“The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.” — Mary Oliver
The Quiet Violence of Waiting
I was wrong. Or I became wrong. Or I was made wrong. It’s hard to tell where one ends and the other begins. Wrong like water finding its way through the smallest crack, slow, relentless, until one day, the structure gives. Wrong like a life spent colouring inside the lines, believing obedience might earn me the right to step beyond them. The long game of discipline, of deference. Of waiting for risk to stop feeling like risk. I kept waiting. It never came.
The mistake, if I can call it that, was believing creativity could be deferred. Set aside, saved for later, pulled from a drawer when the time was right. But creativity does not abide delay. It atrophies, becomes brittle, untrusting. You think you are keeping it safe, but really, you are starving it. The real risk is not doing the work. The real risk is waiting too long to begin.
The old logic: survive first, create later. Learn the rhythms of the institution, sync your voice to its frequency, let the brittle geometry of outputs and citations shape your speech. I followed the script, convinced that certainty was something to be earned, that belonging would be the reward. But certainty never came, and belonging—if it ever arrived—was conditional. A moving target, dissolving the moment I thought I had found it.
I learned, as so many do, to mimic fluency. To smooth my edges, make myself legible. I let the hunger for legitimacy hollow me out. “Hold off on taking risks until you find stability,” they said. So I did. But stability never arrived. And in its absence, my creative self shrank to a whisper.
To live like this is to carry wrongness like a stone in the gut. Each misstep calcifies into doubt, each stumble a lesson in containment. You tell yourself you are making careful choices, but really, you are perfecting the slow art of self-erasure. The wrong institution. The wrong battles. The wrong dreams. The wrong allies. You think if you can get it right next time, the weight will lift. But the weight is structural, built into the conditions of participation.
So I rationed my creativity. I triaged my writing. I told myself I’d wait, that I’d hold onto the work that made me feel most alive until it was safer. Until it was more justifiable. But in waiting, I deferred the very thing that might have saved me.
This essay is a reckoning with that deferral, a letter from the other side of regret. A way of saying: the risk never diminishes. The stakes only shift. This is an invitation, maybe, to those of us who have learned to be cautious, to those who have trimmed their work into something palatable. A reminder that sometimes, the only way forward is to be wrong. To let the wrongness swell, to refuse to correct it. To sit inside the discomfort long enough to see what else might be possible.
Writing against the Grain
To write within any academic discipline is to accept its terms, often without realising it. A contract, unseen but binding, dictating not just what can be said but how it must be said, shaping thought at its root. I learned this early. Not just a matter of style, but of ontology—how to exist in ways that make sense to our neoliberal institutions. I learned to sand the jagged edges, smooth raw experience into something legible, trim and tighten until what remained fit the flattened grammar of legitimacy.
And yet. What happens when the edges refuse to be dulled? When what you write—what you live—doesn’t fold neatly into the structure provided? At first, you think it’s you. That you lack fluency, the right citations, the right inflection of certainty. But wrongness, I’ve come to see, is not about personal failure. It is the moment the scaffolding of a system is made visible, when you see—perhaps for the first time—that the terms of the contract were never neutral. That knowledge, rigour, reality itself are not pure pursuits of truth but machines calibrated for particular kinds of sense-making—ones that can be measured, funded, absorbed without too much disruption.
To write against them is not just to shift an argument’s style but to unsettle the very conditions of what can be known, how it can be expressed, who is permitted to speak. And maybe, just maybe, to sit with that discomfort long enough to let something else emerge.
This is not about small tweaks, minor reforms, soft calls for inclusion. It is about calling the whole thing into question. The policing of form, the fear of experiment—these aren’t incidental. They are the architecture of institutional authority, the mechanisms of control. To write against them is not just to shift an argument’s style but to unsettle the very conditions of what can be known, how it can be expressed, who is permitted to speak. And maybe, just maybe, to sit with that discomfort long enough to let something else emerge.
The Lure of the Unresolved
Wrongness aches for correction. It wants to be smoothed over, stitched into acceptability. But some wrongness refuses to be made right. It lingers—less an error than an excess, something that cannot be absorbed, that sits at the edges of legibility. Anthropology, in its hunger for understanding, has always chased resolution: the definitive account, the compelling interpretation, the final say. Even in critique, even in its turn towards decolonisation and self-reckoning, it clings to form, to structure, to the belief that if it interrogates itself hard enough, it might be redeemed.
But some things do not resolve. Some things resist legibility, refuse to settle into meaning. Anthropology’s entanglements with power, its extractive logics, aren’t mistakes to be corrected but conditions to be lived with. The best we can do is stay with the discomfort, write from the mess, resist the urge to smooth things over.
