into a proprioceptive engine that redistributes authorship across movers. Nicely demonstrates that such score work is not simply playful formalism; it rewires the power relations of the studio by obliging performers to negotiate instruction, improvisation, and memory in real time. The chapter gains heft from Nicely’s interviews with Brown’s collaborators, who describe score making as both liberation and constraint, a tension that the author uses to question easy celebrations of post-modern democratisation.A trans-Pacific shift occurs in Chapter 4, “Vibration,” which focuses on butoh dancer Kasai Akira. Mining the Hijikata Tatsumi Archive at Keio University, Nicely reconstructs how vocal practices, particularly Kasai’s so-called “voice power” drills, unsettle the still-prevalent image of butoh as mute, slow, white-painted minimalism. By tracing how verbal triggers migrate from metaphor into kinaesthetic specificity, she argues that butoh ought to be understood as a translingual technology rather than a static Japanese heritage form. Here the book is at its ethnographic best; Nicely’s participation in Kasai’s workshops allows her to correlate archival word scores with the physical tremors they generate in the studio.Chapter 5, “Adaptation,” returns to North America through Deborah Hay’s score practice. Whereas Kasai’s drills amplify vibration, Hay’s written prompts pursue subtraction. Her famed direction to “remove hesitation and reconsideration” is shown to be less about erasing doubt than about exposing the interval between linguistic command and corporeal response. Nicely links this procedure to Hay’s broader ecological ethics, suggesting that the dancer who adapts to every perceptual flicker rehearses forms of attention urgently needed beyond the studio.“Language as Agent,” Chapter 6, broadens the canvas to contemporary discourse. Nicely revisits Hijikata’s butoh-fulexicon, noting how single words such as “pollen” and “peacock” encode kinetic textures that performers learn to inhabit. The author then dissects the contested branding of “release technique,” the commodification of somatic buzzwords in wellness culture, and the gig-economy realities facing today’s freelancers. For Nicely, dancers navigate these pressures not by rejecting market forces outright but by curating hybrid practices that remain porous to multiple lineages. The chapter’s polemical edge is bracing; it names the structural conditions shaping bodily possibility without lapsing into fatalism.Chapter 7, “Movement’s Return,” was drafted in the wake of the severe disruptions of 2020–2022. While live practice has largely resumed, Nicely retains scenes of masked studios and video-conferenced rehearsals to show how dancers improvised new sensory ecologies under constraint. From these observations she distils “sequencing sensation,” a concept that describes how verbal cues ignite sub-threshold adjustments that eventually lodge in habitus. A side-by-side analysis of Graham-style contraction pedagogy and Skinner Releasing imagery clarifies how two ostensibly opposed methods nonetheless share a faith in language’s capacity to sculpt proprioception. By anchoring the theoretical claim in thick studio description, Nicely avoids the abstraction that sometimes mars conceptual coinage in dance scholarship.Across these chapters the book delivers three substantial contributions. First, it reframes language as kinetic material. Scholars have long catalogued the presence of verbal scores in Fluxus and post-modern dance, yet few have shown, with such analytic precision, how linguistic particles permeate neuromuscular circuitry. Second, the text forges an overdue bridge between somatics and critical theory. Much somatic literature valorises interiority and therapeutic benefit; Nicely threads these practices through feminist, decolonial, and labour critiques, granting somatics sharper political edges while giving theory an embodied toolkit. Third, the study models methodological pluralism by yoking archival sleuthing to participant observation and close reading. It affirms that practice-led research need not sacrifice conceptual depth to empirical detail.The book is not without its blind spots. The promised global purview leans heavily on United States and Japanese archives; artists from Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East appear primarily in passing references. A deeper engagement with those regions might have illuminated how different linguistic regimes inflect micromovement. In addition, the dense theoretical weave in Chapters 2 and 6 occasionally outpaces the rehearsal descriptions that could ground it. Readers unfamiliar with Baradian ontology or Massumian affect may crave more embodied examples. Yet these limitations do little to blunt the study’s impact, and they point productively toward future research.For educators, Nicely’s work supplies an immediate prompt to vary verbal cues, interrogate inherited jargon, and trace the social histories embedded in studio vocabulary. Choreographers will find compositional inspiration in her accounts of consonant-driven gesture, score-based disruption, and speech improvisation. Linguists and performance theorists are invited into a fertile zone where discourse analysis meets fascia and bone.Nicely shows, in the end, that words dance alongside bodies. Changing the studio vocabulary does more than rename steps; it shifts how dancers feel the work, how teachers shape their classes, and how communities organise around the art. As studios shake off pandemic interruptions and answer renewed calls for justice, Experimental Dance and the Somatics of Language offers a clear lens and practical tools for listening to movement inside speech. ReferencesNicely, M. V. (2023). Experimental dance and the somatics of language: Thinking in micromovement (New World Choreographies). Springer Nature. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30296-1

A document by Richard Wainwright, PhD. Click on the document to view its contents.

