Transmissions: Critical Tactics for Making and Communicating Research (The MIT Press)

Researchers rethink tactics for inventing and disseminating research, examining the use of such unconventional forms as poetry, performance, catalogs, interactive machines, costume, and digital platforms.

Transmission is the research moment when invention meets dissemination—the tactical combination of making (how theory, methods, and data shape research) and communicating (how research is shown and shared). In this book, researchers from a range of disciplines examine tactics for the transmission of research, exploring such unconventional forms as poetry, performance, catalogs, interactive machines, costume, and digital platforms. Focusing on transmissions draws attention to a critical part of the research process commonly overlooked and undervalued. Too often, the results of radically experimental research methodologies are pressed into conventional formats. The contributors to Transmissions rethink tactics for making and communicating research as integral to the kind of projects they do, pushing against disciplinary edges with unexpected and creative combinations and collaborations.

Each chapter focuses on a different tactic of transmission. One contributor merges literary styles of the empirical and poetic; another uses an angle grinder to construct machines of enquiry. One project invites readers to participate in an exchange about value; another provides a series of catalog cards to materialize ordering systems of knowledge. All the contributors share a commitment to uniting the what with the how, firmly situating their transmissions in their research and in each unique chapter of this book.

Contributors
Nerea Calvillo, Rebecca Coleman, Larissa Hjorth, Janis Jefferies, Kat Jungnickel, Sarah Kember, Max Liboiron, Kristina Lindström, Alexandra Lippman, Bonnie Mak, Julien McHardy, Julia Pollack, Ingrid Richardson, Åsa Ståhl, Laura Watts

Kat Jungnickel is Senior Lecturer in the Sociology Department of Goldsmiths, University of London and the author of Bikes and Bloomers: Victorian Women Inventors and Their Extraordinary Cycle Wear (Goldsmiths Press).