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

Research Article: Dorsal Practices




The article ‘Dorsal Practices—Towards a Back-Oriented Being-in-the-World’ (co-authored by Katrina Brown and Emma Cocker) has been accepted for the forthcoming Special Issue, Tara Page (ed.) ‘With–In Bodies: Research Assemblages of the Sensory and the Embodied’, of the journal Humanities (ISSN 2076-0787).


Link to Special Issue here.

Link to our article,  ‘Dorsal Practices—Towards a Back-Oriented Being-in-the-World’ here. Please do download the PDF version - as the formatting works better than online.

 

About the Special Issue: Bodies and things are not as separate as we were once taught, and their intra-relationship is vital to how we come to know ourselves as humans and how we learn and know our environments—our place-worlds. In 1994, bell hooks conceived of pedagogy as a ‘union of the mind, body and spirit, not just for striving for knowledge in books, but knowledge about how to live in the world’; using this conception, practices and theories of teaching and learning can be understood as an entanglement of the body with the world (social and material), which can be both learnt from and utilized to teach from. So, the body–bodies are complex intra-actions (Barad, 2007) of the social and affective, where embodiment is a process of intra-actions with other bodies—the body–bodies—and these practices of embodiment are the core of our ways of knowing, learning, and being. This Special Issue of Humanities will present research and research processes that are embodied, affective, and relational to explore the complex materialities of bodies. Contributions might explore this topic through a focus on methodology, theoretical framework/s, or political positioning—such as through bodies immersed in social relations of power. This Special Issue aims to examine how we are always with–in bodies, and how research assemblages work the entanglements of bodies with–in matter, bodies with–in theory, bodies with–in practice, bodies with–in research, and bodies with–in other bodies—to develop the new, disrupt the current, and bring together knowledges and understandings of embodiment across disciplines and place-worlds.

 

Image: Katrina Brown and Emma Cocker, Dorsal Practices. Photographic documents/scores generated in S1 Artspace Studios, Sheffield, November 2022. Original video stills by Leon Lockley.