March 1, 2025Richard Wainwright, Vancouver Art Therapy InstituteReading Dissertations: The Toaster Test, citation ecology, and committee reading in arts-based and post-qualitative writingAbstractDoctoral committees often evaluate dissertations under conditions of partial proximity. Supervisors have lived with the project’s unfolding, while other committee members encounter the work later, quickly, and through inherited evaluative habits shaped by conventional qualitative reporting. Here I  use the ordinary metaphor of breakfast, buttered toast versus waffles, to describe a recurrent mismatch between evaluation instruments and epistemic forms. I argue that citation ecology, (who is cited, how, and for what purpose), functions as a navigational interface for committee readers operating under time scarcity, similar to streaming-platform browsing cues such as genres, familiar actors, and recurring motifs. Conventional qualitative evaluation cultures privilege template-fit through recognizable signals, including bounded questions, separable methods, auditable analytic procedure, and trustworthiness language (Lincoln & Guba, 1985; Tracy, 2010). Arts-based research (ABR) and post-qualitative inquiry, by contrast, often distribute method across making, composition, and conceptual work, requiring different proofs of rigor, including traceability of decisions, ethical containment, and form-as-analysis (Barone & Eisner, 2012; Lather & St. Pierre, 2013; Leavy, 2015; St. Pierre, 2014; St. Pierre, 2018; St. Pierre & Jackson, 2014). The essay further situates post-qualitative and arts-based forms within the ontological turn, which shifts evaluation from procedure-as-proof toward explicit accounting of how inquiry apparatuses help constitute what can appear as evidence and what can count as a claim (St. Pierre, 2014; St. Pierre, 2018). The essay concludes that signposting is infrastructural rather than ornamental. It enables committee members beyond the supervisory team to evaluate waffles as waffles without forcing them into toast proofs, while reducing the likelihood that genre anxiety will be converted into procedural critique.Keywords: arts-based research, post-qualitative inquiry, ontological turn, doctoral committee, evaluation, rigor, citation practices, genre, trustworthinessIt is almost never noon when a non-supervisory committee member first meets a dissertation.It is early or late, between meetings, between obligations. The body wants breakfast and the institution wants judgment. The PDF opens and the eyes do what training has taught them to do. Scan for the chapter where “method” lives. Locate the paragraph where ethics is certified. Find the section where data become findings through a narratable procedure. Under time scarcity, this is not hostility. It is how committee culture performs fairness, by reaching for familiar handles that make a verdict defensible.The first scene of this reading, however, is rarely the abstract.It is the references.A dissertation’s reference list is not only scholarship. It is a map of recognizability. Readers beyond the supervisory team often flip there early for the same reason a person scrolling a streaming catalogue searches for familiar genres, familiar actors, and recurring motifs. Recognition reduces risk. A cluster of conventional qualitative anchors signals one kind of evaluative instrument. A cluster of ABR and post-qual texts signals another. A thin or idiosyncratic list can trigger compensatory policing, intensified demand for “clarity,” and heightened attention to seams.Citation ecology becomes navigation.This is where the Breakfast Club forms. Not a club of detained teens, rather a club of readers operating inside an institutional rhythm. The metaphor is soft on purpose because the mechanism is hard. Committee work is often conducted under time pressure and accountability pressure. In that setting, familiarity becomes a proxy for rigor unless the dissertation interrupts the proxy.The Toaster Test is the name for this proxy.A toaster does not ask what breakfast is. It asks whether a slice fits the slot.Buttered toastConventional qualitative research has become a default evaluation template in many doctoral contexts because it is teachable, defensible, and readable at speed. Its dominant dissertation forms present a bounded research question, name and justify a design, define what counts as data, describe analysis as a traceable procedure, and defend quality through recognizable criteria and practices (Lincoln & Guba, 1985; Tracy, 2010). This architecture is not merely stylistic. It is an accountability technology. It allows an evaluator to see how claims were produced, what might count as evidence against them, and how interpretive risk was managed.Trustworthiness language is one emblem. Credibility, transferability, dependability, and confirmability emerged as portable criteria for evaluating interpretive work, offering a disciplined way to argue that qualitative claims are not merely opinion (Lincoln & Guba, 1985). Tracy’s (2010) later “big-tent” criteria offered a cross-genre vocabulary for qualitative quality, emphasizing meaningful coherence, rich rigor, credibility, resonance, ethical practice, and significance rather than a single narrow method script. In committee life, these vocabularies are often treated as common sense.In toast terms, the evaluation tests are familiar. Where is the method. Where is the analysis. Where are the findings. Can the process be pointed to. Can the verdict be justified to an administrator, an external examiner, a chair, or a future reader who was not in the room.Toast is not the enemy. Toast is institutional comfort.The trouble begins when toast becomes the definition of breakfast.WafflesArts-based research and post-qualitative inquiry do not refuse accountability. They relocate it.In arts-based research, making is not illustration. Making is the knowledge engine. Artistic practice generates evidence, produces concepts, and tests interpretation through form (Barone & Eisner, 2012; Leavy, 2015). Composition can be analytic. Sequencing can be analytic. Decisions about material, omission, juxtaposition, pacing, and aesthetic distance can function as method rather than decoration (Barone & Eisner, 2012; Leavy, 2015). ABR’s insistence is not that art is automatically insight. The insistence is that form is a site of knowing, and therefore a site of rigor.Post-qualitative inquiry intensifies this relocation by challenging the assumption that inquiry must be “methods-driven” in the sense of applying a stable recipe to a stable object. Lather and St. Pierre (2013) frame post-qualitative research as a shift that unsettles conventional methodological assurances and repositions how inquiry is conceived. St. Pierre (2018) emphasizes writing as part of inquiry rather than a report of inquiry, with consequences for how evidence, analysis, and method are understood. St. Pierre and Jackson (2014) press on one particularly sensitive point in conventional qualitative evaluation, the tendency to treat coding as the default proof of analysis, as if procedure could substitute for thinking. The argument is not that analysis should be free of discipline. The argument is that discipline is not identical to ritual.Post-qualitative inquiry’s challenge to methods-driven assurance is also inseparable from the ontological turn. In St. Pierre’s account, post-qualitative work emerges “after the ontological turn,” meaning inquiry can no longer treat ontology as background while method does the visible work (St. Pierre, 2014; St. Pierre, 2018). In practical terms, this means a dissertation is not only reporting on an object “out there.” It is obliged to show how the object is encountered, produced, constrained, and made sensible through an apparatus of concepts, materials, writing practices, and ethical decisions. The consequence for committee reading is immediate. Conventional qualitative evaluation often assumes that rigor is demonstrated by a stable recipe and a stable container. Post-qual and ABR rigor is more often demonstrated by traceability of decisions and the explicit articulation of how world-making conditions shaped what could appear as evidence and what could count as a claim (Barone & Eisner, 2012; Leavy, 2015; St. Pierre & Jackson, 2014).Waffles, in this sense, are structured. They simply do not announce doneness in toast’s preferred locations. Their proofs often live in pockets, in traceable decisions, in disciplined interpretation, in explicit refusals, in ethical containment, and in the visible pathway from making to claims.A toast-trained evaluator can miss this, not because they are incapable, but because their inherited instrument is tuned to different signals.The misbeliefThe misbelief that makes this mismatch feel personal is the belief that evaluation instruments are neutral.Committee culture often speaks as if standards float above genre. “Rigor,” “clarity,” “method,” and “contribution” are treated as stable properties detectable without translation. But these virtues are mediated by institutional forms, habits of reading, and inherited genre expectations. When the instrument is treated as neutral, the evaluator can punish unfamiliar form while sincerely believing the punishment is only about standards.The references scene shows this misbelief operating in miniature. Citations do not only locate scholarship. They locate the dissertation inside an evaluative regime. They tell the reader which test to apply. The reference list becomes an interface between epistemology and institutional appetite.In conventional qualitative contexts, citation ecology often performs stability. It signals that the dissertation belongs to a recognizable lineage of method and quality talk. In ABR and post-qual contexts, citation ecology often performs a different job. It signals that the dissertation will ask to be judged by criteria that include form-as-analysis, decision trail, and conceptually driven inquiry apparatus (Barone & Eisner, 2012; Lather & St. Pierre, 2013; Leavy, 2015; St. Pierre, 2014; St. Pierre, 2018). The list becomes a map of the reader’s required adjustments.The Netflix analogy is useful here precisely because it refuses moral drama. When a person browses a streaming catalogue, the first decision is rarely “What is the deepest work.” The first decision is “What can be trusted to hold attention without regret.” Genres, familiar actors, and recurring motifs do that work. Committee readers behave similarly under time scarcity. Familiar markers reduce risk and reduce the fear of endorsing what cannot easily be justified.The Toaster Test is the Netflix algorithm translated into doctoral governance.The mechanismThe mechanism is the conversion of reading into a defendable verdict under time scarcity.Non-supervisory committee members must justify judgments in standardized language. Under those conditions, the easiest critiques are often the most procedural ones, because procedure can be cited without admitting genre preference. “Unclear method” reads technical. “Insufficient analysis” sounds neutral. “Needs clearer findings” invokes standards without specifying whose standards, for what kind of object.In ABR and post-qual dissertations, those critiques can sometimes be accurate. Not all waffles are cooked through. But the more common failure mode is tool mismatch. The evaluator searches for a methods chapter as container, for analysis as steps, for findings as stable summaries, while the dissertation distributes method across making, composition, conceptual work, and ethical decisions.This is why signposts matter.Signposts are not hand-holding. They are genre cues.A streaming platform does not explain cinema theory before playing a film. It provides cues that help a viewer commit. Committee readers are similar. They want recurring motifs, recognizable markers of discipline, and a visible pathway from method to claims. They are not asking for toast because they hate waffles. They are asking for toast because toast is what the institution taught them how to grade.Occasionally, evaluation culture enters the dissertation as a faint trace, a parenthetical marker of pressure rather than a source of authority (Anonymous reviewer, personal communication, Month Day, Year). The parenthesis is not the plot. It is a symptom. It indicates the system’s tendency to translate unfamiliar form into procedural complaint.The turnThe turn is that ABR and post-qual work does not need to abandon standards. It needs standards that can detect what it is actually doing.Tracy’s (2010) “big-tent” criteria offer one useful bridge because they are not tied to a single method script. They prioritize meaningful coherence, rich rigor, credibility, resonance, significant contribution, ethical practice, and worthy topic. Those criteria can be demonstrated through multiple forms of inquiry, including ABR and post-qualitative work, if the dissertation makes its proofs visible.For ABR and post-qual dissertations, visibility often depends on three infrastructural moves. These moves are not concessions to conventional qualitative culture. They are the conditions under which fair evaluation becomes possible under partial proximity.First, a menu paragraph that states what kind of inquiry this is, what counts as evidence here, and where analysis happens. This paragraph should be explicit enough that a toast-trained reader cannot claim confusion as innocence.Second, an interpretation discipline statement that names the rules of reading. What is privileged. What is bracketed. How recurrence is tracked. How uncertainty is named. This is where rigor becomes visible without imitating a coding-to-themes script, while still being accountable to disciplined interpretation (St. Pierre & Jackson, 2014; St. Pierre, 2018).Third, a scope boundary that states what the project does not claim. This protects multi-register inquiry from being treated as if it were attempting generalization and failing. Scope control is not timidity. It is ethical specificity, especially when the phenomenon under study is complex and overdetermined.These signposts do not turn waffles into toast. They keep toast instruments from misreading waffle structure as absence. They also reduce the likelihood that committee reading will drift toward seams, formatting, and procedural nitpicks that function as surrogate battles over form.At the level of dissertation craft, the move is both modest and radical. Modest because it often requires only a few paragraphs placed early and repeated strategically. Radical because it refuses the fiction that the default evaluation instrument is neutral.Exit signThe Breakfast Club will always exist. Committees rotate. Readers arrive tired. Institutions prefer what is easiest to evaluate and easiest to justify.So the question is not how to stop readers from wanting toast. The question is how to make waffles defensible without flattening them.The answer is infrastructural.A reference list that signals lineage without pleading. A menu paragraph that teaches the evaluator what to look for.Interpretation rules that make rigor visible. Scope boundaries that prevent punitive misreadings. A decision trail that shows how making became knowledge.If rigorous inquiry is to include more than toast, then the table has to be set so evaluation can taste what the work is actually doing.ReferencesBarone, T., & Eisner, E. W. (2012). Arts-based research. SAGE Publications. (pp. xx–xx)Lather, P., & St. Pierre, E. A. (2013). Post-qualitative research. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 26(6), 629–633. https://doi.org/10.1080/09518398.2013.788752Leavy, P. (2015). Method meets art: Arts-based research practice (2nd ed.). The Guilford Press. (pp. xx–xx)Lincoln, Y. S., & Guba, E. G. (1985). Naturalistic inquiry. SAGE Publications. (pp. xx–xx)St. Pierre, E. A. (2014). A brief and personal history of post qualitative research: Toward “post inquiry.” Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, 30(2), xx–xx. (Use the page range from the version being cited.)St. Pierre, E. A. (2018). Writing post qualitative inquiry. Qualitative Inquiry, 24(9), 603–608. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800417734567St. Pierre, E. A., & Jackson, A. Y. (2014). Qualitative data analysis after coding. Qualitative Inquiry, 20(6), 715–719. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800414532435Tracy, S. J. (2010). Qualitative quality: Eight “big-tent” criteria for excellent qualitative research. Qualitative Inquiry, 16(10), 837–851. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800410383121

This play stages a familiar academic transaction that is rarely treated as a transaction, the shared draft that arrives as trust and is too often metabolized as opportunity. Rather than handling draft misuse through detection fantasies or after-the-fact grievance, the piece treats the shared document as a live ethical site where permission, credit, and relational safety are negotiated (or quietly violated) in real time, often through ordinary gestures that can be plausibly narrated as harmless. The domestic worlds of Archie Bunker, Fred Flintstone, and Samantha Stephens collide with the bureaucratic agency of "The Doc" and "Version History," producing a comic but precise ethics workshop in which infrastructure is not background but actor. The refrain "Access is not ownership" operates as both rule and dramaturgical hinge, returning across scenes as temptation intensifies, boundaries blur, and the whisper-network consequences of appropriation become legible as an ecosystem response rather than a personal vendetta. The result is a performable pedagogy, designed for table-read, orientation, or faculty development, in which the audience is invited to feel how quickly good intentions become leakage, how easily "help" becomes portability, and how trust is built, or broken, one click at a time.