Failure is not just a consequence of wrongness; it is what happens when wrongness refuses absorption. It is what lingers when meaning fails to cohere. To create from this place is not just to play with form—it is to reject the idea that knowledge must move towards closure. That to know is to stabilise, to make seamless, to render coherent. Creative anthropology is not an ornament, not an embellishment—it is the practice itself. It is the work of undoing certainty, of dwelling in the gaps, of making visible what refuses to be contained.
Lauren Berlant knew this. Ambivalence isn’t hesitation—it’s a muscle held in tension. The strength to resist resolution, to sit with contradiction without forcing it to collapse. “You don’t stop being in the world,” Berlant reminds us, “but you also make other possibilities.” Not dismantling the past, but bending it, stretching it, letting it breathe into new dimensions. Not fleeing the failures of the institution but inhabiting them—fully, honestly—without the false hope that critique alone will transform them.
Halberstam’s Queer Art of Failure calls for failure as refusal, a way of sidestepping success on the institution’s terms. Anthropology permits failure, but only in ways it can metabolise—self-reflexivity, methodological uncertainty, critique—gestures that ultimately reaffirm its legitimacy. But what of the failures that refuse absorption? The work that does not cohere, does not reassure, does not fit? The writing that lingers at the edges rather than smoothing them down?
Taking failure seriously means letting it stand, uncorrected. Writing not for resolution but for the possibility that something might crack open. This is not an argument against anthropology, but a plea for an anthropology willing to soften, to unfasten, to lean into its own unravelling. One that does not tighten its grip in the face of uncertainty, but loosens, shifts, makes space for the uncontainable. An anthropology that moves not towards mastery, but towards the tremble, the fracture, the knowledge that stays in flux.
A Cartography of Disorientation
“All children ‘write.’ I suppose the real question is why do so many people give it up.” — Margaret Atwood
C.S. Lewis said, “We read to know we are not alone.” But writing is something else. Writing is the slow unspooling of solitude, a thread pulled from the dark, a pulse beneath the skin. A friend once told me that writing reminds us we’re alive[1]. I think of this when the words come in fits and starts, when they settle heavy in the body before they ever reach the page.
I dabbled in creative work my whole life but never fully committed. I told myself I would return to it later, when the timing was better, when it felt less like a risk. Then everything stopped. The pandemic, the silence, the sudden halt of movement. The border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland thickening overnight between my home in Dublin and my place of work and university in Belfast, a slow unravelling of rules, a reminder that control is always an illusion. And then, a deeper rupture. The death of a beloved family member. Grief moved through me like a tidal shift, pulling everything loose, dredging up what had been buried under the daily negotiations of work, deadlines, the logistics of being a body in a system. In that stillness, something else stirred—a different kind of urgency, an insistence. If not now, then when?
Grief did not come as a singular event but as an atmosphere, dense and inescapable. It moved in like weather—thick, unrelenting. Not just sadness, but a severing. A breaking open. The body learned it first: breath shallower, a tightness in the throat, sleep reduced to a raw, buzzing state of almost. No single point of impact, just a diffuse ache, a pull under the ribs.
Ami Harbin (2016), whose work explores disorientation, calls this tenderising—when loss strips you down to something softer, unarmoured, making even the most familiar landscapes feel foreign. But I was already frayed. The pandemic had turned my working life into a kind of bureaucratic free fall, caught between the shifting jurisdictions of Ireland and Northern Ireland, each with their own erratic, sometimes contradictory rules. One week I could cross the border to teach, the next I couldn’t. Forms, tests, permissions—always a new requirement, always the feeling that I was failing to keep up. I moved through that chaos in a constant state of adjustment, a low-level panic humming beneath everything. But when death arrived, it was not something to be navigated. It was a fault line, a sudden and total rupture. The professional chaos had been exhausting, but grief was something else entirely. It didn’t ask for management. It simply took over.
And so my grief stripped everything back to its rawest form, revealing how little control I had—over work, over movement, over loss itself. The exhaustion of managing shifting regulations, of trying to keep pace with the relentless recalibrations of border policies and university mandates, had already worn me thin. But grief had no forms to fill, no protocols to follow. It simply insisted. And in that insistence, something else surfaced—something unruly, something I had spent years trying to contain.
Academia sells a different promise—stability through adherence. The fantasy that if you conform enough, the doubt will quiet, the hunger will settle. But untamed creativity refuses all that. It calls out what we bury, what lingers beneath. For me, writing became a way back to myself, a pulling in of something I’d let drift too far. Each page, a reclamation. Each page, a small act of defiance.
But creative work sharpened my attention to something else—the excess, the overflow, the things that refuse containment. It taught me to trust form as a mode of inquiry, to understand that how we tell matters as much as what we tell.
