This research investigates flow experiences and explores meaning construction for artistic practices that differ in haptic nature. In addition to the phenomenological analysis of interviews, videos of artistic practice and practice-based research (in which participants instruct the researcher in their primary techniques) were employed to obtain both retrospective and real-time records of the physicality of artistic practice. Drawing on authors who emphasise the automatisation of actions in flow (Dietriche, 2004; Spinelli, 2005) and heightened body awareness (Pagis, 2009) flow is reconceptualised in non-representational terms as optimal precognitive engagement with the world. In this light meaning in flow results not from bringing order to the mind as Csikszentmihalyi (2002) proposed, but through its embodied construction in activity. Analyses revealed that the sources of enjoyment and meaning, the relationship between artist, tools and artwork, and the nature and extent of self-differentiation differ between artists who work in two (2D) and three (3D) dimensions, and whose physical actions differ in the production of their artwork. 2D artists derive enjoyment from their creative process and meaning from capturing an atmosphere or place, and attribute artistic control to their artwork. 3D artists derive more enjoyment from the product of their artistic activity and meaning from the recreation of the self in material form, and do not attribute artistic control to the artwork. Consequently, embodied physicality of activity appears fundamental to similarities in flow experiences and meaning-making: accounts of flow and the meanings generated in activity differ between activities that differ in their haptic or performative nature but are similar among haptically similar activities.

The recent trend towards practice-based routes to knowledge has raised methodological questions concerning how best to research practices. Within the geography of art, the expansion over recent decades of collaborative and practice-based approaches has raised similar questions, along with concerns regarding the appropriateness of geographers not trained in art to undertake their own artistic practice within their research. This article grapples with these questions in relation to my own geographic-artistic research, through which I sought to generate boundary understanding or 'knowing between' different practices. I outline my own research method, which employed both qualitative interviews and practice-based research with artists, and present two case studies to highlight particular insights gained during the practice-based research, over and above those acquired through semi-structured interviews. These case studies reveal the insubstantial and fragile nature of boundaries between practices and levels of proficiency, and raise political issues for inter-disciplinary activities, problematizing in particular the role of the qualitative interview as a stand-alone method in research into practices, and recent calls for artsbased research only to be conducted by those proficient in art.

This chapter’s author interrogates the spaces and knowledges of interdisciplinarity by exploring the relationship between alternative understandings of expertise (improficiency), academic career prospects (professionalization), inter-/disciplinary spaces (the undisciplined), and research practices. She considers the implications of interdisciplinarity for the spatialization of disciplines themselves, emergent knowledges, the academics generating them, and understandings of expertise. She argues that the prefix ‘inter-’ is most appropriate in individual (not team-based) contexts, as the co-location of different knowledges in the body of one researcher holds particular promise, despite this promise being underappreciated. In this chapter, she offers a variegated conceptualization of inter-/extra-disciplinary spaces; a refined understanding of expertise across interdisciplinary practices; and suggestions as to how academic institutions can better support interdisciplinary careers. Rather than progressively dismantling interdisciplinary spaces, knowledges, and practitioners, proponents of different disciplines can validate and help to realize the potential for interdisciplinary work to ricochet productively among the disciplines, rather than continually policing the borders between them.

This paper explores the psychological phenomenon of flow through a nonrepresentational geographical emphasis on material practices. Both the positivity and skillschallenge balance assumed to characterise flow are brought into question by the challenge and negative feelings arising from material aspects of artistic practice. This challenge appears to be localised around a pivotal point in the emergence of the artwork, and essential for both successful completion of the artwork and experience of flow. This localisation is conceived as a period of chimerical instability in the ontological status of the artwork, during which the artwork is more than a series of marks but not yet a finished work, and a zone of indiscernibility concerning when activity should cease. Particular features of material practiceheterotechnicity or cooperative framework, and heterochrony or magnification of effects from small scale changes-provide a means of rethinking the skills-challenge relationship in artistic flow experiences.

With growing social science interest in the potential for images to facilitate access to embodied experience, this study re-examines the relative value of visual and verbal methods in body-oriented research. Taking one lead from Kyrölä’s (2016) idea of body image as the relationship between representation and corporeality, and another from Gendlin’s (1993, 1995, 1997) methods for attending to and articulating from pre-reflective experience, we develop a method that juxtaposes words and images to explore the role of pre-reflective understanding on body image among teenage girls. The study highlights both an influencing role for pre-reflective understanding in body image and the availability of pre-reflective understanding to participants. While recognising persistent challenges in communicating embodied experience, we propose a method for engaging and working with embodied or pre-reflective experience in social science research by integrating the verbal and the visual in a specific way.