A document by Richard Wainwright, PhD. Click on the document to view its contents.

The Draft That Came In Too Smooth and the Email That Writes ItselfAbstractThis essay stages a now-common pedagogical friction point, the “too-smooth” student submission that triggers a bodily sense of vacancy before it produces anything you could call proof. Rather than converting that sensation into a compliance pathway, the piece treats it as an ethico-aesthetic diagnostic, a signal that the relationship between writer and text has been thinned by institutional voice norms, workload compression, and the availability of sentence-smoothing systems. The scene, set in a late-term graduate seminar at Thompson Rivers University, follows the familiar institutional reflex to discipline through detection and escalation, then pivots toward a studio framework in which drafts, revision traces, and tool logs become materials for learning rather than instruments of prosecution. The argument is both practical and infrastructural. AI-text detection is demonstrably brittle under ordinary transformations such as paraphrase, and institutions have publicly backed away from detector-led enforcement in response to false-positive risk and opacity (Sadasivan et al., 2023; Krishna et al., 2023; Vanderbilt University, 2023).Keywordsacademic integrity, generative AI, writing pedagogy, aesthetics, studio process, higher educationThe Draft That Came In Too SmoothThe file arrives the way most files arrive now: a timestamp, a soft ping, a polite little act of delivery that pretends it is neutral. A graduate seminar at Thompson Rivers University, late in the term, twenty people moving through capstone pressure with the familiar mix of ambition and fatigue, and the institutional weather shifting hourly because someone has mentioned “AI” in a meeting and suddenly everyone is talking as if the word itself is an emergency procedure.On the screen the submission looks competent, even elegant. It is clean. It is calm. It does not trip over itself. It offers transitions that feel professionally lubricated, and it cites in a way that feels correct without feeling inhabited. Nothing is “wrong,” exactly. That is the first problem.You read a paragraph twice. Then again. There is an odd bodily sensation, not outrage, not moral certainty, more like a quiet draining, as if the prose has vacuumed the air out of the room. A familiar teacherly hunch appears, the kind you do not say out loud because the institution does not like hunches. It likes evidence. It likes categories. It likes a story that ends in a verdict.Still, the body registers something. A thinness. An absence of feeling. The writing performs scholarship the way a hotel lobby performs comfort, everything in the right place, nothing that could be blamed, nothing that could be quoted against you later. You have seen this before, long before generative tools were available, but now the feeling arrives with a new frame hovering around it, a new suspicion that comes preloaded with policy language.The default reflex is already waiting.Caught in the act.Not caught in the arts, not caught in the messy studio where ideas actually form, but caught like a violator, caught with the assumption that the educator’s role is to detect and report. The educator becomes an enforcement node. The student becomes a risk object. The course becomes a small stage where compliance is performed for an invisible audience that never has to read the paper.The trouble is that the file itself does not confess. It just sits there, immaculate and quiet.Most institutions are now carrying a very efficient story about what is happening, and why it is happening. The story goes like this.AI arrived, students started cheating, the old trust model collapsed, and now the ethical task is to build better detection, clearer rules, cleaner escalation pathways. If something feels off, the proper response is to move from intuition to evidence, and from evidence to procedure.It is persuasive because it lets everyone stay calm. It treats the crisis as a technical problem with a technical fix, and it offers a satisfying moral geometry. Innocent work will look human. Guilty work will look machine-made. The system will sort.But “the system will sort” is exactly the misbelief, and it is increasingly hard to defend empirically. Even where detectors appear to work in narrow conditions, research has shown how easily detection can collapse under paraphrase and other low-friction transformations, and how the problem is not only practical but structural (Sadasivan et al., 2023; Krishna et al., 2023).The story persists for the same reasons most institutional stories persist. It protects the institution from having to ask harder questions about what it has been rewarding for decades, and what it has been withdrawing in the meantime: time, feedback, relationship, the slow apprenticeship that makes writing feel like thinking rather than like output. It also gives educators a role that is legible to management. Not mentor. Not witness. Not co-reader. Officer.So the misbelief is not only “AI makes cheating easy.” It is “the main ethical problem here is detection.”And the smooth draft becomes a crime scene.The Email That Writes ItselfOnce suspicion enters the room, the institution offers you a script. You can almost hear the tone of it before you draft it, because you have heard it in committee meetings and professional development sessions that treat the crisis as a workflow problem and the solution as an escalation ladder.There is a way these emails write themselves.They begin with procedural friendliness. They lean on “concern.” They position the student as someone who may have “misunderstood” expectations. They request drafts, outlines, process notes, version history, a trail that can be audited. They imply consequences without naming them, because the naming belongs to another office. They end with a meeting request, which is also a containment strategy. Bring the problem into a controlled space. Make it manageable. Make it legible.The ethical language is there, but it is not exactly ethics. It is risk management wearing ethics’ clothes.You do not want to send that email yet, because the bodily register is not proof, and you know what happens when institutions confuse unease for certainty. You have watched scapegoats get manufactured out of ambiguity. You have watched students, especially students already navigating disability, language difference, precarious work, uneven prior training, get folded into punitive systems that read coping as deceit (Dolmage, 2017; Liang et al., 2023).So instead you sit with the feeling, which is an unfashionable thing to do in a university obsessed with measurable outcomes.You ask a different question.What is the aesthetic signal here?Not “Did you cheat,” but “What happened to the relationship between writer and text.”The MechanismThis is where the talk titled It’s about aesthetics too stops being a slogan and starts acting like a tool for staying human inside the integrity apparatus.The mechanism is not only the model, or the detector, or the policy PDF. It is the interaction between ordinary institutional components that, together, make the smooth draft feel inevitable.Rubrics that quietly reward a narrow band of voice, the polished anonymous voice that sounds like nobody in particular, and punish risk by calling it “unclear.” (This is not an accident. Standardness travels as ideology, and it does gatekeeping work even when nobody names it as such.) (Inoue, 2015; Lippi-Green, 2012)Workloads that compress process until students are forced to treat writing as a late-stage cosmetic task rather than a method of discovering what they think.Platform habits that reduce “writing” to “submitting a file,” as if thought is a detachable unit that can be uploaded without residue.And the new availability of tools that are extremely good at laundering sentences into institutional acceptability, not necessarily more intelligent, not necessarily more ethical, just