Freezing ontologies: making visible the messiness of working with theory

Abstract

ABSTRACT For creatives, scholars, and social practitioners, how we attend to theory and practice are of great consequence. This essay is a performative exercise that shows my relationship with theory at work—offering a practical approach and a look into the sweats and spinning we might do as we engage with textual theory. This is opposed to locking the worldviews in place artificially. Given the messy, ever-changing nature of tethering theory and practice, I present an approach for reformatting text on the page, allowing for temporalities of coming to understand theory, and taking up space with embodied personal experience.