Does this make me a better anthropologist? No. It makes me a different one. Less invested in proving my place, more willing to risk. Less tethered to the authority of argument, more drawn to the generative potential of uncertainty. Anthropology already teaches us to sit with contradiction, to listen for what is unsaid, to track the slippages between language and gesture, structure and feeling. But creative work sharpened my attention to something else—the excess, the overflow, the things that refuse containment. It taught me to trust form as a mode of inquiry, to understand that how we tell matters as much as what we tell.
Creative work made me more attuned to the rhythm of knowledge—its pauses, its hesitations, its eruptions. It allowed me to see that certain truths can only be gestured toward, that some forms of understanding resist linear argument altogether. It gave me new tools, new textures—fragments, fiction, poetics—not as embellishments but as necessary methods, ways of making room for what cannot be neatly transcribed. It made me more porous, more attuned to the affective charge of the field, to the way that knowledge doesn’t just live in words but in bodies, in landscapes, in breath. More willing to let the work change me in ways I cannot predict.
And in that shift, I have also found others—people tired of pretending, unwilling to make their work seamless. People holding their own small lights in the dark. The disappointments of academic kinship still linger—the absences, the conversations that never came. But so does something else: the quiet recognition of those who have also felt undone, who are also looking for something truer.
We didn’t need to build something grand. It was enough to find each other. To hold our small, flickering lights up against the dark. To remember why we began at all.
Standing on the Shoulders of Giants
“The question is not who influences you, but which people give you courage.” — Hilary Mantel
To do this work is to stand on the shoulders of giants—not just the names in footnotes, but the voices murmuring at my back. The ones who carved space for something more alive, more urgent. Who refused to inherit anthropology as it was handed down. Creative anthropology has always been a refusal, a way of saying: this, too, is knowledge.
But to create is not only to break away; it is to connect. Today, networks like the EASA Creative Anthropologies Network (CAN) make these inheritances visible, interwoven. CAN, Allegra, Sapiens, Otherwise Mag, Third Shelf, Anthropology and Humanism—these are spaces that don’t just tolerate creativity but nourish it. They insist that knowledge is not only what we argue but how we shape, how we move, how we bring thought to life.
Creative anthropology no longer stands at the periphery. It moves through the discipline, stretching its boundaries, shifting its weight. Expanding what we allow ourselves to see, to say, to feel. It resists the smoothness of knowledge production, refuses the equation of rigour with sterility. Without it, we risk ossification—a field so preoccupied with its own reflection it forgets to look outward, to listen, to breathe.
This moment—this growing visibility—feels less like a battle cry than an opening. Bayo Akomolafe calls it a grand hush, a silence before something vital is born. “The air is quite suddenly alive with rich proposals,” he writes. That is how creativity moves. The moment before the pen touches the page, before the first cut of film, before the story takes its shape. A slow, trembling expansion of possibility.
Because creativity is not just a mode—it is a way of listening, a way of paying attention. Writing, filmmaking, graphic storytelling—these are not embellishments, not flourishes, but ways of thinking. I think of creativity as a kind of spellwork—runes scratched into the archive, a reaching into the unknown and pulling something back.
And what is this creativity, if not a kind of joy? Not the joy of mastery, of achievement, but joy as expansion. Sara Ahmed speaks of joy as something that stretches us—towards each other, towards possibility. Maybe that’s why creative anthropology matters. Not because it is an aesthetic choice, but because it reminds us that we are not alone.
This is what the giants, the allies, have given me—not certainty, but courage. The courage to create when the words falter, to make when the form is unclear, to sit inside the restless, unfinished edges of the work. To trust that hesitation, that discomfort, is not failure but an opening. To stay with the unknown long enough to see what else might be possible.
So what does it mean to work more creatively—not just in writing, but in thinking, in making, in the ways we engage with the world?
So what does it mean to work more creatively—not just in writing, but in thinking, in making, in the ways we engage with the world? It is not a formula, not a method, not something to be neatly packaged-this is what we must all resist. It is instead-fugitive, elusive, a series of disobedient gestures. It starts with attention. With following what moves us before translating it. With asking: What do I feel when I create? How might I follow that feeling instead of flattening it?
Practically, it means experimenting with form. Letting rhythm guide an argument, allowing silence to sit where we have been trained to fill the space. Letting image, movement, sound carry meaning where words fall short. It means trusting the body as a site of knowledge, allowing gesture, voice, materiality to speak alongside analysis. It means writing in fragments instead of seamless exposition, filming in ways that unsettle rather than resolve, using graphic storytelling to hold what cannot be easily expressed in text. It means working with sound as much as words, thinking through texture, resonance, rupture. If academia has a choreography—a set of movements that establish legitimacy—then creative practice asks: what happens when we dance differently, or refuse to dance at all?