more compliant. The broader ethical concern is not “machines can produce sentences,” it is that scale and fluency can mask provenance while intensifying existing inequities around voice, legitimacy, and whose language counts as credible (Bender et al., 2021; UNESCO, 2023).The system does not have to tell students to hide. It builds conditions where hiding feels like competence.So the hinge is not “AI use” as such. It is the way institutional legitimacy has been tied to a particular surface, and how quickly surface can now be manufactured.Studio, Not CourtroomA studio framework changes what counts as evidence.In a courtroom, evidence is for verdict.In a studio, evidence is material. It is process, draft, scrap, refusal, revision, constraint, workaround, the messy pile of decisions that led to the thing on the wall. It asks not only what the final piece looks like, but how it came to be, what it cost, what it replaced, what it made possible (Hetland et al., 2007; Schön, 1983). Writing studies has made the same point in its own register: revision is not a cleanup stage, it is where thinking gets made visible (Sommers, 1980).A studio framework does something subtle. It moves the educator away from detective and back toward witness and interlocutor. It also moves the student away from defendant and back toward being an artist of their own learning process, even when that process includes technologies and shortcuts and fear.So you do not ask for “evidence” in the punitive sense. You ask for process in the creative sense.Show me how you worked.Where did you get stuck.What parts felt alive.What parts felt dead.That last word matters. Dead. Because the sensation you had while reading was not merely suspicion, it was a sense of deadness, of prose that moved correctly while refusing contact. You cannot prosecute deadness. But you can respond to it, and you can treat it as a diagnostic. The writing is telling you something about the conditions under which it was made.The Human and Nonhuman CastThe cast is bigger than two people in an office hour.There is the student, tired in a way that looks ordinary now, carrying the soft panic of capstone season, and the learned assumption that sounding like themselves is a liability.There is the educator, holding responsibility for standards while being quietly pushed into an enforcement role, asked to turn perception into proof on demand.There are the nonhuman actors, the learning management system, the policy templates, the similarity report interface, the time-stamps, the auto-generated receipt of submission, the meeting request button that feels like a trapdoor, the version history that can become either a studio tool or a surveillance tool depending on how it is framed (Foucault, 1977).There are constraints that never make it into policy language but do most of the work anyway: budgets, time, disability accommodation procedures, cultural expectations about “professionalism,” the quiet violence of being evaluated for voice in a voice-policed institution (Dolmage, 2017; Lippi-Green, 2012).That is the scene.That is why the smooth file feels haunted.The First ConversationThe student arrives to office hours looking like someone who has not slept properly for weeks. Not dramatic, not theatrical, just the ordinary face of contemporary graduate education, that quiet mix of urgency and depletion. They bring a laptop and a kind of readiness, the readiness of someone who has rehearsed being accused.You start differently than the policy script expects.You ask what the paper is trying to do.They answer quickly, then slower. They can talk. They can think. They can name stakes when you give them space. The gap between their spoken intelligence and the paper’s polished neutrality becomes visible, and it is in that gap that the ethical question sharpens.You ask about their writing process. They hesitate.Then they say it, not defiantly, almost with relief.They used tools. They used them to tighten, to smooth, to make the tone “more academic.” They did not see it as cheating exactly, not in the way copying a paragraph from a website feels like cheating. They saw it as support. They saw it as what everyone is doing. (This is the point where policy language tends to flatten everything into the same category, even when the underlying act is more like tone-conforming than idea-theft.) (Fishman, 2014)You can feel the institution rush back into the room, the impulse to translate this into violation language. But you also feel the other reality, the one the institution keeps refusing to notice. The student was not trying to fake intelligence. They were trying to sound like what the institution rewards.That is a historical point hiding in a small office.The university trained the student to equate legitimacy with a certain voice, then panics when machines can produce that voice on demand. The student did not steal a thought. They outsourced a tone.And the tone, here, is not decoration. It is a gate.Thought in the ActOnce the student names tool use, the conversation could collapse into discipline. It could become a checklist and a warning.But the studio pathway is still available, if you take it seriously as method rather than as vibe. And it is increasingly supported by the boring public record of the last two years: even the major tool-makers and major institutions have admitted, in different ways, that detection is shaky ground for adjudication. Vanderbilt University publicly disabled Turnitin’s AI detector in its learning environment, citing concerns about transparency and false positives (Vanderbilt University, 2023), and reporting has documented that false positives in practice were higher than early claims, with the company itself issuing cautions about false positives and interpretive limits (D’Agostino, 2023; Turnitin, 2023a).You ask to see the prompts. They scroll, slightly embarrassed. The prompts are mostly about sounding better, sounding clearer, sounding scholarly. There is almost nothing in them about ideas, and that is the second problem.The machine was not asked to think with them. It was asked to launder their sentences into acceptability.You name this gently, because gentleness is not indulgence. It is precision. You say the paper reads like it is avoiding risk. You say it reads like it is afraid of having a voice. You say you want to find where the student actually is in the writing, where their own thinking leaves a trace, even if the trace is awkward.The student looks startled, then a little angry, then relieved. They say they did not know they were allowed to sound like themselves. They say the rubrics make them feel like themselves is the thing that will be punished (Inoue, 2015; Lippi-Green, 2012).There it is again.Aesthetics as ethics.Not aesthetics as prettiness, but aesthetics as the felt register of legitimacy, the sensory politics of what counts as “proper academic work.”Caught in the ArtsCaught in the arts is not a slogan. It is a reorientation of attention.Instead of asking only “Is this allowed,” you ask “What does this feel like, and why.” You treat the educator’s bodily response as a diagnostic signal, not a verdict. You treat the student’s relationship to the text as the site of ethical inquiry, not merely the product.So you do not send the integrity email. Not yet. Instead you negotiate a pact. Not a loophole, not a pardon, a pedagogical agreement that moves the moment from adjudication to learning, which is exactly what a teaching-and-learning approach to integrity argues for at the institutional level (Bertram Gallant, 2017; Fishman, 2014).You agree on a revised process.Two sections will be rewritten without smoothing tools, with full permission to be messy. Drafts will be brought in, not as evidence for prosecution, but as material for thinking together. The student will annotate where they feel the urge to polish, where they feel ashamed of their own phrasing, where they start to trade risk for safety. Tool logs stay visible, not as contraband inventory, but as