Doing Creative Work
from Your Political Body


A Process and Guide for Practice-led Research
by Myriam D. Diatta

REVIEWS


Doing Creative Work from Your Political Body is an invitation to make from the whole self—skin, breath, memory, ache, joy, contradiction. It’s for artists, designers, writers, performers, educators, and cultural workers who’ve been asked (too often) to leave their politics outside the studio. To “be neutral.” To tidy their truths into something more digestible. This book says: no. Bring your body. Bring your entire history. Bring the future you desire.
   Myriam Diatta offers a practice that moves between inner knowing and outer making, between what we’ve survived and what we’re trying to build. This book explores how to identify and listen to what the body has been storing, materialize what’s been unnamed, locate theory in the evidence of your own process, and recognize what lives in the space between theory and practice—that slippery, powerful space where transformation actually happens. It’s both framework and workbook: poetic, precise, built for the studio, the classroom, and the long work of becoming.
   Doing Creative Work from Your Political Body is a grounded, generous, and clear-eyed companion for the solitary maker and a framework for collective learning— so your work can hold complexity, honor lineage, and still reach forward, making room for more of us to arrive.
—Stephanie Dinkins
Artist; Kusama Chair in Art, Stony Brook University; Founder, Future Histories Studio

Creative practice researchers have been taught that theory—the ideas and knowledges that help us navigate our worlds—is forever separate from practice—the things and experiences we make, our politics, and who and what we love. This false binary makes practice-led research writing a struggle: we lose ourselves in theory's abstractions and silence what we know through making. But theory lives in the intimate and everyday details of practice—in the movement between personal and political and among hands, heart and head.
   This book shows how, by writing from that beautiful entanglement, we can materialize and embody the change we seek. It gives us a guide for learning to love writing as an embodied, politicised practice. It is an invitation to trust the felt sense of your practice and to celebrate that how you know and what you make shape not just how you write, but how you live.
—Stacy Holman Jones
Co-Editor of the Handbook of Autoethnography, Professor of Theatre and Performance at Monash University

“Doing theory, thinking practice.” Guided by this canny formulation, Diatta’s work patiently unravels tired antinomies in her vital effort to align values to action. Experimental, poetic, and autoenthnographic, this deeply felt and dazzling work plumbs the means by which systemic trauma lives in the body, takes shape in creative practices, and yet can be channeled to reimagine a material politics of the everyday.
—Jamer Hunt
Professor of Transdisciplinary Design, Parsons School of Design | The New School, Co-Curator of Design and Violence, Museum of Modern Art












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BOOKINGTo invite Myriam to speak at your event, program, lab, or course, contact her at myriamddiatta (at) gmail.com.

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