Performing Research
Fall 2025

Diffractive drawing exercise in Session 4 @ Gustav Nielsen

"To the affirmative and diffractive co-experimentation with concepts and binaries for justice-to-come" - Karin Murris (2022, dedication page)

While researching, theorizing and practicing architecture has traditionally been considered separate but related activities—sometimes inter-acting as praxis—in performing research we inquire on what might emerge when these are always already entangled and intra-acting. Working through our disciplined carrier bag of methods for research in architecture we are un/learning with feminist new materialist, critical posthumanist and postqualitative approaches as we collectively explore the ethical implications of our knowledge-making practices when they are also world-making. As we attend with care to the agencies of matter—both real and virtual—known approaches such as participatory action research (PAR), practice-based research (PBR), arts-based research (ABR), and design-led research (DR) are read/written/practiced, re-turned, and folded with each other, our own practices, and narratives of transition, democracy, genocide, coloniality, and regeneration to develop methodologies-in-the-making for response-able transdisciplinary architectures. It is the pursuit of a researching Otherwise (Bathla, 2024) which reaches for plural worlds, but also a diffractive (Barad, 2007, 2014) researching attentive to and affected by the effects of interfering practices, ideas, and matters in their co-constitutive and iterative performativity.

Lecturer:
Gustav Nielsen @gustavkvnielsen

Collaborators:
COA @culturesofassembly
ASA @asa.unilu
Facilitec @facilitec_luxembourg
Centre Formida @centre_formida
SIVEC @sivec_recycling
DOM Publishers @dompublishers

References

Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Duke University Press.

Barad, K. (2014). Diffracting Diffraction: Cutting Together-Apart. Parallax, 20(3), 168–187.

Bathla, N. (Ed.). (2024). Researching Otherwise: Pluriversal Methodologies for Landscape and Urban Studies. gta Verlag.

Murris, K. (Ed.). (2022). A Glossary for Doing Postqualitative, New Materialist and Critical Posthumanist Research Across Disciplines. Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.