part of the studio table (Hetland et al., 2007; Schön, 1983).You also name boundaries, plainly.Producing whole passages without authorship is not acceptable here, not because a policy says so, but because it severs the learning relation. It turns the course into transaction. It makes education into disguise (Fishman, 2014).Then you say the part most policies avoid.The institution must meet the student halfway, because the institution is implicated in the conditions that made this attractive. If the only rewarded voice is the polished anonymous voice, students will reach for polish machines. If the workload is crushing, students will reach for compression tools. If accommodations are uneven or bureaucratic, students will improvise private accommodations with whatever is available (Dolmage, 2017; UNESCO, 2023).Ethics, here, is not only a rule. It is shared responsibility for the environment that makes certain choices feel like the only choices.The TurnA week later the student brings the rewritten sections.They are less smooth.They are better.There are awkward sentences. There are places where the thought is not fully formed. There are moments where the student’s curiosity shows up, and it is not always polite. It is sometimes jagged. It is sometimes funny. It is sometimes uncertain. It is recognizably situated.You feel the difference in the body. The earlier emptiness is gone. The work does not float. It has weight.This is not a happy ending. It is a re-scaling.The question was never only “Is AI ethical.” The question was “What kind of educational life are we building, and what forms of writing does that life permit.” When the institution treats AI as threat and responds with rule systems, it often produces the dissociation it claims to be preventing. It trains students to hide process. It trains educators to mistrust perception. It makes the classroom feel like a checkpoint.Even the public-facing governance literature is starting to say, in different registers, what your body already knew while reading the too-smooth paragraph: the key problem is not simply tool access, it is what assessment rewards and what learning conditions make shortcuts feel rational. OECD, for instance, frames generative AI as capable of producing performance without learning gains, and it pushes systems toward redesigned assessment that foregrounds planning, reflection, and depth rather than polished output (OECD, 2026).When the institution treats AI as an embedded condition and responds with studio practice, something shifts. The classroom becomes more like a site of making. Accountability becomes relational rather than carceral. The writing becomes contact again, imperfect contact, but real.That shift is fragile. It requires time and resources and faculty support. It requires spaces where students can learn tools openly rather than learning secrecy. It requires a willingness to admit that “voice” has always been policed, and that the new machines did not invent the problem, they just made the old incentives more visible (Inoue, 2015; Lippi-Green, 2012; UNESCO, 2023).For the length of one office hour, and then again in a rewritten draft, the scene holds.A student leaves with a plan that is not only about avoiding punishment. It is about recovering contact with their own work.An educator closes a laptop and feels, briefly, that the job is still possible.And somewhere behind the policy memos and detection fantasies, a quieter truth persists.It was always about aesthetics too.CompletionHere is what completion looks like when you refuse the institution’s preferred competition, the arms race between smoothing and detection that turns learning into a suspicion machine.Completion is not the verdict email, and it is not the fantasy that you can return to a pre-tool innocence. It is the moment the pedagogical relation becomes explicit again, with boundaries that are intelligible in studio terms, grounded in the fundamental values model of integrity as a shared culture rather than a purely punitive apparatus (Bertram Gallant, 2017; Fishman, 2014). It is also the moment you stop pretending detectors can carry the ethical load they keep being handed. OpenAI itself discontinued its AI Classifier tool, citing low accuracy (OpenAI, 2023), and research continues to show why detection, as an enforcement foundation, is brittle under ordinary transformations like paraphrase (Sadasivan et al., 2023; Krishna et al., 2023).So completion, in this piece, is contact restored.Not perfect, not permanent, but real enough that the next file might arrive with less polish, more risk, and a voice that can be held accountable because it is present.ReferencesEmily M. Bender, Timnit Gebru, Angelina McMillan-Major, & Shmargaret Shmitchell. (2021). On the dangers of stochastic parrots: Can language models be too big? In Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT ’21) (pp. 610–623). Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/3442188.3445922Tricia Bertram Gallant. (2017). Academic integrity as a teaching and learning issue: From theory to practice. Theory Into Practice, 56 (2), 88–94. https://doi.org/10.1080/00405841.2017.1308173Sylvie D’Agostino. (2023, June 1). Turnitin’s AI detector: Higher-than-expected false positives. Inside Higher Ed .Jay T. Dolmage. (2017). Academic ableism: Disability and higher education . University of Michigan Press.Teddi Fishman (Ed.). (2014). The fundamental values of academic integrity (2nd ed.). International Center for Academic Integrity.Michel Foucault. (1977). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison (A. Sheridan, Trans.). Pantheon Books.Lois Hetland, Ellen Winner, Shirley Veenema, & Kimberly M. Sheridan. (2007). Studio thinking: The real benefits of visual arts education . Teachers College Press.Asao B. Inoue. (2015). Antiracist writing assessment ecologies: Teaching and assessing writing for a socially just future . The WAC Clearinghouse. https://doi.org/10.37514/PER-B.2015.0698Ehsan Kasneci, et al. (2023). ChatGPT for good? On opportunities and challenges of large language models for education. Learning and Individual Differences, 103 , 102274. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lindif.2023.102274Kalpesh Krishna, Song, Y., Karpinska, M., Wieting, J., & Iyyer, M. (2023). Paraphrasing evades detectors of AI-generated text, but retrieval is an effective defense. arXiv . arXiv:2303.13408.Weixin Liang, Yuksekgonul, M., Mao, Y., Wu, E., & Zou, J. (2023). GPT detectors are biased against non-native English writers. Patterns, 4 (7), 100779. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.patter.2023.100779Rosina Lippi-Green. (2012). English with an accent: Language, ideology and discrimination in the United States (2nd ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203348802OECD. (2026). OECD Digital Education Outlook 2026: Exploring effective uses of generative AI in education . OECD Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1787/062a7394-enOpenAI. (2023, January 31). New AI classifier for indicating AI-written text. (Discontinued July 20, 2023.)Vaishakh S. Sadasivan, Kumar, A., Balasubramanian, S., Wang, W., & Feizi, S. (2023). Can AI-generated text be reliably detected?arXiv . arXiv:2303.11156.Donald A. Schön. (1983). The reflective practitioner: How professionals think in action . Basic Books.Nancy Sommers. (1980). Revision strategies of student writers and experienced adult writers. College Composition and Communication, 31 (4), 378–388. https://doi.org/10.58680/ccc198015930Stevens, S., & Wainwright, R. (2019). Shady figures and shifting grounds for re/truthing: Channeling McLuhan’s posthuman. Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, 34(3).Turnitin. (2023a, March 16). Understanding false positives within our AI writing detection capabilities.UNESCO. (2023). Guidance for generative AI in education and research . https://doi.org/10.54675/EWZM9535Vanderbilt University. (2023, August 16). Guidance on AI detection and why we’re disabling Turnitin’s AI detector.