But let me be clear: this is not about choosing creativity over scholarship. It is about refusing the illusion that the two are separate. Creativity is not an escape from rigour, nor a rejection of scholarship, but an insistence that knowledge takes many shapes—that meaning-making is expansive, porous, alive. There is space for both: for the density of the theoretical text and the breath of the poetic one, for the precision of analysis and the sharp clarity of an image, a gesture, a soundscape that says it all in a single stroke.
Creative anthropology is not a departure from knowledge. It is another way of knowing. And perhaps, for some of us, the truest way of speaking to the world.
Conclusion: A Call for a Caring, Creative Academy
“Looking obliquely at the edges of things, where they come together with other things, can tell you as much about them, often, as can looking at them directly, intently, straight on.” — Clifford Geertz
The neoliberal university demands polish. Precision. The clean line of argument, the seamless conclusion. But creativity—real creativity—lives in the cracks. In the trembling edges where things come undone. To admit failure, to be wrong, to stand open and unsure, is not to collapse but to loosen, to make space for something raw and alive. This openness—unguarded, unscripted—is the condition of creative work. It is where anthropology breathes again, where it lets its seams show, where it stops apologising for not having all the answers.
Writing is one thread, but not the only one. I turn to it because it allows for slowness, for listening, for sharpening the questions that won’t let me go. But I have also worked in other forms—co-producing short films, crafting a graphic book, experimenting beyond text. These forms have reshaped not just what I know, but how I know—moving, unsettling, demanding something different. What if academia embraced not just creative scholarship, but a wilder definition of knowledge itself?
What if, instead of treating failure as something to avoid, we saw it as the condition for making something new? What if mistakes, those moments of falling short, were not setbacks but openings? What if academia became a place of experimentation, where the imperfect, the unresolved, was not something to apologise for but something to build from?
Mary Oliver writes of regret, of the ache of unlived potential. I think of this often. I think of all the ways we defer the work that calls us most urgently, the ways we sideline what feels too unruly, too impractical, too hard to justify. And so I choose, again and again, to risk the unpolished, to stand inside the uncertainty, to commit to this becoming. But I am not alone. Others have already been carving paths, widening the cracks, letting the light in.
The question is no longer whether change is possible. The question is who will take up the work next, and in what ways?
So here is the invitation: let restlessness guide you. Let the forms shift. Let the work be strange, porous, uncontainable.
So here is the invitation: let restlessness guide you. Let the forms shift. Let the work be strange, porous, uncontainable. Find the others who are reaching for something else, those who refuse the story that knowledge must be neat, that scholarship must be smooth. Write, make, paint, film, gather. Build the academy you want to live in—one jagged, luminous fragment at a time.
Reference List
Ahmed, S. 2010. The Promise of Happiness. Durham: Duke University Press.
Akomolafe, Bayo. 2023. “Do You Feel It.” Accessed June 9, 2024. https://www.bayoakomolafe.net/post/do-you-feel-it.
Berlant, Lauren. 2021. “Intimacy as World-Making.” Accessed June 9, 2024. https://extraextramagazine.com/talk/lauren-berlant-on-intimacy-as-world-making.
Berlant, L. G. 2022. On the Inconvenience of Other People. Durham: Duke University Press.
Halberstam, Jack. 2011. The Queer Art of Failure. Durham: Duke University Press.
Harbin, Ami. 2016. Disorientation and Moral Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Note of gratitude: I am deeply grateful to the peer reviewers whose thoughtful engagement, sharp insights, and generous critique helped refine and strengthen this work. Their willingness to sit with its uncertainties, to ask the necessary questions, and to push me towards greater clarity and depth is a reminder of what peer review can be at its best—a conversation, an opening, an invitation to think otherwise. My sincere thanks for their time, care, and intellectual generosity.
[1] Many thanks to my wonderful friend and colleague Keith Egan for his constant companionship through life and through creating and for casting an eye multiple times across this piece.
Abstract: This essay examines the slow attrition of creative thought within the academy, the way institutional logics discipline aesthetics, constrain risk, and demand fluency in the language of legitimacy. It interrogates the affective and material consequences of deferral—how waiting for security becomes a mechanism of containment, how wrongness is internalised as failure rather than as an aperture to something otherwise. Drawing from personal experience, critical theory, and creative anthropology’s place in the discipline, the essay situates creative refusal as a political act. What happens when we stop translating ourselves into formats that reassure? What if failure, rather than marking an end, signals a necessary unsettling? Creativity is not a supplement, nor a salvageable excess—it is a confrontation with the conditions under which knowledge is produced. This is not just an argument for alternative forms, but for a mode of scholarship that remains raw, unsettled, and irreducibly alive.
