Emma Cocker is a writer-artist and Associate Professor in Fine Art at Nottingham Trent University, UK. Her research enquiry unfolds at the threshold between writing/art, involving diverse process-oriented, dialogic-collaborative and aesthetic-poetic approaches to working with and through language. Cocker often works in collaboration with other artists on durational projects, where the studio-gallery or site-specific context is approached as a live laboratory for shared artistic research. Cocker’s writing has been published in Failure, 2010; Stillness in a Mobile World, 2010; Drawing a Hypothesis: Figures of Thought, 2011; Hyperdrawing: Beyond the Lines of Contemporary Art, 2012; On Not Knowing: How Artists Think, 2013; Choreo-graphic Figures: Deviations from the Line, 2017; The Creative Critic: Writing as/about Practice, 2018; Live Coding: A User's Manual, 2023, and in the solo collections, The Yes of the No, 2016, and How Do You Do?, 2025. Cocker is co-founder of the international Society for Artistic Research Special Interest Group for Language-based Artistic Research. See also https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2985-7839

Special Issue: Practices of Phenomenological and Artistic Research

I am a co-editor (with Alex Arteaga, Juha Himanka and Journal Editor Erika Goble) of a Special Issue of the Journal of Phenomenology and Practice, on “Practices of Phenomenological and Artistic Research”.
This special issue will explore existing and possible connections between two different sets of practices: phenomenological research practice and artistic research practice. On the one hand, both sets of practices share a basic aspect: they approach their object of research as phenomena, that is, through their phenomenal presences. On the other hand, these sets of practice are configured by different forms of action developed in different media — among many others, written or oral language, drawing, architectural design, film, photography, sound or body movement. On this twofold basis, we are inviting submissions that address the following questions and demonstrate them in action: How do the commonalities between practices and methods of artistic and phenomenological research manifest? How can phenomenological research be accomplished in artistic media and by artistic means? How can artistic research extend the scope of phenomenology as research practice? In turn, how can phenomenology contribute to further develop artistic research practices? 
The focus of this special issue goes beyond traditional views of the relationships between art and phenomenology by considering both as fields of research, or more specifically, as ways of researching through phenomena. For the purposes of this special issue, art is not approached as an object of research for phenomenologists and phenomenology should not be treated in this context as a theoretical reference for artists producing art works. Accordingly, we are neither focusing on inquiry into practices of artistic production based in or inspired by phenomenology nor on phenomenological theories of art.
Instead, we are focusing on research practices developed through the influence, combination or even hybridization of phenomenological and artistic approaches. We are convinced that in pushing this subject matter we are contributing to an original methodological development of both fields: phenomenology and artistic research.
We invite submissions from artistic researchers and phenomenologists that activate the concerns of this Special Issue, Practices of Phenomenological and Artistic Research. The call can be viewed here.