The day a pop star became a file formatA pop star’s name becomes a systems error:In the mid-1990s, Prince’s shift to an unpronounceable symbol did not only provoke cultural chatter, it exposed the quiet governance of formats, the way databases, style sheets, encoding standards, and newsroom workflows decide what counts as a “name” in the first place. This essay reads “The Artist Formerly Known as Prince” as a compatibility patch, a phrase that let radio scripts, magazine copy, and chart listings keep functioning without admitting that the constraint was infrastructural rather than personal. Following the symbol through custom fonts on floppy disks and the Unicode Standard’s refusal to encode idiosyncratic marks, the piece argues that pop is not remembered by vibes but by retrievability, by what can be stored, sorted, searched, and shipped. The symbol will not fit in the field; the field, in turn, teaches culture whose identities are legible and whose must be translated into supported characters.The symbol will not fit in the field.You can watch the failure happen in slow motion, which is how bureaucratic reality prefers to break. A form with a box for “Artist.” A database column that assumes language arrives as letters. A newsroom style sheet that needs a pronounceable handle. And then this, a glyph that behaves like an icon, not a word, and refuses to be stored without someone inventing a workaround. In the mid-1990s, Prince turned a contract dispute into a typographic problem by replacing his stage name with an unpronounceable symbol, the one fans nicknamed the Love Symbol. (Forde, 2015). (The Guardian)The public solution was a sentence that sounded like pop wit but worked like a patch, in the plain technical sense. A patch is the small fix you apply to a system so it can keep functioning without being rebuilt, a quick compatibility layer that lets everything continue as if nothing fundamental is wrong. “The Artist Formerly Known as Prince” did exactly that. It moved cleanly through radio scripts and magazine copy and chart listings, letting everybody keep filing him under something, anything, rather than admit the filing cabinet itself was the constraint. (Forde, 2015). (The Guardian)That patch is the object on the table. Not the celebrity. The patch.Because once you see it as a patch, the story stops being a cute anecdote about eccentricity and starts behaving like a lesson in how pop gets remembered. Not by vibes. By formats. By whatever can be typed, sorted, searched, and shipped on deadline.The easy version, the one that flatters the reader, is a personality story. A genius gets “weird.” A star gets dramatic. The harder version is procedural. It is about contracts, release schedules, ownership of names, and the quiet authority of systems that were designed for normal cases and then asked to process someone who refused to be normal on purpose.Prince’s biography makes that refusal feel less random than it gets framed. He was born Prince Rogers Nelson on June 7, 1958, in Minneapolis, and he was the rare kind of composer who could also perform professionally across instruments, which is another way of saying he did not need the industry’s assembly line to complete him. (Walser, 2026). (Encyclopedia Britannica) The more he could do himself, the more the bottleneck became everything outside the music, the calendar, the label’s pace, the corporate comfort with scarcity. You can treat that as temperament, or you can treat it as physics. A person who makes work quickly experiences slow permission as a kind of captivity.So when the conflict with Warner Bros. Records sharpened in the early to mid-1990s, it was not just “artist versus label” in the abstract. It was also an argument about control of output and about the unsettling premise that a company could own and control not only the music released under a name, but the name as a usable container. Forde describes Prince’s position bluntly, including the claim that Warner owned and controlled his name along with the music released under it. (Forde, 2015). (The Guardian)He did not keep the dispute polite. He took it public, including appearing with the word “slave” written on his face, a stark act of messaging that made the legal fight readable as a moral one, whether you agreed with his framing or not. (Forde, 2015). (The Guardian)Then he did something stranger and, in its own way, calmer.He made his name incompatible.The mechanism here is indexing, which sounds boring until you notice how intimate it is. Indexing is how culture becomes retrievable. It is the promise that if you remember the right handle, you can find the thing again. A glyph breaks that promise in a very specific way. It forces every part of the pop pipeline to improvise. Radio needs a sayable phrase. Print needs something that will not collapse into a blank square. Databases need a string that can be stored, sorted, and searched. Even fans need something they can request without pointing at a record sleeve and shrugging.So the world minted the patch phrase and used it everywhere.The funniest part, and the most revealing, is that the music press did not only invent language. It installed software.Rhodes notes that news outlets received floppy disks containing a font download of the glyph because nobody could easily type the symbol. (Rhodes, 2016). (WIRED) Feldman, writing about the same workaround, spells out the practical absurdity from the print side, writers and layout designers could not type the name, so a custom-designed font was distributed to news outlets on a floppy disk. (Feldman, 2016). (New York Magazine)That detail is doing more work than it seems. It is a little time capsule of the era, yes. It is also the story’s hinge.Picture the scene. Late-night production desk. Somebody trying to make a page close. A disk on the table that contains, essentially, a letter-shaped solution to a problem that should not have been a problem. The disk is not a souvenir. It is an emergency adapter. It exists so the machine can keep humming without admitting its limits.That is what patches do. They keep things running. They also hide the fact that the system cannot handle what it claims to represent.There is another back room inside the symbol itself, and it matters because it keeps the episode anchored in craft rather than mysticism. The Love Symbol was not a dream that drifted onto a record sleeve. It was made under deadline. Rhodes reports that in 1992, Mitch Monson and Lizz Luce were approached at Paisley Park because Prince “needed a symbol,” and the work moved quickly. (Rhodes, 2016). (WIRED) If you look closely at the mark, Rhodes notes both its merge of gendered iconography and its deliberate imperfection, the slight imbalance that people kept wanting to “clean up,” and that Prince refused to perfect. (Rhodes, 2016). (WIRED)That small design choice is a perfect Prince detail because it is not only aesthetic. It is a refusal of corporate polish as a default virtue. The mark is meant to feel like a body rather than a diagram. It is slightly uncooperative by design. The visual world is already arguing with the systems that want everything to be smooth.Now zoom out. The symbol forces a culture of workarounds.Feldman’s reporting adds another layer of mundane friction that makes the whole