The materiality of failure

This chapter offers a reflection and creative engagement with the materiality of unfinished research. It presents an experimental arts-based practice which sought to alleviate the affective weight of failure (to complete projects) and lessen the material presence of that failure. This involved reworking research materials into a different kind of object. Abandoned Research emerged both as a newly living book-like ‘thing’ and an instance of ‘the unfinished, the unattained, the unconventional’ that this edited collection recognises. It was made quite literally from the research materials from several projects that had not all found their way into publication but no longer had currency for knowledge production. It includes traces of old cassettes used to record interviews and tape worked into different shapes on malleable moulds from which to create printed images. This chapter discusses Abandoned Research as a practice of making which resists the shame of the incomplete and challenges the masculine regime of valuation that dominates the academy. It stimulates an attentiveness in the present that contrasts with the logic and accelerated pressures of academic life in the UK in the 2020s. This chapter shares the process and rewards of the making of Abandoned Research and reflects on the everyday exigencies of living with research projects and materials.