thing feel less like legend and more like office life. The custom font substituted the symbol for what would otherwise be a capital P, and it came with usage and installation instructions, stern enough to sound like someone who has been fielding panicked calls from editors and graphic designers all day. (Feldman, 2016). (New York Magazine) It is hard not to love that image. Not because it is cute, but because it is honest about where pop actually lives, in the places where people do unglamorous work so glamorous stories can circulate.This is where the episode stops being only about Prince and starts being about the ordinary world we all live in, the one where “unsupported characters” is treated as a normal sentence. A name becomes a technical problem and then, without anyone saying so, a social one. If the system cannot store you, it asks you to simplify yourself. If you refuse, it asks everyone around you to translate you into something it can handle.Prince could force that translation work to happen because he was already famous enough that accommodation was easier than refusal. That is not praise or blame. It is leverage described plainly. The same mechanism lands very differently on people who do not have that leverage, whose names are misspelled forever in official records, whose diacritics are quietly dropped, whose identity gets flattened into the nearest available option because the form must be submitted.If you want the story to feel near-present without dragging in another celebrity, there is an even more quietly delicious twist.The Love Symbol still does not sit comfortably inside plain text.The reason is not that computers are malicious. It is that character encoding standards draw a boundary around what counts as “text.” The Unicode Standard is explicit that it does not encode personal, idiosyncratic characters and it does not encode logos or graphics. (Unicode Consortium, n.d.). (Unicode) That puts Prince’s symbol in a permanent kind of exile. It behaves like a logo. Unicode, by design, does not want to become a museum of private brands and one-off marks. So the symbol keeps falling back into workarounds, custom fonts, images pasted into layouts, substitutions, and the old patch phrase that can travel anywhere.Seen this way, the “Artist Formerly Known as Prince” era is not just a pop culture memory. It is a stress test for the idea that our systems are neutral containers. They are not. They are choices that look like nature once they have been around long enough.InterludeA pop star is not only a person. A pop star is a routing event.That is why this story still feels contemporary even if you remember it the first time. It is about what happens when a human being collides with the boring machinery that makes culture legible at scale. The name change was a fight conducted in public, but it was also a demonstration. Here is what happens when the artist refuses to be filed. Here is what the filing system does next.It is worth remembering, too, that the symbol did not become a permanent identity in the romantic sense. Rhodes notes that after Prince’s contract with Warner ended, he returned to using Prince again. (Rhodes, 2016). (WIRED) That return is not a betrayal of the symbol. It is a clue. The symbol was a tactic calibrated to a constraint, and when the constraint shifted, the tactic could shift too.So where does that leave us, if we are trying to end like a drawer already ajar rather than a moral of the story.Back at the field.The symbol will not fit in the field. The field will keep asking for patches. The patches will keep doing what patches do, smoothing over incompatibility so the machine can keep humming, while quietly teaching everyone to treat the machine’s limits as natural.The uncomfortable question is not whether Prince was right or wrong, or whether the stunt was genius or petulant. The uncomfortable question is what else we have already patched over so thoroughly that it feels like reality, what names and sounds and selves we keep translating into “supported characters” so culture can keep moving at speed, and who never gets the luxury of forcing the system to show its seams.The symbol will not fit in the field.Now the field looks less like a neutral container and more like a decision someone made, long ago, about what kind of name the world was allowed to remember.So we end where we began, at the box that cannot hold the symbol. The “Artist Formerly Known as Prince” patch did its job, which is to say it kept the machine running while making the machine’s limitations feel natural, inevitable, not even worth naming. Prince could force accommodation because fame functions like leverage; the same incompatibility, elsewhere, becomes a quiet erasure, a diacritic dropped, a name flattened, a self revised to fit the available character set. The Love Symbol remains a reminder that infrastructures do not merely carry culture, they edit it, and their edits accumulate until they read as reality. The symbol will not fit in the field. Which means the field is not neutral; it is a decision, still operating, about what kinds of names the world is willing to remember.

A document by Richard Wainwright, PhD. Click on the document to view its contents.

A document by Richard Wainwright, PhD. Click on the document to view its contents.

This document explores the concepts associated with glitchy writing, which defies conventional academic structures and methodologies. Inspired by Paul Klee's Open Book (1930) and incorporating a variety of collaborative and experimental practices, this work rethinks the boundaries of academic writing by incorporating anarchive concepts, posthuman philosophy, and glitch aesthetics. Drawing on joint studies, theoretical divergences, and intertextual explorations, this paper challenges the norms of linear article structures and proposes a remix approach to scholarly production. Informed by Deleuze and Guattari's (1987) rhizomatic thinking and Erin Manning's (2016) notion of 'minor gestures,' this work emphasizes the dynamic and evolving nature of knowledge production. It's also meant as a light playful way to learn glitch aesthetics and the writing of xxx

The RiffWhat term may be applied to an intuitively formed academic discourse of many years’ length that has been entirely conducted by way of various technologies and functions such as phone, text, email? We call it riff—interactive and freeform. And if we approach it scientifically, we practice Riffology. As we seek to reference our interest in educational ontologies, we prefix it with [onto], which we enclose in brackets to suggest a compound word that’s primacy of focus is placed on the active (action) constituent of “riff” and “riffing.” [onto]Riffology. We have been archiving emails and texts passed between us in an approach to learning that is largely thus: technology facilitated encounters gratifying our embodied curiosities and abecoming curricula without syllabi. Incrementally, we have witnessed our inquiries broaden, understandings multiply, and relationships in assemblage intensify. As educators, students and researchers we believe that there are evolving ways of learning in relationships whereby we simultaneously plug-in technological platforms and facilitate education’s capabilities and capacities.